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SFideas

Page history last edited by Meredith Carpenter 12 years, 4 months ago

Science Hack Day SF > Ideas

 

Got an idea for a science hack? Got a brainwave for a mashup? Add it here. If you see an idea you'd like to hack/collaborate on, add your name to it!

 

What can you do?

Need ideas? Browse some of the ideas from previous Science Hack Days or add to/check out the ongoing list of science-related APIs, data and useful frameworks. Then, add your project idea for San Francisco's Science Hack Day below!

  • APIs
  • Datasets 
  • Programming Tools and Frameworks
  • Tools available to use at the venue: digital microscope, electronics lab with 6-10 soldering stations with solder, industrial sewing machines, drill press, chop saw, scroll saw, midi sound studio, 60watt laser cutter for light plastics and cardboard, drills, basic hand tools… and of course, wifi for everyone! 

 

Hack Ideas:

  1. International Space Station Notify Globe
  2. Hack your Genome!
  3. Geoscience Hardware Hack
  4. LHC data hack
  5. DIY automated immunostaining
  6. Planet Hunters Anonymous
  7. How fast can that critter go?
  8. Create a synesthesia machine to see reality! 
  9. What's the Evidence? Applying sentiment analysis to academic literature for assessment of claims such as "conclusively shows, suggests, implies.."
  10. The (Drinkable) DNA Cocktail
  11. CellScope Hacking
  12. What's the harm?
  13. Where can the cell phone save the day?  
  14. DNA iPhone Game
  15. Tensegrity Robot 
  16. Agora - Dynamic, graphical tool to accelerate scientific research by visualizing the relationships between publications 
  17. Make things with NASA images 
  18. Lets (gently) kill LaTeX with html and css
  19. Cell playhouse
  20. Mapping human mitochondrial DNA haplogroups over time 
  21. Who does the science in your neighborhood?

 

Example Title (tags: example tag, example tag)

Example idea description goes here. Keep it to just a few short & sweet sentences.

Hackers:

  • Your Name, Email, Twitter Username (so people can talk to you about your idea!)

Comments:

  • Commenter Name, Email, Twitter Username (so people can talk to you about your comment!) 

International Space Station Notify Globe (tags: space, arduino)

Last year, we tried to make a lamp that would light up every time an asteroid flew by the Earth. We had another idea that we didn't end up figuring out: make a LED-studded globe constantly light up with the approximate position of the International Space Station over Earth. This would take a globe, a LOT of LEDs and wires, and I'm assuming some shields to deal with all the wires going into the arduino.

Hackers:

  • Ariel Waldman, ariel@sciencehackday.org, @arielwaldman
  • ...and jump in!  

Comments:

  • Alternatively, how about a laser on a gimbal, suspended inside a globe beach ball? (patrikd@gmail.com)
  • Or, maybe show a miniature ISS circling on a ring across the globe? (patrikd@gmail.com)
  • I can help with the arduino side of things (@physicsdavid) 
  • Maybe a map (2D) might be easier? A grid of LEDs behind a translucent plexiglass-type map? (@leahculver)
  • I've got an Arduino I can donate to the cause, random electrical components and some hackin' skillz! (@kevinrohling)
  • ...

Hack your Genome! (tags: biology, genomics)

Have your 23andMe genotype? Wondering what you can do with it? Let's find out! Bring your personal data if you have it. Or not - there's plenty of publicly available 23andMe data out there, and lots of whole genome sequences as well. There's a good number of open source software as well that we could tie into. There's not that much in terms of good visualization software though - that could an interesting angle to explore. Got an idea? Add it in the comments below.

Hack your genome, hack the future!

Hackers:

  • Patrik D'haeseleer, patrikd@gmail.com, @patrikd
  • Eri Gentry, @erigentry 
  • Lisa Ballard, @BasilLeaf
  • ...and jump in!  

