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Japan radiation monitoring – new comprehensive open source

Radiation monitoring in Japan goes crowd, open source,  CNET, by Eric Mack, May 6, 2011 A new open and crowdsourced initiative to deploy more geiger counters all over Japan looks to be a go. Safecast, formerly RDTN.org, recently met and exceeded its $33,000 fund-raising goal on Kickstarter, which should help Safecast send between 100 and 600 geiger counters to the catastrophe-struck country.

The data captured from the geiger counters will be fed into Safecast.org, which aggregates radiation readings from government, nonprofit, and other sources, as well as into Pachube, a global open-source network of sensors. Safecast is one of the larger crowdsourced monitoring efforts, not unlike a similar effort in the United States that predated the Japanese disaster.

For the last month, the Safecast crew and volunteers have been collaborating with universities in Japan and driving their geiger counters around the country and taking measurements. Safecast’s early monitoring trips north of Tokyo returned some disturbing findings, including elevated radiation levels in a kindergarten classroom….Radiation monitoring in Japan goes crowd, open source | Crave – CNET

May 8, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, technology