[SoaS] [IAEP] Quake Catcher Network

[Yamandu Ploskonka]

Caryl,

I think it is wonderful you do share about this.  It is always 
interesting to see how some idea can have unreached effects and become a 
wish for more

I have been quite involved in seismic monitoring in my day, and to 
imagine personal computers could be used for that, beats everything else 
this week as to wishful thinking turned into vaporware, even though I 
spent a lot of time reading so called evaluations of ICT for education, 
and there was that revival of the crank...

Now, if you can, and abusing a lot on your patience, please do not see 
what I said as a criticism to you, or that you should not share with us 
this kind of stuff.

Actually, for someone like me it is extremely valuable to be aware of 
what is going on out there, and in the absence of things that make sense 
completely, it does help me hugely to, well, hear about this kind of 
things, because at some level these do reflect real dreams and desires 
which are perfectly true and valid, even though their put into effect is 
not.

I guess I could go into detail, but the basic reason this cannot work is 
separating "real" seismic data from any other, from steps close to the 
machine, to a car rolling outside...  This of course will not stop a 
skilled grantwriter, who would offer to prepare software that can 
discriminate data.  However, the nearly mathematically unsolvable 
problem is in separating *overlapping* data, which is the real reason 
they forbid cellphones on planes.

That is why real seismeters are set underground, as far away from human 
activity as possible.


On 04/18/2010 05:31 PM, Caryl Bigenho wrote:
> Hi...
>
> Here is something intriguing I heard about on NPR yesterday.  It is a 
> Seismic Monitoring program that can run in the background on computers 
> that have built-in accelerometers (newer Macs) or PCs with an external 
> one with usb connection.  The hope is to have a world wide network of 
> computers sensing quakes, especially in places where there are many 
> quakes.
>
> It is designed to be an educational project with schools involved 
> doing "citizen science" (sort of like CoCoRaHS).  They have 
> interactive/educational software and seismic monitoring software.
>
> Disclaimer... I haven't tried the software yet so I can't recommend it 
> one way or the other until I do.
>
> Does the XO have an accelerometer? No matter if it doesn't because it 
> has usb ports to spare.  Any chance of someone getting a version of 
> the software to work on the XOs?  Maybe one of our developers who 
> knows what would have to be done to get it to work on the XO could 
> contact the Quake Catcher Network and ask it they could do it?
>
> Here is a link to the site:
>
> http://qcn.stanford.edu/downloads/
>
> Looks like it is based at Stanford.
>
> Caryl
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
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