Slashdot Mirror

What's the answer then? I don't know. Nobody does. BioXiv (and others like it) offer an interesting possibility but that isn't without pitfalls (not the least of which is that a paper there that gets rejected in a journal is somewhat more difficult to resubmit elsewhere).

Hackaday has started its own journal

...{snipsnip}

There's an opportunity here to start something new and avoid all the pitfalls we keep hearing about.

A noble effort. How do you avoid the challenge of accepting, certifying or publishing inaccurate works when a majority of the reviewers are bots or paid button-clickers? By "majority" I mean enough "peers" to control what gets accepted as truth? When enough peers agree with a paper that says "2 + 2 = 5" then it becomes the accepted standard.

What's the answer then? I don't know. Nobody does. BioXiv (and others like it) offer an interesting possibility but that isn't without pitfalls (not the least of which is that a paper there that gets rejected in a journal is somewhat more difficult to resubmit elsewhere).

Hackaday has started its own journal

It's free, and it wants to become an actual journal with all the rigor and benefits of the mainstream journals.

It also wants to navigate away from some of the problems we see with current journals, such as publishing negative results (which is allowed), citation inflation, and so on.

It currently has one issue with one paper, and has an open call for more papers.

It targets citizen science, and we're seeing a lot of that in the hacker community, but would welcome and accept submissions from more mainstream researchers.

There's an opportunity here to start something new and avoid all the pitfalls we keep hearing about.

Anyone who would like to join that community, get in on the ground floor and help make a better type of journal can contact the editors.

(Disclaimer: I'm one of their reviewers. I'm particularly interested in structural rigor such as statistical methods: logical fallacies such as p-hacking, reversed conditional errors, and so on.)

What's the answer then? I don't know. Nobody does. BioXiv (and others like it) offer an interesting possibility but that isn't without pitfalls (not the least of which is that a paper there that gets rejected in a journal is somewhat more difficult to resubmit elsewhere).

Hackaday has started its own journal

It's free, and it wants to become an actual journal with all the rigor and benefits of the mainstream journals.

It also wants to navigate away from some of the problems we see with current journals, such as publishing negative results (which is allowed), citation inflation, and so on.

It currently has one issue with one paper, and has an open call for more papers.

It targets citizen science, and we're seeing a lot of that in the hacker community, but would welcome and accept submissions from more mainstream researchers.

There's an opportunity here to start something new and avoid all the pitfalls we keep hearing about.

Anyone who would like to join that community, get in on the ground floor and help make a better type of journal can contact the editors.

(Disclaimer: I'm one of their reviewers. I'm particularly interested in structural rigor such as statistical methods: logical fallacies such as p-hacking, reversed conditional errors, and so on.)

Search for 'flat earth', 'vaccine autism', 'creation science', 'labor economics', 'sociology' etc etc.

The thing they have in common? The people involved wouldn't know science if it bit them on the ass. Instead they grind axes.

And all of the "real science" that encourages citizen participation only has the citizens doing trivial things.

Things like running "Folding@Home", viewing astronomical photographs looking for potentially interesting things, sending in local samples for analysis - things that any high-school kid could do.

Find something in the astronomical photograph and you'll be listed as the discoverer, along with the *real* scientist who did the analysis. Send in a sample and you'll be listed as the contributor, along with the *real* scientists who wrote the paper.

(St. Louis zoo was passing out vials, asking people to find local samples of algae and send them back to be cultured. They were looking for high-yield cultures that could be used for aquaculture. A fine idea, and interesting for a child, but not actual citizen science.)

I've seen a bunch of YouTube videos that did brilliant technical comparisons of techniques or materials. One in particular - that I can't find at the moment - had everything one would need for a paper: background, hypothesis, test, measurement, and results. It would make a typical paper in materials science, except it was in video format. It was simple, concise, and had a clear result. (Update: it's here.)

If you want a platform for citizen science, you might try Hackaday.io. They are trying to start an actual scientific journal to collect some of the results that amateurs are coming up with, The Hackaday Journal of What You Don't Know.

