I went a mile underground inside an abandoned gold mine ...for science!I was in Lead, South Dakota (next to Deadwood) to keynote their big public event called Neutrino Day where families come in from the surrounding areas to geek out about particle physics, which is so cool.I always adore a chance to geek out about neutrinos and subatomic particle collisions, but I was especially excited to get a chance to go one mile underground and see all the cool science taking place. The Sanford Lab is host to a particle accelerator, extremophile research, dark matter experiments and the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). Check out what it was like!
I'm on the Science Channel!
Geeky confession: I was excited to wake up & see @ScienceChannel RTed me: http://is.gd/7bQ1Jh . Geeky dream: Ideally, 1 day I'll be on it.
— Ariel Waldman (@arielwaldman) June 23, 2011
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Five years ago I revealed on Twitter that one of my geek dreams was to appear on the Science Channel. Little did I know that a few months later I would be appearing on the SyFy channel, which was a lot of fun and deepened my desire. And now, five years later, I will appear on the Science Channel! Appearing on TV is something very near and dear to me because of how central a role TV shows, documentaries and films have played in inspiring me to be where I am today.I had never self-identified as a science geek, but I always enjoyed watching science documentaries. In 2008, I was watching the documentary When We Left Earth on the Discovery Channel that captured the story of NASA sending a human into space. The documentary interviewed people who had worked in mission control at the time and shared their story of how they didn't know anything about orbits or rocketry or spacecrafts – they were figuring it out as they went. As a millennial who had grown up in Kansas and attended art school, this was new information to me and I found it incredibly inspiring. I didn't know anything about space exploration either, but all of a sudden I wanted to work at NASA, too! I took that inspiration and shortly thereafter emailed NASA a fangirl letter to volunteer myself. Very unexpectedly, I ended up getting a job at NASA from that email. The rest is history, aka my biography to date.Tomorrow my dream from five years ago will be realized when I be appear on the Science Channel! The show is called How To Build Everything (#HowToBuild) and it airs on Wednesdays 10pm Eastern (9pm Central, 7pm Pacific). I'll be talking about how to build an interplanetary rover! I'll also be in a couple of upcoming episodes talking about how to build spacesuits and rocketships. Below is a shot of me from filming last year. Tune in!
The emergence of science hacking in Madagascar
This article was originally published on Boing Boing and has been reposted here.
Descending into Madagascar at night is an experience. I was enveloped in and captivated by the darkness. The expected sight of bright lights, distinguishing cities, small towns or even an airport runway, slowly dissipated as I pressed my face against the plastic Air France window. Occasionally, the plane would pass over a handful of small lights - almost like looking at the few stars you can see on a clear night in New York City. There is, for a moment, a quieting calm. Stepping onto the runway and into the immigration hall, the silent darkness ends abruptly. Bright florescent lights beamed down as I squinted and was herded into an over-crowded cattle pen of people pushing in every direction to hand off their landing cards and passports for inspection. People clamored over each other, extending their passports over the shoulders of others, climbing over children to get to the front of the crowd. No lines, no waiting, no calm, no conventions, no personal space. It was an exhilarating rush of city-like urgency, if not overwhelming. The lack of a distinctive electrical grid and the country's self-declaration as a land of "mora mora", a Malagasy phrase meaning to take life slow, could easily mislead one into thinking that this island of 22 million people prefer to kick-back and watch the world go by. Not so. As Science Hack Day Antananarivo was about to show me, Madagascar is pulsing with an insatiable liveliness for science and technology – a cybernetic horse champing at the 8-bit.
The next morning, I met with the Science Hack Day organizers who were darting around to get the venue ready for the arrival of Madame Rasoazananera Marie Monique, the "Ministre de l’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche Scientifique", who I learned was a very notable figure within the government when everyone abruptly stood up upon her arrival. She and other officials spoke of how it wasn't enough to just have the people of Madagascar get PhD's and write scientific papers - that what Madagascar really needed was more people who were actively involved in experimenting, creating solutions and prototyping ideas with science. I was pleasantly surprised to hear this. It's rare for me to encounter government officials that recognize from the get-go that simply raising the percentage of people who acquire PhD's in your country does not necessarily equate to seeing science in action or having a country of empowered people who can build real-world solutions. I could tell just how meaningful this Science Hack Day was for proving to the newly internationally-recognized Madagascar government (that came into power just this year to mark the end of the widely-condemned coup that happened in 2009) that people from all backgrounds can make amazing things with science.
