Marcus D. Hanwell
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A First Look at Google's Science Journal App
Google recently announced the release of its Science Journal app, a tool intended to "inspire future makers and scientists." All you need to get started is an Android phone—it will make use of the sensors on your phone and offers a digital science notebook to record your findings. The app is free and slated to be released open source later this summer. Google has already released microcontroller firmware for Arduino-based sensors on GitHub. You can start experimenting and making notebook entries once you have downloaded the app, and the interface is friendly and approachable. There are a number of experiments I intend to do with my 7-year-old son, and the Arduino kits look like something he would love too...
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Confessions of a Cross-Platform Developer
Andreia Gaita is giving a talk at this year's OSCON, titled Confessions of a cross-platform developer. She's a long-time open source and Mono contributor, and develops primarily in C#/C++. Andreia works at GitHub, where she's focused on building the GitHub Extension manager for Visual Studio. I caught up with Andreia ahead of her talk to ask about cross-platform development and what she's learned in her 16 years as a cross-platform developer...
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How Scientists Are Using Digital Badges
The open source world pioneered the use of digital badges to reward skills, achievements, and to signal transparency and openness. Scientific journals should apply open source methods, and use digital badges to encourage transparency and openness in scientific publications. Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts know all about merit badges. Scouts earn merit badges by mastering new skills. Mozilla Open Badges is a pioneer in awarding digital merit badges for skills and achievements. One example of a badge-issuing project is Buzzmath, where Open Badges are issued to recognize progress in mathematics to students, or anyone wanting to brush up on their skills...
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Kitware Receives Funding To Develop An Open-Source Application For Atomic Scale Tomography Using S/TEM
Kitware has announced a new Department of Energy SBIR Phase I award to develop an open-source platform for materials reconstruction using scanning transmission electron microscopes (S/TEM).
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Kitware To Showcase Advances In HPC And Visualization At SC14
Kitware, a leader in the creation and support of open-source software and state-of-the-art technology, is exhibiting recent work in HPC and visualization at Supercomputing 2014 (SC14) in New Orleans, LA...
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Open Chemistry Project Raises Up the Next Generation of Researchers
In 2007 I took part in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) developing the Avogadro application. As we were developing Avogadro, we founded The Open Chemistry project as an umbrella project to develop related tools for chemistry and materials science. Our goal is to bring high quality open source tools to research communities working in these areas, and to develop other tools to complement the Avogadro molecular editor. This year we were very pleased to be selected as a mentoring organization for GSoC; a few of our mentors are Geoff Hutchison, Adam Tenderholt, David Koes, and Karol Langner, who are all long-time contributors in related projects. And, we were lucky to get three slots for student projects...
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Open Chemistry Project Upholds Mission of Unorganization, The Blue Obelisk
Chemistry is not the most open field of scientific endeavor; in fact, as I began working more in the area (coming from a background in physics), I was surprised with the norms in the field. As a PhD student way back in 2003, I simply wanted to draw a 3D molecular structure on my operating system of choice (Linux), and be able to save an image for a paper/poster discussing my research. This proved to be nearly impossible, and in 2005 a group of like-minded researchers got together at a meeting of the American Chemical Society and formed an unorganization: The Blue Obelisk (named after their meeting place in San Diego)...
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Open Source Dependency Management As A Balancing Act
During my career I have spent a lot of time packaging other people's code, writing my own, and working on large software frameworks. I have seen projects that still haven't released a stable version, never quite hitting 1.0, while others made 1.0 releases within months of beginning development, and then quickly moving on to 2.0, 3.0, etc. There is quite a variance in these release cycles, and this coupled with maintaining large projects can make things difficult. I will go through some of the decisions we have faced in projects I have worked on and the pressures on the project. On the one extreme, users would like to have a stable API that never changes, with dependencies that don't specify a minimum version so that they can choose whatever version works best...
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Will The RIO Journal be the Most Open Scientific Publication?
A large amount of scientific research is published in scientific journals, and there has been a lot of debate around offering open access to these articles, along with the underlying data, software, and methods. There is a new journal that launched recently with the goal of going beyond traditional scientific publishing by encompassing all outputs of the research cycle. What does this mean? The RIO Journal (Research Ideas and Outcomes) is launching with the goal of publishing a number of things not currently published, in addition to more conventional outputs on a single collaborative platform. This includes things such as project proposals, data, methods, workflows, software, project reports, and research articles.
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