Whether the journal goes anywhere is anybody's guess, but the .io system has a lot of cool scientific projects that might make for good research. Such as this one, or this one.

Search for 'flat earth', 'vaccine autism', 'creation science', 'labor economics', 'sociology' etc etc.

The thing they have in common? The people involved wouldn't know science if it bit them on the ass. Instead they grind axes.

And all of the "real science" that encourages citizen participation only has the citizens doing trivial things.

Things like running "Folding@Home", viewing astronomical photographs looking for potentially interesting things, sending in local samples for analysis - things that any high-school kid could do.

Find something in the astronomical photograph and you'll be listed as the discoverer, along with the *real* scientist who did the analysis. Send in a sample and you'll be listed as the contributor, along with the *real* scientists who wrote the paper.

(St. Louis zoo was passing out vials, asking people to find local samples of algae and send them back to be cultured. They were looking for high-yield cultures that could be used for aquaculture. A fine idea, and interesting for a child, but not actual citizen science.)

I've seen a bunch of YouTube videos that did brilliant technical comparisons of techniques or materials. One in particular - that I can't find at the moment - had everything one would need for a paper: background, hypothesis, test, measurement, and results. It would make a typical paper in materials science, except it was in video format. It was simple, concise, and had a clear result. (Update: it's here.)

If you want a platform for citizen science, you might try Hackaday.io. They are trying to start an actual scientific journal to collect some of the results that amateurs are coming up with, The Hackaday Journal of What You Don't Know.

Whether the journal goes anywhere is anybody's guess, but the .io system has a lot of cool scientific projects that might make for good research. Such as this one, or this one.

Search for 'flat earth', 'vaccine autism', 'creation science', 'labor economics', 'sociology' etc etc.

The thing they have in common? The people involved wouldn't know science if it bit them on the ass. Instead they grind axes.

And all of the "real science" that encourages citizen participation only has the citizens doing trivial things.

Things like running "Folding@Home", viewing astronomical photographs looking for potentially interesting things, sending in local samples for analysis - things that any high-school kid could do.

Find something in the astronomical photograph and you'll be listed as the discoverer, along with the *real* scientist who did the analysis. Send in a sample and you'll be listed as the contributor, along with the *real* scientists who wrote the paper.

(St. Louis zoo was passing out vials, asking people to find local samples of algae and send them back to be cultured. They were looking for high-yield cultures that could be used for aquaculture. A fine idea, and interesting for a child, but not actual citizen science.)

I've seen a bunch of YouTube videos that did brilliant technical comparisons of techniques or materials. One in particular - that I can't find at the moment - had everything one would need for a paper: background, hypothesis, test, measurement, and results. It would make a typical paper in materials science, except it was in video format. It was simple, concise, and had a clear result. (Update: it's here.)

If you want a platform for citizen science, you might try Hackaday.io. They are trying to start an actual scientific journal to collect some of the results that amateurs are coming up with, The Hackaday Journal of What You Don't Know.

Whether the journal goes anywhere is anybody's guess, but the .io system has a lot of cool scientific projects that might make for good research. Such as this one, or this one.

Everyone here is calling it a non-Newtonian fluid, which is correct, but more specifically, it's a shear-thickening fluid. Oobleck is the shear-thickening fluid made of starch and water. Other kinds exist. Here's a Hackaday article about a shear-thickening fluid made of PEG and Repti-cal. I don't know what this orange goo one is made of, but it's probably a mixture of PEG, some dissolved viscoelastic substance, and a specific size of silica particles.

Doing this with an Applewatch and an iPhone ? - that's gotta be at least $500, likely much more. So that will never be a an affordable option outside of the 1st world.

Have a look at Heartypatch, orderable now for $95. "HeartyPatch is a completely open source, single-lead, ECG-HR wearable patch with HRV (Heart Rate Variability) analysis. "
https://hackaday.io/project/21...
https://www.crowdsupply.com/pr...

Pleasant side effect, you have 100% control over the data.

Whoooppeeee!

