Quake-Catcher Aims to be Largest Distributed Seismometer Network

Nature is reporting that a new distributed computing application is looking to monitor earthquake data using the accelerometer in many computing devices. In the long run, "Quake-Catcher" will hopefully be fast enough to give warning before major earthquakes. "If it works, it will be the cheapest seismic network on the planet and could operate in any country. It wouldn't be as sensitive as traditional networks of seismometers, but Lawrence says that's not the point. 'If you have only two sensors in an area, you have to have a perfect system. If you have 15 sensors in a system it [can] be less perfect. One hundred, one thousand, ten thousand -- your need for the system to be perfect becomes much smaller,' he says. 'That's really our approach -- just to have massive numbers.'"

Comments

Re:Great vaporware application

[Brian Gordon]

I definitely don't mind anyone spying on my accelerometer.. besides, this definitely has some mass appeal. You're contributing to something that could really help people, not just crunch numbers for (what's the word you used oh yeah) VAPORWARE research. Plus it doesn't tear up your CPU at night. I'd be concerned about coordinated pranks, like thousands of 4channers all shaking their computers making the system think theres an apocalypse coming :)

Re:Accelerometers

[Harmonious Botch]

The aggregate would be reliable, not the individual data.

Re:Hope is not a plan

[Animats]

the thirty second warning is little better than "duck and cover" if it cannot be communicated effectively.

Actually, a 30 second warning is quite useful, but not to humans. There are such warning systems in California. When the warning system trips, elevators stop at the nearest floor, subways and BART trains stop, gas valves at schools and mobile home parks close, and some hazardous processes shut down.

But the data from that comes from fixed seismic stations, not somebody's random accelerometer.

Re:Great vaporware application

[MrNaz]

Personally, I think this is a dud idea.

1,000 laptop accelerometers cannot do what a single seismic sensor can, because they are orders of magnitude less sensitive. You can't take 1,000 sensors, add the data together, and say it is 1,000 times more effective than a single device. If the sensor granularity is not sufficient to detect what you are trying to detect, then one or one million will not be able to detect your subject. It'd be like using one cheap VGA webam to try to photograph surface topography on Pluto, and when that didn't work, trying the same thing by using 1,000 cheap VGA webcams together.

Stupid.

Re:Great vaporware application

[Eivind Eklund]

There are techniques for extracting higher quality data from overlapping low-resolution data sets. In the visual space, it's obvious that this is possible: If you have a single low-res camera, a static photographic subject, and full control of movement you can move a camera less than a pixel for reach picture taken (in a controlled way). Then you get sub-pixel-resolution data plus noise in the resulting difference set between different pictures. If you have ENOUGH difference sets, you can cancel out the noise. You then get sub-pixel resolution.

To extend this to a domain where you don't have the effective control, you have to automatically detect where different pictures fit. I remember having seen somebody that did this; I can't remember where, though.

Eivind.