DailyDirt: Ubiquitous Sensors Are Getting Kinda Useful
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Sensors are everywhere, recording all sorts of activities and creating an enormous amount of data. The ability to store and analyze immense amounts of information is making these sensors even more useful. Before this computational capacity was so readily available, researchers were forced to hone their hypotheses before conducting experiments. But now, it’s possible to just collect a lot of data and then try to see if any hypotheses are supported by already-gathered evidence. Here are some quick links on sensors and sensor data.
- Collecting data from a wide variety of sensor feeds could become a useful service — if only there were a standard format for sensor data and all that data turned out not to be junk. Massive amounts of garbage in, garbage out…. [url]
- Ground-based lasers could be used to map the Earth’s magnetic field by exciting sodium atoms in the atmosphere and watching them fluoresce with telescopes. And this technique could be used to find underground oil deposits without using satellites to map fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field. [url]
- British and Russian scientists should probably take a look at the previous link before they launch two satellites that measure the Earth’s magnetic field fluctuations from space in order to anticipate earthquakes. Predicting earthquakes would be an awesome ability, but it’s not certain there’s even a correlation between earthquakes and changes the Earth’s magnetic field. [url]
- You could contribute towards the deployment of 600 Geiger Counter devices in Japan — if you donate to a Kickstarter project that aims to collect and publish the radiation data. The raw data will be published under Creative Commons 0 license. [url]
- To discover more interesting science-related stuff, check out what’s currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]
By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.
Filed Under: data, data mining, earthquakes, lasers, magnetic field, sensor
Companies: kickstarter
Comments on “DailyDirt: Ubiquitous Sensors Are Getting Kinda Useful”
Earthquake sensor
Did you know you could make an earthquake sensor out of a 10 cent disposable plastic drinking cup? Just fill it with water and set it on a level surface where light can reflect off of the water. Something that reflects a straight line in the water works best. Vibrations, even too small to feel, cause ripples on the water which show up as distortions in the reflected image. This works best with a dark colored cup, light reflected by the interior of a lighter colored cup tends to obscure the reflected image.
Another way to do this is to put a sheet of white paper a few inches behind the cup, darken the room and shine a LED or other point source of light on the water at about a 45 degree angle so it reflects onto the paper. This projected image shows the ripples quite plainly.
Unless you’re on a concrete slab away from civilization this doesn’t really prove anything. There are all sorts of things that can cause vibrations, out of balance fans, roaring water heaters or furnaces, wind, nearby passing trains, trucks, buses or other heavy vehicles, blasting, and of course, actual earthquakes. There are no calibrations, but you can get an idea of the relative intensity of the vibrations by the nature and distinctness of the ripples in the reflected image. And it does make an interesting experiment.
Should there really be a license for raw data?