All we need now is Wayland and the Unity desktop

That's it. I'm switching to BSD

Newer one.

https://hackaday.io/project/19...

The competition appears to be for a medical tricorder.

(There are legitimate science tricorder projects as well.)

Fifty-ish medical conditions is a very good start, and I can only imagine that adding more and different sensors will allow such a system to discriminate between more conditions in the future (do these devices ask for human input of symptoms or history?).

Of course, we could never get these approved for use in the USA - the 3.8 million noted in the article would only be a drop in the bucket compared to the costs of certification. If a single drug costs $2.5 billion for certification (and hearing aids cost $5000 and up), imagine how much it would cost to certify an autodoc for 50 diseases!

But this should work quite well in developing countries.

If you are a member of a hackerspace, how about:

An optics kit
Some lego-enhanced optics components
Other cool optics components using legos
A home built robot
3d-print an industrial robotic arm
A modular clock kit
Any sciency kit
Any sciency toy

There's a long list of interesting things you could *build* for your child, or build *with* your child, and if they break something or want to modify/extend something, you can build them a replacement or an extension.

If you are a member of a hackerspace, how about:

An optics kit
Some lego-enhanced optics components
Other cool optics components using legos
A home built robot
3d-print an industrial robotic arm
A modular clock kit
Any sciency kit
Any sciency toy

There's a long list of interesting things you could *build* for your child, or build *with* your child, and if they break something or want to modify/extend something, you can build them a replacement or an extension.

If you are a member of a hackerspace, how about:

An optics kit
Some lego-enhanced optics components
Other cool optics components using legos
A home built robot
3d-print an industrial robotic arm
A modular clock kit
Any sciency kit
Any sciency toy

There's a long list of interesting things you could *build* for your child, or build *with* your child, and if they break something or want to modify/extend something, you can build them a replacement or an extension.

If you are a member of a hackerspace, how about:

An optics kit
Some lego-enhanced optics components
Other cool optics components using legos
A home built robot
3d-print an industrial robotic arm
A modular clock kit
Any sciency kit
Any sciency toy

There's a long list of interesting things you could *build* for your child, or build *with* your child, and if they break something or want to modify/extend something, you can build them a replacement or an extension.

If you are a member of a hackerspace, how about:

An optics kit
Some lego-enhanced optics components
Other cool optics components using legos
A home built robot
3d-print an industrial robotic arm
A modular clock kit
Any sciency kit
Any sciency toy

There's a long list of interesting things you could *build* for your child, or build *with* your child, and if they break something or want to modify/extend something, you can build them a replacement or an extension.

If you are a member of a hackerspace, how about:

An optics kit
Some lego-enhanced optics components
Other cool optics components using legos
A home built robot
3d-print an industrial robotic arm
A modular clock kit
Any sciency kit
Any sciency toy

There's a long list of interesting things you could *build* for your child, or build *with* your child, and if they break something or want to modify/extend something, you can build them a replacement or an extension.

If you are a member of a hackerspace, how about:

An optics kit
Some lego-enhanced optics components
Other cool optics components using legos
A home built robot
3d-print an industrial robotic arm
A modular clock kit
Any sciency kit
Any sciency toy

There's a long list of interesting things you could *build* for your child, or build *with* your child, and if they break something or want to modify/extend something, you can build them a replacement or an extension.

If you are a member of a hackerspace, how about:

An optics kit
Some lego-enhanced optics components
Other cool optics components using legos
A home built robot
3d-print an industrial robotic arm
A modular clock kit
Any sciency kit
Any sciency toy

There's a long list of interesting things you could *build* for your child, or build *with* your child, and if they break something or want to modify/extend something, you can build them a replacement or an extension.

Check out the Hackaday prize, over at Hackaday.io.

Actually, you don't even have to get too clever to save lives. In early 2015, the South Pacific country of Vanuatu was devastated by cyclone Pam, a category 5 storm that severely damaged almost half the country. (Full disclosure: the UNICEF photos are mine.). In spite of some islands being completely denuded of shelter, only 11 people died.

