By Haruhiro Hirahata
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ONLINE MAP OF PASSABLE ROADS
At 10:30 a.m. on March 12, 2011, less than 24 hours after the Great East Japan Earthquake stuck northeastern Japan and unleashed towering tsunami, the website of Honda Motor Co. started displaying a map of roads still accessible to automobiles and other vehicles.
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How was it possible to pitch such a map so soon after the magnitude-9.0 earthquake hit? It emerged that Honda made use of the Internavi interactive car navigation system to trace and show where vehicles equipped with the technology had traveled.
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WATER GAUGE AND FLOOD RISK
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Water gauges that meet government standards cost more than 10 million yen ($91,730) apiece. Even simpler versions are priced at hundreds of thousands of yen, meaning the devices are never installed on a whim.
This led Hiroaki Akiyama, a professor of space engineering at Wakayama University’s Center for Disaster Science and Resilience Collaborative Development, to develop an inexpensive IoT-based water indicator.
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