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Monitoring Beijing's Air Quality Is as Easy as Flying a Kite
The world's air pollution is a huge problem—worldwide, air pollution kills more people —and its heart lies in Beijing, which regularly lies blanketed in pea soup smog. While the air pollution woes of major Chinese cities has received plenty of international attention, especially with China's economy at risk.But what can the average person on Beijing's streets do to combat the problem, especially in light of the Chinese government's strict control over pollution monitoring? Well, why not fly a kite?The video above was produced by ChinaFile, a project of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society. It takes a look at the FLOAT project, which combines kites with cheap, lightweight air monitoring technology to put the power of studying Beijing's choking air into the hands of the people. FLOAT was created by a pair of US graduate students—Xiaowei Wang, a master’s student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and Deren Guler, a master’s student of Tangible Interaction Design at Carnegie Mellon—to help combat China's crushing grip on air quality data.In the style of the Twitter account @beijingair, rogue air monitoring groups have worked to distribute air quality data across the web and social networks. The problem is that high-grade monitoring equipment can be cost-prohibitive, which spurred the FLOAT organizers to combine a technology that's been used in China for millennia with cheap air monitoring tech.Last year, Guler spoke with Joshua Frank (who shot and edited the above video) about FLOAT for Motherboard, and the two compared the kites to our favorite air technology: drones. It's a valid comparison, as whether it's a quadcopter or a kite, lightweight, relatively inexpensive technology is making our skies more accessible than ever. In this case, with China's factories belching pollution in their quest to scratch the world's technology itch, there's something particularly perfect about using simple kites to raise awareness of the polluted air they're gliding through.@derektmead