Comments:

  • I really like this idea (@mrgunn) I have some modest skill at dataviz, too, as well as my own 23andme data.
  • I can offer my data, front-end web, and graphics (@junnibug)
  • I wish I had my 23andme data already. I would love to explore good visualizations for genomes. Maybe we can try some biomedical ontology with visualization toolkits. (Fabius Leineweber, usfabi@gmail.com, @fabius)
  • after logging in it's here: https://www.23andme.com/you/download/  
  • I've added a bunch more resources in the Datasets page


Geoscience Hardware Hacks (tags: geophysics, hardware, seismology)

I'll bring geophysics equipment amiable to expanding functionality or repurposing data collection. If you have a desire to muck about with magnetic fields, gravity meters, conductivity or resistivity of rocks, radar, or pretty much any other way of staying up here while figuring out what's down there, let me know so I bring the most interesting gear.

 

My equipment packing list at the moment includes gear for:

- a Kinect, which I'd love to modify to collect and image geophysical data

- DIY tabletop seismographs (Live in SF? Detect P-waves for a few seconds early-warning before earthquakes!): my current rig requires a chunk of specialized equipment, but in theory we should be able to modify to a laptop&easy-components-only setup.

- gyrostable compasses, which are awesome but the apps to extract the data have limited functionality

- UV LED & detectors to identify brighteners/oil in water (detergents in storm sewer water, etc)

- piezoelectrics to do acoustic seismic surveys (useful in post-earthquake damage evaluation; again, we hacked together the system using a piece of unnecessarily complicated equipment that should be laptop-replaceable.)

 

I'll be bringing at least one toughbook with geophysical software on it so we can process & image data.

 

I have permission to extend the packing list to include ice radar gear, low voltage piezoelectrics, magnetotelenics, magnetometers, strange gauge and load cells, chirp sonar acoustic ranging gear, but due to a lack of either glaciers or deep water at the event for live demos & testing, I'm not going to bring them unless someone has specific interest. I can also bring a laser scanner.

 

Hackers:

  • Mika McKinnon, mika@geomika.com, @mikamckinnon

Comments:

  • @ERIC STACKPOLE: if you've got an ROV, I can bring some marine probes to see if we can get them playing nicely together. -MM

LHC data hack (tags: particle physics, hack, browser hack, data analysis, design)

One of the experiments from the Large Hadron Collider, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment), has released a small amount of the data for educational purposes. However, it is hard to access and even more difficult to understand. Can we hack a better interface to these data? Can we create a website to allow others to use these data for education or art? Or can we do real SCIENCE with these data (my super-high-aiming goal!)???? I'll bring the data and explain what is in these datasets and some simple tools to interface with these data. Looking for hackers, coders, educators, artists and definitely designers, to figure out if this can be done. 

 

I've created a page on my website to provide some preparatory information for the hack, as well as keep track of our work over the weekend. You may want to make sure your laptop is set up with git, python, and processing/processing.js. These are not a requirement to work on this hack by any means, but it might help if you want to jump in right away on some analysis of the data. Anyone who has any ideas for these data which I have not discussed are especially encouraged to work on this hack, in particular, digital and non-digital artists and hardware-hack folks.

 

http://www.mattbellis.com/index.php?title=Science_Hack_Day_2011_(San_Francsico)

 

Hackers:

  • Matt Bellis, bellis@slac.stanford.edu
  • Lisa Ballard, @BasilLeaf
  • .....and jump in! 

Comments:

  • I would love to help with this! (@natronics)
  • Would love to brainstorm about what real science we can do (@rocket_bala) 
  • Definitely interested! (@physicsdavid) 

DIY automated immunostaining (tags: molecular biology, western blot, immunohistochemistry, staining, biology, chemistry, DIYbio, electronics, arduino, pumps)

Immunohistochemistry (IHC) is a technique which uses antibodies to mark the location of a molecule of interest (usually protein) on a fixed membrane.  IHC can be used to determine size, relative abundance, or layout of a molecule.  The idea is to generate an automated IHC machine using either an arduino or a computer as a controller.  The controller will operate pumps at specific intervals which will either add or remove fluids to perform a simple IHC protocol.