It's easy to see why the government is wanting to move science into a more active role in Madagascar. Madagascar frequently ranks in the top ten poorest countries across the entire world, sometimes as high as the top five based on varying data points. 75% of the country is considered to be living in poverty, with over 90% of the country living on less than $2 a day. The wildlife, which Madagascar is internationally known for, have been deeply exploited. Approximately 90% of Madagascar's plants and animals exist nowhere else on Earth. From the 1950's to 2000, the country lost approximately 50% of its forests. Lemurs, which exist naturally only in Madagascar, have been deemed the most threatened mammal on Earth - meaning they are the most likely mammal to go extinct in the near future (the Northern Sportive Lemur, for example, has less than 20 individuals of its species in existence today). The biodiversity in Madagascar has also made its plants a target for excessive exploitation via pharmaceutical companies, which hurt not only the plants themselves, but also the local economy which rarely receives profit from these outsider operations. As a knock-on effect, a few scientists I spoke to in the region said they sometimes avoid knowledge-sharing due to a reasonable paranoia over companies regularly exploiting Madagascar for all its worth. Amidst all these unfortunate facts, there are glimmers of hope to be found in an emerging community of science hackers.Andriankoto 'Harinjaka' Ratozamanana, the lead organizer of Science Hack Day Antananarivo, runs Habaka, a tech innovation hub in Madagascar. Habaka has become a central hangout place for the geeks of Antananarivo. Harinjaka has a tenacious quality about him - taking initiative to drive a tech/science community in Madagascar forward in the face of many challenges. His drive has a contagious effect, inspiring many others to follow his lead. The Habaka space is co-run by a small scrappy group of locals who are passionate about facilitating a space for tech and science in Madagascar and want to elevate their community to be recognized on the world stage. The success of Kenya's tech incubator, iHub, is a great example of a space that has brought a community together to collaborate and build great things in Nairobi. But iHub's success often outshines other tech/science hubs across Africa to journalists who carelessly like to lump the entire continent of Africa into one single place. There are, in fact, dozens of these spaces and initiatives across the continent, some of which are cataloged by the community network AfriLabs.
Chris Corbett, a Bay Area expat now residing in Antananarivo, is a regular collaborator of Harinjaka's, having helped him put together the Science Hack Day and run the Habaka space. In addition, Chris runs an endeavor called "Human Development League", a non-profit that teaches life skills and character development through amateur sports to many of the children who live on the streets of Antananarivo. Chris has a hugely endearing nature to him; a person that exudes kindness and a desire to help people in any way he can. He told me how he came to Madagascar for what was supposed to be a five-day trip and immediately decided never to leave, turning his trip into a four month stay and a Visa process to reside in the country. As I walked around crowded markets and out-of-the-way restaurants across the city, seemingly everyone knew Chris and greeted him with hugs and smiles.It's amazing to see what both Harinjaka and Chris have been able to accomplish with very little, if any, funding for these initiatives over the years. They've navigated in-kind donations and support networks to help build out their visions thus far and now hope to find grants and sponsorships to ensure a bright future for their projects. For Science Hack Day Antananarivo, Thomson Reuters EndNote provided sponsorship for the event, helping make it the largest event that Harinjaka and Chris had put together - proving that there was a proper budding science hacker community that was just waiting to be tapped into action.
It was also fascinating to learn that one of the largest obstacles to hacking/prototyping in Madagascar was not lack of income, but the fact that hardly any companies ship to Madagascar. Before traveling to Madagascar, it's common to have local friends ask you to buy phones, laptops and other devices for them because there is no way to get them shipped over. Many of the Science Hack Day attendees had learned about Arduinos inside and out, but had never seen one in person because there was no company that would ship them there. The few donated Arduinos I had brought were quickly snatched up as large teams formed around so that everyone could get a chance to play with them. My partner and Science Hack Day collaborator, Matt Biddulph, led an impromptu Arduino class and found himself in the middle of an Arduino-frenzy as everyone crowded around with questions about various sensors and code. My heart broke a little as numerous people came up to me saying they'd be happy to buy an Arduino if we could somehow get them shipped to the country. Getting more sensors, devices and computer/data science literacy to Madagascar could actually be critical in the fight against deforestation.
