Students use kites to measure air pollution in Beijing

An ancient Chinese kite-flying tradition has become a new citizen tool for monitoring air quality in the skies over Beijing. The project, a joint effort between a Chinese graduate student and U.S. graduate student, was first inspired by controversy regarding China's air pollution statistics.

The "Float Beijing" project's kites carry air pollution sensors as well as colorful LED lights that show the level of air quality — green for good, yellow for moderate, red for unhealthy and pink for severely unhealthy. Since raising more than $5,000 in funding on the crowd-funding site Kickstarter, the project has held its first Beijing workshops in August and appeared at New York City's Maker Faire in September.

"The sensors were pretty easy to mount to the kites," said Deren Guler, a master's candidate in tangible interaction design at Carnegie Mellon University. "The kites' flyers helped us with that and we were able to find the best place after a few tests."

Ordinary Chinese have suffered from smog and bad air quality because of China's rapid industrialization — a problem that the Chinese government has tried to tackle during high-profile events such as the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. But the issue turned politically hot this year when Chinese citizens noticed the big difference between the U.S. embassy's air pollution readings (publicized through Twitter) and the sunnier reports issued by the Chinese government.

Guler worked with Xiaowei Wang, a master's candidate in landscape architecture at Harvard University, to develop the kite solution in the wake of Chinese citizens demanding more detail from the official Chinese air pollution readings. Their Float Beijing project ended up marrying ancient Chinese tradition with modern technology.

Wang talked with kite flyers at a local Beijing park who recommended a master kite maker in a nearby kite market. The kite maker and his wife were "very enthusiastic" about the project, and helped the Chinese and American graduate students refine their kite design.

"They gave us some of their own kite-light decorations to help experiment with and offered to sell our modules," Guler told TechNewsDaily.

The first Beijing workshops taught Chinese citizens how to attach the air pollution sensors and lights to the kites. Such kites are able to not only detect and display general levels of carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds, but also collect the data and store it for later.

Float Beijing aims to eventually create an online interactive display of the air pollution results collected by the kites, as well as a book about the project. The project founders also left some of their open-source kite modules in Beijing so that Chinese citizens could begin sharing the design on Weibo, China's version of Twitter.






 Source: TechNewsDaily

Beijing Air Quality: What Was All the Fuss About?

When the 2008 Summer Olympics were set to open, air quality was all the buzz. Pictures of a hazy, smoggy Beijing were plastered across TV screens, the Internet, and newspapers across the globe. The first few sporting events, we all waited with bated breath to see if our athletes would collapse due to the inferior air quality. Now, with the Games coming to a close, athletes continue to break Olympic and world records with relative ease, and we wonder, what was all the air quality fuss really about?

But hold on, now. Let’s have a look at just some of the emittion-cutting measures that Beijing has taken to improve its air quality. Polluting industries have been closed, cleaner production methods initiated, half of Beijing’s 3.3 million cars removed, public transportation infrastructures built, man-made forests grown, battery-powered cars driven, solar panels installed, and among other environmentally-friendly measures, reports indicate a whopping $17 billion has been invested in cleaning up Beijing’s air.

Is all this work just for show? Perhaps. But one thing’s for sure, we’ve learned something important from the efforts made in Beijing: measures to improve air quality work!

In fact, the air quality in Beijing so far this month has been the best for any summer period over the last 10 years.

Who knows if Beijing will keep up its pledge to improve air quality once the international eye is no longer watching, but really, who are we to say? They’ve researched, indeed initiated, what we here in Canada and the United States are only still talking about.

We’ve had our chance to shake our finger at China, tssk-ing in all our glory, but I think as the Games come to a close, we should open up our own air quality discussion.

As a country, what measures are we going to take to improve our own air quality? As a government, what restrictions are we going to impose on our citizens and corporations?

As citizens, what steps can we take to protect ourselves, our families, until we stop tssk-ing, and start tasking?