Skip to main content

Why you should join the Search

    SETI or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is a science organization that scans the sky for signs of alien life using your computing power to do so. Citizen Science projects are projects which heavily rely on help from the general public. These projects can range from anywhere from researching the folding of protein which can be used to advance medical technology to SETI. There are thousands of Citizen Science projects and even more ways you help out with them. It is important that everyone spends some time looking at research projects and finds ways that they can help out with the pursuit of human knowledge, either for the many things that knowledge lets us do for merely the knowledge itself.

    Dating back to 1996 GIMPS (The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) has been searching for incredibly large prime numbers. They are attributed to finding the largest known prime number, 2^82,589,933-1. This knowledge can be used to increase data security and is also just cool to have. GIMPS is incredibly supported by BOINC, a program from Berkeley that allows people to donate their computing power while they aren't using it to help out with research projects. There are many other projects that are supported by BOINC such as Rosetta@home which attempts to fold RNA shapes to figure out how they work, World Community Grid a program that researches Cancer, HIV, AIDS, and a bunch of lesser known disease, or SETI@home which lets you help out with the search for aliens because aliens are cool and even if we don't find any it's cool that we tried. If any of these are at least a tiny bit interesting to you look through the BOINC project list and find one to support.

    There are also lots of projects that are more hands on if you want to actively contribute. A game called FoldIt was released in 2008. It teaches to basics of protein folding then lets users attempt to figure out proteins that have yet to be solved. Computers often struggle to brute force these proteins which makes it necessary to do them by hand. If you enjoy puzzle games check out FoldIt even if you don't progress science you'll have a good time. The government also has a list of citizen science projects which can be found at citizenscience.gov these are usually a bit more active but can be nearly anything. A lot of these that I find cool are from the national park service which has programs for pretty much everyone who enjoys the outdoors. Over the summer highschoolers can participate in the Youth Forest Monitoring Program or many of the other listed programs, there is something for everyone.

    These projects and programs are incredibly easy to join in on and with the sheer number of them there is going to be one that both interest you and matches the level of effort you want to spend. No matter what you do it will progress something. Shoot for the moon because even if you miss you will clear an area from the list of possible places for alien life.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

June 10: How to make a rock (using Onshape)

3D printing and my experience with it      I have a decent amount of experience with 3D printing, I own a printer and have made a bunch of models. I have printed replacement pieces for board games, stencils for D&D battle maps. Whenever there is a problem that requires a small plastic piece of very specific parameters I can make a solution. At one point the band had water bottles whose handles would snap off every other second so I went and made a file for replacement. It is safe to say that in any practical situation I can make something. There is one thing I have no clue how to do, and that is make something completely impractical, so incredibly pointless that it exist for the shear fact that it exist. Today I made a rock. A quick discussion on the concept of rocks      Rocks do not have a reason to exist, they did not decide that they wanted to be, they simply are. Rocks are not uniform they do not attempt to be perfect in any way, a rock that is a p...
Post a Comment
Read more

June 18: Dr Schuman's Talk

Neuromorphic AI      Neuromorphic AI use neurol networks based off of the human brain to minimize energy cost in computing. Dr. Schuman's research group has built a robot car that they are using neuromorphic AI to lower the energy cost of.  Research Opportunities     The most interesting part about her talk to me was the fact that you could do research as a high schooler. Her group does research in the aforementioned field of Neuromorphic AI. She does research over the academic school year and over the summer both of which are in person and online. I want to do research in to computer science as a career path so I am really hoping to join the group for this upcoming school year.
Post a Comment
Read more

June 17: Visualization and AI

 Visualization     We worked on data visualization over the last 2 class days. Below was the visualization I made to make McDonalds sales make more sense at a glance. Below are the total sales, profit, and number of customers along with sales by country, costumer satisfaction and sales trends. I have found that just looking at the numbers directly usually makes more sense to me then a bunch of fancy pie charts and maps but I can see how they would be useful. It is definitely really helpful for showing off numbers to those who need to get it at a glance or did not work closely with the data. AI     AI or Artificial intelligence is a really bad name for what is essentially a bunch of statistics. For example we used it to guess who would have survived and who would have died on the Titanic. To do this we got a list of training data which is a bunch of details about people on the ship and whether or not they survived. The code takes that data and uses it to construc...
Post a Comment
Read more