The people of Vanuatu deal with an average of 1.5 cyclones every year, but this was an unique event. There had never been a storm of this intensity measured in the country before, and certainly not one that passed directly on top of more than half the population. 3000 years of dealing with cyclones meant that people knew how to cope, but it was telecommunications that allowed us to warn people in time for them to seek shelter. Ironically, on Tanna (the worst-affected island) the majority of casualties occurred when the wall of a building designated an emergency shelter collapsed.

One national telco saw its entire national network knocked out. But within 10 days, they had better than 90% of it back in operation. I myself saw the CEO manhandling a microwave antenna into the back of a chopper during the height of the relief effort.

So yeah, it's not glorious; it's not clever. Sometimes tech just needs to be available to save lives.

P.S. The owners of a Very Large Internet Company saved a lot of lives in the immediate aftermath of the storm when they sent their superyacht to assist with relief activities. The vessel was small enough to get into the countless tiny passages, and large enough to support a helipad for medevacs. On top of that, the 40,000 litre desalination unit could keep entire villages supplied with water until barges could arrive. They don't want their names to come out because this is one of the few places in the world they can get away and just be people. But thanks guys. You rock.

Check out the Hackaday prize, over at Hackaday.io.

For three years running, Hackaday has hosted the contest with a $100,000 first prize and a handful of $10,000 prizes.

Several of the prize categories would be appropriate for solving world problems, such as "citizen scientist", "automation", and "assistive technologies". (The other two categories are catch-alls which could also contain world-bearing solutions.

Many of the projects are high-concept. There are about 1000 entries this year, so you will get a wide range of possible project including some risible ones.

But there are definitely some strong entries this year.

I follow the Automatic Digital Microscope project, which hopes to automate (and speed up) the detection of tuberculosis in 3rd world countries.

The Electrospinning machine looks really interesting, could possibly become the next "3d printer" appliance for hackers.

The very high accuracy tilt sensor is possibly a new technology (I hadn't seen or heard of it before).

If you want to find techies improving the world, you might include Hackaday.io (specifically: the prize entries) in your search.

If you want to improve the world yourself, you might consider coming up with a project and entering the prize next year.

If you want to *help* improve the world, you might consider joining a Hackaday.io team that's entered for the prize.

Check out the Hackaday prize, over at Hackaday.io.

For three years running, Hackaday has hosted the contest with a $100,000 first prize and a handful of $10,000 prizes.

Several of the prize categories would be appropriate for solving world problems, such as "citizen scientist", "automation", and "assistive technologies". (The other two categories are catch-alls which could also contain world-bearing solutions.

Many of the projects are high-concept. There are about 1000 entries this year, so you will get a wide range of possible project including some risible ones.

But there are definitely some strong entries this year.

I follow the Automatic Digital Microscope project, which hopes to automate (and speed up) the detection of tuberculosis in 3rd world countries.

The Electrospinning machine looks really interesting, could possibly become the next "3d printer" appliance for hackers.

The very high accuracy tilt sensor is possibly a new technology (I hadn't seen or heard of it before).

If you want to find techies improving the world, you might include Hackaday.io (specifically: the prize entries) in your search.

If you want to improve the world yourself, you might consider coming up with a project and entering the prize next year.

If you want to *help* improve the world, you might consider joining a Hackaday.io team that's entered for the prize.

Check out the Hackaday prize, over at Hackaday.io.

For three years running, Hackaday has hosted the contest with a $100,000 first prize and a handful of $10,000 prizes.

Several of the prize categories would be appropriate for solving world problems, such as "citizen scientist", "automation", and "assistive technologies". (The other two categories are catch-alls which could also contain world-bearing solutions.

Many of the projects are high-concept. There are about 1000 entries this year, so you will get a wide range of possible project including some risible ones.

But there are definitely some strong entries this year.

I follow the Automatic Digital Microscope project, which hopes to automate (and speed up) the detection of tuberculosis in 3rd world countries.

The Electrospinning machine looks really interesting, could possibly become the next "3d printer" appliance for hackers.

