SPATRAM

Figure: SPATRAM (Spectrometer for Atmospheric TRAcers Monitoring) installed since April 2004 at the University of Evora , Portugal.


Since 1999, DTA is involved in the development of new remote-sensing equipment, in particular Uv-Vis Spectrometers (Figure), devoted to the monitoring of atmospheric compounds (specifically, gaseous compounds as Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2), Ozone (O3) in the Stratosphere and in “passive mode” (meaning that the source of radiation is the Sun). The spectrometers used in “Active Mode” (the source of radiation is artificial – i.e. Halogen Lamps) can also perform measurements of tropospheric pollutants as BTX, Sulphur Dioxide (SO2) and again NO2 and O3.

Reference sent by André Albuquerque.

RatTales

RateTales is an installation with a large floor projection and camera tracking system, creating a space for interaction among people and a computer-generated swarm of rats. Every rat as well as each visitor has a tail made of letters displaying various quotes about rats. The rats will flee from visitors but attack them from behind. With his rat-tail the individual joins a race, he may perceive as a disgust and a threat.

It is a project of TheGreenEyl

Reference sent by Irma Földényi.

Cambridge Mobile Urban Sensing

CamMobSens is a project of Cambridge University, where they mount sensors on pedestrians and cyclists to monitor pollution and send back the information to a website as soon as it is gathered. In the figure above taken from their web page, pollution levels are proxied by the height of the plots.

Más información aquí.

Reference sent by Susanna Tesconi.

Visualizar 09: Public data, data in public

In the air has been selected as invited project to Visualizar 09 at Medialab-Prado, workshop directed by Jose Luis de Vicente, with Ben Cerveny from Stamen, Aaron Koblin and Manuel Lima as tutors and with the support of Bestiario.

We have developed the application in two aspects:

-we have added a timeline, which allows to navigate through the data by hour, day and month.
-we have studied the archived data to find patterns of behaviour of the components, relating them to the activities of the city. We have added tags which pop up through time, allowing the user to read the stories behind the data.

We have developed as well an application for the digital facade, which consists on a changing heatmap with the location of all stations.


Collaborators of Visualizar 09: Paolo Battino y Velentina Basotti (informational architecture), Raquel Osa, Martina Fernández Ramos y Guillermo San Miguel (contents), Martín Nadal (code development), and Francisco Martín (technical assistant).

biological agents in the air

Other agents, other means, other scopes...Scarry, isn´t it?

NEW TECHNOLOGY: Sensor Detects Invisible Agents.

Research on a new sensing device able to simultaneously identify more than 3,000 biological materials shows great promise, says one of its developers, Ravi Saraf of Virginia Tech's chemical engineering department. Saraf, who holds 27 U.S. patents, hopes such a device will have multiple military and industrial applications, especially as concerns continue over the threat of terrorist attacks.

A key advantage of this new sensor is its ability to detect a specific biological agent even if its trace amount is only one part per billion in a sample volume of air or water.

The new detector or biochip under development has an optical based system. Its designers have increased the sensitivity of what the chip can "see" or sense, consequently improving its response...

Measuring and visualizing indoor air quality

inAir (living-environments.net) is a personal tool for sensing and visualizing indoor air quality to improve awareness and understanding of indoor air quality. inAir provides historical and real-time visualizations of indoor air quality by measuring tiny hazardous airborne particles as small as 0.5 microns in size.

It is a project of Sunyoung Kim & Eric Paulos, at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon.

Info sent by Santiago Ortiz.

Piensa Madrid 2

Yesteday we had the chance to present the project in Piensa Madrid 2, a seminar curated by Ariadna Cantís and Andrés Jaque in its second edition. It was interesting to identify the different points of view from the platforms we shared the table with: Ludotek and Traficantes de Sueños.