Hackers:

  • Joseph Elsbernd (@CodonAUG) - Don't really have the supplies necessary but I figure I/we could work out how to build one theoretically. 

Comments:

  • Commenter Name, Email, Twitter Username (so people can talk to you about your comment!) 
  • I also like this, and I have tons of experience in immunohistochemistry, less so with arduino/pumps. (@mrgunn)
    • Ditto here too.  I suppose we could try using mechanical timers and pumps? I would love to try this but the controller aspect is important.(@CodonAUG) 
    • I can help with the arduino side of things but what kinds of pumps do you have? They'll take too much power to drive through the arduino so we'll need some electrical extras. (@physicsdavid) 
    • I can offer immunohistochemistry expertise and usability advice (@junnibug) 
  • I can probably help with the microcontroller/electrical part. Might need some special equipment though, how do you calibrate the timing of the pumps? (@natronics)
    • The simplest way I can think of is to determine the flow rate of the pump/voltage and then determine how much time or voltage to use to fill and drain the containers. (@codonaug) 
  • I was thinking that a peristaltic pump (like this) along with 6 solenoid valves (one for each reagent and waste bottle (Primary, Secondary, optional 3rd, Blocking, Wash, Waste)), controlled by an Arduino would make this hack work.  The pump is not too expensive but I have not found any small (for ~1/4" tubing) solenoid valves that could be used.  Also, what kind of Arduino would be best for this and what supporting electrical components would it need (to power the pump and solenoids)?  (@CodonAUG)
  • Another interesting thing is that aquarium dosing pumps are almost perfect for automated IHC.  Take a look at this 3 channel one, here.  Its only 3 channels, but if it were 6 it would be perfect (albeit the flow rate is a bit slow). (@CodonAUG)

Planet Hunters Anonymous (tags: space)

PlanetHunters.org is a crowd-sourced platform for finding extrasolar planets in stellar light curves from NASA's Kepler spacecraft (and quite addctive - you've been warned!). Problem is - the visualization interface for the light curves isn't necessarily ideal for the human visual system to spot the kind of patterns that they're interested in. Spurious patterns in the noise may catch the eye. Only 1/4 of the data is presented at a time. No built-in tools to check periodicity, etc. Surely, we should be able to do better than that!

How about some smoothing methods? Wavelet analysis? Periodograms? Maybe some audio - the human ear is great at picking out interesting rhythms.

Hackers:

  • None yet. 

Comments:

  • This sounds very interesting, would love to hear more about it! (@kevinrohling) 
  • Commenter Name, Email, Twitter Username (so people can talk to you about your comment!) 

How fast can that critter go? (tags: biology, data visualization, movement)

I study how individual cells crawl and/or swim from one place to another.  One question that I get asked often is "How fast do they actually go?"  Although this is answerable in units of measure (xx microns per minute), it's not very helpful for getting a good feel for movement, because the relative sizes of organisms vary so wildly.  I was thinking a visualization that scales rate of movement to the objects size would be a fun way to compare organisms like bacteria, amoebae, humans, whales, cheetahs, to each other and to other things like a zeplin or an escalator.  This could be a physical hack, or some sort of animation or web based hack.

Hackers:

  • Lil Fritz-Laylin (fritzlaylin@gmail.com)

Comments:

  • Commenter Name, Email, Twitter Username (so people can talk to you about your comment!)
  • Interested :) (@rocket_bala) 

Create a synesthesia machine to see reality! (Tags: Neuroscience, Data Visualization, Hardware)

Our consciousness does not contain reality - there is too much information in reality to handle, our brains would fry. Therefore, our various sensory cortexes have really complex data compression and processing algorithms to present us with the most useful information to help us kill antelopes, run away from lions and find attractive mates. This means we ignore a lot of reality. Perhaps we can see a different aspect of reality by listening to our eyeballs or looking through our eyes. Let's make machines to convert audio information to visual, or maybe visual to tactile. Perhaps we'll find some surprising patterns.