The very high accuracy tilt sensor is possibly a new technology (I hadn't seen or heard of it before).

If you want to find techies improving the world, you might include Hackaday.io (specifically: the prize entries) in your search.

If you want to improve the world yourself, you might consider coming up with a project and entering the prize next year.

If you want to *help* improve the world, you might consider joining a Hackaday.io team that's entered for the prize.

Check out the Hackaday prize, over at Hackaday.io.

For three years running, Hackaday has hosted the contest with a $100,000 first prize and a handful of $10,000 prizes.

Several of the prize categories would be appropriate for solving world problems, such as "citizen scientist", "automation", and "assistive technologies". (The other two categories are catch-alls which could also contain world-bearing solutions.

Many of the projects are high-concept. There are about 1000 entries this year, so you will get a wide range of possible project including some risible ones.

But there are definitely some strong entries this year.

I follow the Automatic Digital Microscope project, which hopes to automate (and speed up) the detection of tuberculosis in 3rd world countries.

The Electrospinning machine looks really interesting, could possibly become the next "3d printer" appliance for hackers.

The very high accuracy tilt sensor is possibly a new technology (I hadn't seen or heard of it before).

If you want to find techies improving the world, you might include Hackaday.io (specifically: the prize entries) in your search.

If you want to improve the world yourself, you might consider coming up with a project and entering the prize next year.

If you want to *help* improve the world, you might consider joining a Hackaday.io team that's entered for the prize.

I wouldn't be sad, personally. There's a quote somewhere that says that all the best science doesn't start with "eureka" it begins with "hm, that's odd..." I've always liked that quote.

FYI, there is a person who feels exactly as you do (put it in space, turn it on, see what happens). The project is a 24Ghz microsatellite version, currently being funded on gofundme. It doesn't look like he's going to get the cash for it unfortunately, but it's a step in the right direction.

Personally I'd like to see more designs put forward before we put one in space. We now have 3 competing theories on how this might work (Shawyer's wave group velocity idea, McCulloch's inertial quanta, and now Kolehmainen's paired photon idea). Personally my next step would be to simulate all three as heavily as possible and see if we can experimentally test and match those simulations to indicate which might be the best theory. These theories make predictions about how an emdrive should behave. Let's throw some test cases at them and see which ones still hold water. Do some science, you know? Then figure out the most likely description of what's going on, use that to make the best emdrive we can, and launch it. I'd love to see that.

And you're correct, of course. It's best to be skeptical of such an extraordinary claim. But McCulloch makes a compelling case how it could come to be (my personal pick of the 3 theories so far), and despite the worries about how a functioning emdrive would fit into our current knowledge, to me it still looks like a pretty minimal addition. If momentum were quanta, to me it just looks like a deeper understanding of already well known phenomena but with a new set of corner cases added to the picture. Read McCulloch's paper - it really is an interesting notion.

Hackaday.io has a project to develop an automatic book scanner for Ethiopia. Uganda could use this to make books easily available.

https://hackaday.io/project/10...

The magnetic field of an MRI determines the wavelength of the absorbed/re-emitted signal. MRIs use high-strength magnetic fields to get the higher precision that comes from using shorter wavelengths.

You can make an MRI that sits on your desktop. See "The Amateur Scientist" by C.L. Strong for an example.

The big issue with MRIs is uniformity of the magnetic field. Since the signal is dependent on the field strength, any variation in this strength results in signals of a different frequency. MRIs are traditionally big in order to have uniform magnetic fields in the cylindrical chamber.

We've actually come a long way in processing algorithms as well. For example, this project is attempting to make a desktop MRI using structured-light algorithms to compensate for the field variation.

Perhaps Mary Lou Jepson did due dilligence before embarking on this venture.

For transmitting there's the HackRF which is a few mW output and is the one I've played with. Also another supplier that has cheaper, transmit only versions; the HackRF Blue
For quite a bit more, there's MIMO capable devices such as the Ettus USRP that lets you run your own GSM basestation among other things.
And for a more stand alone device, there's always the PortableSDR
I've got a HackRF and am having fun with it trying to make a network analyzer. The others, I've just heard about.

