openNASA

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to join fellow openNASAer Chris Gerty at Science Hack Day San Francisco. Science Hack Day brings together designers, developers, scientists and other geeks in the same physical space for a brief but intense period of collaboration, hacking, and building ‘cool stuff’ focused on science. I went tolast year’s event as well and was super impressed with the many awesome projects that came out of the weekend - this year was no let down, either!

We began the weekend by offering a lightening talk on some of the many NASA-related data resources available out there that participants could use in their projects, including data.nasa.gov, Helioviewer, exoAPI, and ECHO.

[caption id=”attachment_7679” align=”aligncenter” width=”600”][][] Chris Gerty and I give a Lighting Talk about NASA Datasets[/caption]

Throughout the weekend, we aimed to be the “NASA boots on the ground” - offering help to those who wanted to do things with our data or focus on space exploration. It was incredible to see so many intelligent people in one room so excited about science - many of whom also participated in the International Space Apps Challenge last April.

Here’s a quick run down of some of the completed projects from the weekend.
Openpost
[http://openpost.com
][]Openpost is a quick way to summarize events that are posted to mailing lists. Simply subscribe openpost to your favorite mailing lists and go to a URL you create to see a calendar view of upcoming events mentioned on the list. It’s a great way to de-clutter your inbox without missing important info!

Truthiness
[http://truthiness.herokuapp.com
https://github.com/benjuang/truthiness
][]Truthiness is a simple site devoted to clearing up misconceptions about popular science topics. By sharing unbiased information coupled with quizzes and social integration, Truthiness aims to make everyday life more understandable.

TwitterDots
http://twitterdots.net/
https://github.com/fennb/phirehose
TwitterDots is a real-time visualization of Twitter keyword data. Inputting a keyword shows you geolocated data of where people around the world are discussing that keyword. In the demo, the team demoed the tool showing likely Romney and Obama voted based on language processing from voter’s tweets.

GeoMappit
http://geomappit.net/
https://github.com/basilleaf/geomappit
GeoMappit takes USGS data and mashes it up with Google Fusion tables to create an interactive map to display information about interesting geological features in your backyard!

CoGeNT Symphony and the Sounds of Dark Matter
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~bellis/cogent_sonification/
|The GoGeNT Symphony took sonic mappings from data generated by the CoGeNT dark matter detection experiment to create a musical interpretation of the sound of radioactive decay.

Jamion

Jamion compares San Francisco public transit flow to condensed matter physics in order to make predictions about future SFMTA traffic jams.

Evan XD
Evan designed a computer program that, when coupled with special glasses, enables color-blind individuals to see patterns that otherwise would be difficult or impossible to discern.

Wrist-Based Input
https://gist.github.com/4013771
Rio created a wrist-mounted sensor array that detects movement in the hands and wrist using machine learning.

Quantum Mixology
http://www.slideshare.net/physicsdavid/quantum-mixology
This project mapped fundamental particles to cocktail ingredients and made a series of recipes with a definite quantum theme!

Schrodinger’s Quest: Hunt for the Higgs

This team took data from the Large Hadron Collider and created a game where the player throws protons together using motion detection and attempts to identify the Higgs Boson appearing.

Browser Collider
http://bloodyepic.com/images/picture1.png
Browser Collider visualizes what happens inside the Large Hadron Collider on your web browser.

Baudio
Baudio hacked together a way to collect audio feedback from our physiology. The example connected a EEG to a speaker and allows the user to control the pitch of the tone generated by using their mind.

Election Bot

Putting the finishing touches on [#ElectionBot][] ! twitter.com/ShreyasChand/s…

— Shreyas Chand (@ShreyasChand) November 4, 2012

ElectionBot built a robot out of an electric wheel chair that polls user’s sentiment about recent political issues and presents aggregated data on sentiment around the US.

GelloShotElectrophoresis
https://secure.flickr.com/groups/2091253@N24/
This hack replaced Gel Electrophoresis chemicals with Salt Subsitute and Lime Juice.

NationRank
https://github.com/Empact/nationrank
NationRank creats meta-indicies of nations according to published values such as Press Freedoms.

Zendosaur
http://muga2.com/zendosaur/
https://github.com/gossamr/zendosaur
Young children can make incredible observations and recognize hard to see patterns. Zendosaur serves as a puzzle game that challenges players to create hypothesis about the types of foods a dinosaur may want to eat and test them out with various experiments.

KineSutra
http://kinesutra.wordpress.com/
https://github.com/CodeStrumpet/KineSutra
KineSutra uses Kinect based body recognition coupled with a haptic feedback suit to instruct dancers to follow a pre-set routine.

Constellation
http://mattsenate.github.com/constellation/
https://github.com/mattsenate/constellation
Constellation is a web tool that takes patterns and identifies clusters of stars in the sky that match those patterns. Instant constellation creation!

[]: http://open.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/lightingtalk.jpg [http://openpost.com
]: http://openpost.com [http://truthiness.herokuapp.com
https://github.com/benjuang/truthiness
]: http://truthiness.herokuapp.com