Proposed by:

  • Liam Holt (ljholt@gmail.com)

Hackers:

  • @rocket_bala

Skills needed

  • Robotics, building, software hacking 

How Strong is the Evidence? Applying sentiment analysis to academic literature for assessment of claims including "conclusively shows, suggests, implies.."

(tags: science, text mining, evidence, academic, analysis)

The idea here would be to take existing algorithms for mining social networks for people saying good or bad things about a company and adapt it to sift through the scientific literature to weigh up the claims for and against certain phenonena, such as RF radiation and cancer or global warming and crop damage or storm severity. Instead of using a corpus of words like "love, useful, thanks, hate, sucks" to score positive or negative sentiment, we'd instead use words like "conclusively shows, suggest, implies..." and all the other academic phrases you're probably all familiar with to predict how strong the evidence is for the phenomena under discussion. The Public Library of Science (plos.org) has a nice API which gives you access to full text, so that might be a good starting place, and I have a R script that implements a rudimentary sentiment analysis algorithm, but there's plenty of room for improvement and of course adaptation to use the scientific vocabulary. The github repo is here, if anyone is interested:  https://github.com/williamgunn/SciSentiment

Proposed by:

  • William Gunn (@mrgunn)

Hackers:

  • None yet

Skills needed:

  • Text mining
  • front end development if we want to make a service out of it

Comments:

  • Please include your name, email, twitter handle, or other identifier.
  • Fantastic idea. (@natronics)
  • Crazy idea spawned over lunch at oss2011: build a "reCAPTCHA" like tool to leverage crowdsourcing for text analysis. If your automated parser comes across an ambiguous sentence, present the alternative interpretations to a human, and let them choose. (patrikd@gmail.com)
  • I just finished a consulting job with intention analysis and information extraction.  I would sure like to help with open source frameworks for NLP as well as visualization tools.  (Fabius Leineweber, usfabi@gmail.com, @fabius)

The (Drinkable) DNA Cocktail (tags: hands-on molecular biology, mixology, mad science)

You may have done the little DNA extraction experiment at MakerFaire, or you may have seen Mac Cowell's 5 minute DNA Extraction in a Shot Glass instructable (do check out the last picture!) . All you need is some cells (say, from fruit), a few drops of detergent, a pinch of salt, some meat tenderizer (optional), and a shot of vodka. Which doesn't exactly make for the tastiest cocktail, but it's all fairly harmless.

 

Now, could we improve on this, and come up with a DNA extraction protocol that also makes for a great cocktail? This would mean getting around the use of detergent to lyse the cells, and minimizing the amount of salt. We could start with a fruit smoothie, add some papaya, fig and/or pineapple for protease (instead of meat tenderizer), and blend the heck out of it to lyse some of the cells. Could also try an ultrasonic jewelry cleaning bath for lysis. Figuring out which combination of fruit and salt concentration works and tastes best would take some experimentation. I figure we can do enough experiments to keep the entire room buzzed for the entire weekend...

Hackers:

  • Patrik D'haeseleer, patrikd@gmail.com, @patrikd
  •  

Comments:

  • Equipment needed: blender (I have a Vitamix I can bring), lots of cheap vodka, fruit, etc.
  • I would recommend using something other than detergent. Harmless in small doses, may can send you running to the bathroom.
    • Exactly. A few drops of detergent in a shot glass may not do any harm, but it won't help the taste any either. If we can lyse enough of the cells simply by blending or using ultrasonics (or even an iSi Cream Whipper?) we may not need any detergent at all - but that would take some experimentation. (patrikd@gmail.com)
    • Could you lyse the cells by bathing everything in a hypotonic solution? (@CodonAUG)
      • For mammalian cells this will work, but plant cells need mechanical grinding due to their cell walls.
      • And for drinkability, we'd like to preserve the fruit flavor as well. So diluting the fruit with a lot of water to start with would be sub-optimal. ;-)
    • Pineapple or papaya juice can be used instead of meat tenderizer... always tasty in a beverage! (@drkiki) 
  • @bonnie will be bringing a bag of useful items including:
    • 1000 ul pipette & tips
    • spherification chemicals (food-grade calcium chloride and sodium alginate)
    • conical tubes and microcentrifuge tubes
    • douncer homogenizer
    • cream whipper 
    • dremel (anybody have a dremelfuge?)
    • 0.1g scale 
    • pH paper
    • futt (that's fun with 2 t's) 
  • Excellent! I'm donating a pineapple and a bottle of vodka. :-D I can also do a quick DNA extraction demo from spit, if people are interested. Bringing some isopropyl alcohol  too, so kids can participate in the spit-DNA demo if they'd like too. (@patrikd)