This event inspired the hackaday.io community to build entries for the Clocks for Social Good list. Some are very ingenious.

Scientists have eliminated smallpox from the world, and we're about 5 years shy of eliminating polio. I read about new strategies for malaria each year (making stronger mosquitos that resist the malaria infection, for instance).

Muhammad Yunus is a PhD scientist who started the Grameen Bank, in 1999 had reduced poverty by 40% worldwide(*). His TED talk is interesting.

Everybody is working towards new energy sources: wind and wave, solar (in various forms), and even nuclear. There's a Hackaday prize on the theme of "save the world, build something that matters" with over 500 entries.

We're putting up cell phone towers in Africa, giving clean water to the Bangladeshi, inventing pot-in-pot refrigerators, and helping people use propane instead of charcoal (with attendant improvements in health).

I don't hear scientists talk like this, and that's fine, it's probably not their place. But evidence isn't enough to actually move people to action, you do actually have talk about right and wrong, and why this thing is wrong and must be stopped.

What the heck are you talking about?

Scientists move the world.

Clinging to some outdated religion is what holds us back.

(*) According to a Scientific American article that I am citing from memory, and my memory of the article may be flawed, and it's really old information.

What about using an openhardware password storage device like Mooltipass? http://hackaday.io/project/86-... Mooltipass is composed of one main device and a smartcard. On the device are stored your AES-256 encrypted passwords. The smartcard is a read protected EEPROM that needs a PIN code to unlock its contents (AES-256 key + a few websites credentials). As with your credit card, too many tries will permanently lock the smart card. The mooltipass main components are: a smart card connector, an Arduino compatible microcontroller, a FLASH memory, an OLED screen and its touchscreen panel. The OLED screen provides good contrast and good visibility. Unfortunatley this project is about to fail it's Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign.

Okay, let's see... they're offering open source software, but how about the baseband hardware? Firmware?

This isn't Open. Just because I pay money doesn't make it safe. Just because some of the code is Open doesn't make it safe. Those are huge logical fallacies.

I can run the best code in the world, but if I can't trust the hardware, that don't mean shit. For example, check out the HackADay finalists. ChipWhisper looks to be the coolest one, and they've got open hardware (although they'll be happy to sell you a board) and tutorials to demonstrate how you can attack an otherwise perfectly fine implementation of AES at the hardware level.

Ever heard of side-channel attacks? Hardware backdoors? Fuck mate, you're busy giving away your trust with no rational basis on which to do so.

captcha: exploits

See this game-changing open-source project, the ultimate solution: a wireless login dongle and password manager compatible with existing websites: http://identivasecurity.com/
Also published in Hack-a-Day's contest: http://hackaday.io/post/7759

You can login aty the press of a button, and security is unprecedented since passwords are never revealed to the computer runinng the browser.

If you're handy, here's a DIY ADB to USB adapter:

http://hackaday.io/project/907...

If not, there are a few of the Griffin ones on eBay for $20-30.

I guess you're supposed to stencil the paste in first and the put it in a heat oven as if you had done the pick and placing by hand.

Their FAQ contains:

• TBD - Solder paste dispensing
• TBD - Selective Reflow via custom ATC head

That's what would make the machine useful for prototyping. Printing a solder paste stencil can be done on a laser cutter, but you need access to one, or you must send the job out. Laying down solder paste by hand with a little syringe on each pad (probably under a microscope) takes longer than manually placing parts and is Not Fun.

Printing solder paste with an ink-jet printer type head has been done. If they can make that work, that will be a big win.

Hey all, theres been a bunch of low cost 3D printers poping up at Hack-A-Day lately:

$300 Pick and Place / 3D printer - http://hackaday.io/project/963...
Prototype of a Servo based Printer (much cheap elecytronic) - http://hackaday.com/2014/05/26...

The Mooltipass http://hackaday.io/project/86-... meets almost all of your requirements. You'll have to supply your own code mods.