Is US air quality ever as bad as in Shanghai? (photos)

Announcing Government Backdoor Mode for AQcalc

We’re planning to add a new feature to future versions of AQcalc that will allow authorized, legitimate government users to modify the AQcalc readings to make them less strict.

Authorized governmental entities (after a thorough approval process by their internal ethics boards and our corporate lawyers) will be able to modify the standards messages in AQcalc. For a small fee, they will be able to change “Hazardous” to something more informative such as “Señor, air clean now. No pollution. Please stay in our hotel.” Higher fees will apply for shorter modified messages in more convincing, better English that actually fit in the GUI text area. Higher fees may also apply to greater levels of modification (changing “Hazardous” to “Good” or “Excellent” instead of the still alarming “Very Unhealthy”).

A version still being tested will also estimate the socioeconomic status of the user for additional message payload “targeting” options. For an additional fee, authorized, ethical government entities will be able to “target” the degree of message modification based on selected user criteria. (The exact use case for this “Fat Cat messaging mode” is not clear. Loaded vacationers might be targeted to receive greater message modification, since they would presumably have more dough to spend in hotels, and thus convincing them the air was clean would be more profitable. Alternatively, members of the 1% might be more politically influential and less gullible, so they might receive less message modification to avoid scandal. We’ll leave this to our prospective “customer entities” to figure out.)

Assuming successful approval by both their internal ethics boards and our corporate lawyers, interested governments should inform us which dark alley they will be dropping off their suitcases full of cash. (Or better yet, suitcases full of Bitcoin. We understand that Bitcoin cannot be traced and leaves no permanent records, so sounds perfect for this. Also, it has risen seven orders of magnitude, and apparently what goes up just keeps going on up forever. Moreover, there is apparently a limited supply of Bitcoin. California real estate agents were also telling us similar things about real estate a decade ago, and unfortunately we did not invest then.)

Towards International Standards

Obviously, we are not being serious above about government backdoor mode. We take the accurate information provided by our products very seriously.

We think air quality standards should be international, based on the very best science. At present, their are licensing restrictions on the use of some government’s data that requires their standards to be applied. We think the combination of individual sensors and the internet of things, that will go away. You’ll be able to decide which air quality standard you want to apply to your own data, which scientific studies to believe, and what you personal air quality target should be.

Related posts:

Smart cities: analytics, bigdata, cheap IoT sensors Creative Solutions to Air Quality Reviews of our app, or working more with governments on air quality Dust sensors, the latest CES vacuum cleaners, and the Internet of Things

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