CellScope Hacking (tags: microscope, mobile)

I can get my hands on one of these: http://cellscope.berkeley.edu/ if anyone has any interest in doing a hack with it. It's essentially a microscope tethered to an iPhone (you would need an iPhone if I brought the CellScope).

Hackers:

  • Ariel Waldman, ariel@arielwaldman.com, @arielwaldman
  • Lily Lew, squidbait@ymail.com 
  • ...and jump in! 

Comments:

  • ...What a great invention! Let's create a digital recognition system like the "tagging your friends" feature for pictures to match with a database. The applications are endless as learning tools, possible mobile screens for forensic cases, having instant access to information about the identified compound, other CSI ideas or just to name the bacteria that live on our body. Imagine shooting a fiber and finding a match to a database or shooting a rock particle and knowing what the mineral is, sick with mono or the flu would the cell culture match up? I'm excited!
  • Or maybe a citizen science movement for geotagging all things related to nature such as organisms in water, plants, pollen types and counts, etc... 

What's the harm?

If you're a scientist at an research institution, your institution pays tens of thousands (or more) to private companies so that you can read the papers that you and your colleagues have published. It wasn't supposed to be this way! I'd like to build a Firefox / Chrome plugin that calculates how much money a research browsing session would cost if researchers had personally to pay the exorbitant prices charged by closed access publishers. The goal is to show on a clear and personal level how much money is being siphoned away from scientific research and into the pockets of closed access publishing companies.

  • @mrgunn, maybe @codepo8 if he's in attendance again?
  • anyone else!
  •  

Comments:

  • I've never made a browser plugin before, but it seems like a small simple project like this would be just perfect for SHD!
  • I do have some knowledge of how to scrape publisher article pages and use related APIs.
  • Or maybe a notice when putting together a bibliography for a paper: "DID YOU KNOW that it would cost an independent researcher at least $1234 just to read all those papers? SUPPORT OPEN ACCESS by clicking on this link: <link>". It's a bit nag-ware, but for a good cause at least.

Where can the cell phone save the day?  (Health, Biotech, Data mining, Data analysis, Planet Saving)

Background: Around the globe, disease is prevalent; cell phones are prevalent; but healthcare is not. Gadgets are being developed that can turn a cell phone into a diagnostic device (e.g. the CellScope, as seen above). Project: To address the public health issue, let's mine some datasets that are rich in demographic information: data.un.orgstats.oecd.orghealthmap.org, or www.data.gov. These sites provide a lot of data, but for starters we could use the data to build overlaying maps of disease, cell phone coverage and heathcare access. We could then explore the following questions and more: What diseases are most prevalent in regions where cell phones are available, but healthcare is not? What cell phone technologies/hacks would be necessary to diagnose those diseases? 

 

Hackers:

  • Nancy Burgess

Comments:

  •  

DNA iPhone Game

 

In light of the popularity of Angry Birds and mobile phone games, why not use this means to teach kids science?  We can make a simple DNA base pairing game with cute graphics, happy music, and a lot of interaction.  Open to other suggestions.

  • Jun Axup, jun@jya.me, @junnibug
  • anyone else!
  •  

Comments:

  •   

Tensegrity Robot (tags: tensegrity, robotics, morphing structures)

 

 

Tensegrity structures are remarkable for their light weight structural integrity.  They can also change shape by shortening and lengthening the tension elements.  I propose building a simple robot with a tensegrity structure that can propel itself, perform a task, or at least do a little dance (GIR voice!) by taking advantage of this feature.  Mighty morphin' tesegrity bots!

 

  • Parker Imrie; e-mail is first.last at gmail; Twitter is OGuunter
  •  

Comments:

  •  

 

 


 

Agora - Dynamic, graphical tool to accelerate scientific research by visualizing the relationships between publications

 

The initial concept behind this idea is to simplify scientific research by creating a way to graphically view publications in context, by viewing each paper as a node, with connections to the papers it cites and the papers which cite it.  The x-axis could be a timeline, the node size could be journal impact factor, etc.  A second pane below would allow a user to click on a node, and see the abstract and other details for that publication in a pane below.  

 

The goal of this tool is to dramatically decrease the time and effort required to read research results firsthand, ultimately enabling:

 

a) students to learn science faster by focusing on the important papers.  

b) more interdisciplinary research by allowing specialists in one field to rapidly get up to speed in areas outside of their area of expertise. 

 

Problem statement:

    Imagine I'm interested in a particular field of science, like organ regeneration medicine using stem cells.  How can I figure out where the state of the art in this field is?  Right now, I can perform a keyword search, find an interesting paper, then look for interesting citations within this paper, go find those papers, and repeat.  

 

Solution:

   Instead, I'd like to see a web of nodes and connections plotted on a timeline, centered around a publication I've searched for.  I can instantly see which of the papers it cites are important based on how many papers cited each of those (indicated by the size of those nodes).  In addition, I can click on each of those publications and instantly see the abstract, authors, and institutions.  This has taken my 3-5 hour search down to a few minutes, and has allowed me to start with the most significant papers instead of the ones that I found first.

 

What needs to be built:

 

Two sections for prototype, maybe more:

1) Small test database of papers/authors/citations.  Data can be scraped from Web of Science, Pubmed, or Google Scholar

2) Graphical front end with graph layout, dynamic visualization, etc.

 

email me at etrautmann@gmail.com with ideas/questions/etc.

 

(@mrgunn) - Citation graphs have been done. I'd really like to see existing work extended: building on http://vyzkumap.net/ and http://academic.research.microsoft.com/VisualExplorer#26492207&citation and https://collabgraph.xcend.de .

 


Make things with NASA images (tags: space, design)

NASA has a very open use policy for most images obtained from NASA missions and they are sprinkled all over the internet in the form of websites. We could scrape images and their metadata (titles, descriptions, etc) from public websites and repurpose it somehow. Mobile apps? games? Social media bots? alternative ways to browse/search? Or simply make an API so others can access the data more easily for their own projects.. I was thinking it would be cool to do something with Spitzer images since they are so colorful and awesome and their website doesn't look too hard to scrape (http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/info/18-Image-Use-Policy) Also I have a dataset of press release planetary ring images and metadata I have already scraped from the Planetary Rings Node (http://pds-rings.seti.org/saturn/cassini/) Other sources or hack ideas?

 

Hackers:

 

Comments:

  •  

 

 

Lets (gently) kill LaTeX with html and css

 

LaTeX has been the standard for scientific markup for a long time. It provides a good environment in which to write scientific papers for journals and publications. While LaTeX remains a great system its not without its troubles: compilation errors, a intimidating learning curve for new comers, a fight to get that one graph exactly where you want it, trouble deciphering bespoke macros from third parties and journals,  I am sure all of us who have used it have experienced issues like these. 

 

The web also requires markups and has established html / css as its tools of choice. These seems like a much more natural system and one that could be the future of scientific publishing. One of the major hurdles to adoption of standards like these is making the output look less like a website and more like the scientific publications  we know and love.

 

Lets try and take a scientific paper 

 

http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.1785

 

and mark it up in html / css getting as close to the look and feel of the original paper as possible. Off the back of this we could begin to develop a set of templates and code for the major journals, perhaps start a shift away from LaTeX towards the rest of the web.

 

Issues : How to do maths? Do we use pure html/css or abstractions like sass etc ?  

Benefits : ability to embed data / visualizations. Using something like this http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/ we can output to multiple different displays easily (mobile, tablets etc). Citation links become easier etc. Don't have to code in LaTeX.

 

Hackers:

 

Comments:

  • You may want to take a look at at what Inspires is doing. Inspires is a searchable database of (mostly) physics and astro papers that has started pulling out information from the papers to make the database more searchable. It is also rendering the LaTeX in the browser.
  • http://inspirehep.net/record/884880 

 

 

  


Cell playhouse

 

Let's build a walk-in, interactive model of a cell, complete with organelles and molecular machines! The parts may not look exactly like actual cell parts, but rather the emphasis will be on interacting with the parts to get an intuitive idea of what they do. 

Come join us in room 2!

 

Hackers:

  • Lil Fritz-Laylin -fritzlaylin@gmail.com
  • Meredith Carpenter - mlcarpen@stanford.edu
  • Bala 

 


 

Mapping human mitochondrial DNA haplogroups over time

 

The mitochondrial DNA is passed down only through the maternal line and changes relatively rapidly, so it is often used as a marker of human populations. I work on ancient DNA, and I'd like to make a map/timeline that includes haplogroups found in ancient DNA in different locations around the world as well as the distribution in modern populations to see if we can find any patterns.

I'll collect the data, and anyone with experience with data visualization/mapping APIs would be welcome to help!

 

Hackers: 

  • Meredith Carpenter (find me in room 2) - mlcarpen@stanford.edu

 

Comments: 


 

Who does the science in your neighborhood? (Science In My Backyard or SIMBY for short)

 

Is there a botanist down the street who can tell you about the plants in your yard? Do you love birds and want to share the local birds with your neighbors? Are you looking for help on a garage science project? Do you need a science expert to talk to your classroom? How can you find and share science with your neighbors? With a community platform website, of course! This website will allow people to meet their neighbors in the online space and connect with them in the real world. I'd love to figure out how this website would work best for the most people.

 

Hackers:

  • Dr. Kiki (I'm in the main room with the baby and possibly a video camera, and would love to talk about this idea with other people)

 

Comments:

 

Comments (6)

Patrik D'haeseleer said

at 12:00 am on Nov 7, 2011

I believe Thomson Reuter's "Web of Science" does exactly this. We could definitely use an open access version though. From their fact sheet:

"CITATION MAPS
Visualize the connections between articles and their citations. Go forward and
backward in time to track citing and cited references; color code, re-configure
and organize your citation maps to discover trends in citation activity. Link
directly to the full record of any article shown."

William Gunn said

at 12:09 pm on Nov 7, 2011

Web of Science does this, MS Academic Search does this: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/VisualExplorer#26492207&citation and there's even a few hacks out there such as http://vyzkumap.net/ and https://collabgraph.xcend.de .

Eric Trautmann said

at 12:29 pm on Nov 7, 2011

Looking at all of these, http://vyzkumap.net/ comes the closest to this original idea, but all of these just show you the citations of a given paper without attempting to prioritize them or organize in any way. It's not useful for me to see the 60 citations of a given paper without having a clue of which of those had the greatest downstream impact. You are right that plenty of people have done something similar, but none of these tools are all that useful in their current form.

William Gunn said

at 12:47 pm on Nov 7, 2011

The reason I posted this was in hopes we could build on what's out there, as opposed to trying to make something from the ground up. That would be quite a tall order for a weekend, too.

Eric Trautmann said

at 4:54 pm on Nov 7, 2011

Yeah, that's a great call. the vyskumap would be a great starting point since it provides all of the code as well. I haven't dug into that but it seems like that gets us the closest. Definitely more than a weekend project, but it's possible that the weekend project could put together a prototype demonstration to generate interest for an open-source project with a slightly longer timescale.

William Gunn said

at 6:03 pm on Nov 7, 2011

There's also http://www.kleenk.com/ and https://collabgraph.xcend.de/ which are half-baken right now but could provide some inspiration. Maybe we could get the author of Vyzkumap (@m1sp) to join us online for the weekend.

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