The attendees of Science Hack Day Antananarivo were some of the most endearing, excited and inventive people I've met. The type of people that you could never possibly be in a bad mood around even if you tried. Most worked in large teams, figuring out how each person could contribute to hacking together a concept. The hacks that emerged were highly influenced by the ubiquity of sensors for the real world. One team prototyped a concept for producing happier, fatter chickens in short timeframes by creating "smart farms" that could play calming music as well as control temperature, sound and light. The project was called Akouzen (essentially, "zen chicken"). Another team proposed using radar and ultrasound to detect and kill locusts that regularly ravage Madagascar's crops. Perhaps for the best, there was no live locust-killing demo. The largest team worked on two prototypes: a robot security dog and an emotion detector based on measuring skin resistance. One of the journalists who came to cover the event became so excited by it that she stuck around and created a prototype of her own: a solar stove that could cook basic meals without the need for gas or electricity
.It was the end of Science Hack Day Antananarivo that was the best. All the attendees, despite their tired state, clamored over each other to take as many ridiculously fun group photos as they could, showing off their awarded science medals and certificates, making huge group hugs, and grinning from ear to ear. Harinjaka and Chris were in an exhausted euphoric state that I know all too well as a Science Hack Day organizer. When I had organized the first Science Hack Day San Francisco in 2010, I remember barely being able to keep my eyes open but feeling like it was the best thing I had ever done. Putting together an event that brings people excitement and laughter and unconstrained creativity and experimentation is simply awesome. After the event, a retired astrophysicist dropped by Habaka in jubilation. He had read about the Science Hack Day in the local newspapers and was excited to find other individuals who were trying to make science an active pursuit in Madagascar. He regularly spoke to schools and the government about how Madagascar should invest in a small satellite and how it would have a huge impact on both education and policy. He talked of how isolated he had felt in his endeavors and now after connecting with Harinjaka and the Habaka hub, he no longer felt alone.
Some might say that Madagascar has a long road ahead to restore the many exploitations and grievances endured by their environment, government and people. While that is likely true, and many more people, policies and financial aid is needed to rebuild, Madagascar has what are likely to be the first responders in rehabilitating and improving the country: the science hackers of Antananarivo.
Ariel Waldman is the global director of Science Hack Day, a 48-hour-all-night event where anyone excited about making weird, silly or serious things with science comes together in the same physical space to see what they can prototype within 24 consecutive hours. Anyone can organize a Science Hack Day in their city -- a how-to guide is available at http://sciencehackday.org/howto.
Part of the Science Hack Day SF organizing team: Ariel Waldman, Rose Broome and Jun Axup (photo by Matt Biddulph)
Six fears that keep event organizers up at night
When I first came across hackathons several years ago, the idea sounded awesome to me. A bunch of people get together, brainstorm ideas, and build wacky or useful stuff over a weekend. I never really accepted the fact that they were in large part geared solely towards developers. I had weird ideas. I had things I could contribute to a team. I was up for navigating the murky waters of prototyping a concept in any way I could, be it code or cardboard. I just... wasn't a developer at all. I didn't understand why hackathons didn't bother trying to get all types of people together. Sure, they'd maybe say they were open to anyone and there'd be the occasional code-literate designer or two in the audience, but that was about it. I remember sneaking in to a Yahoo! Hack Day to work with Leah Culver and Cal Henderson on a hack. All I remember doing is looking for images and resizing them. Not a monumental task, but I got a thrill out of being part of making something. In fact, that's why I moved to San Francisco from Kansas City in the first place. I wanted to be surrounded by people obsessed with making things rather than just talking about what other people make.
It is those early experiences that motivated me to take great care when I decided to organize my first hack day in 2010: Science Hack Day. Yes, Science Hack Day's mission is about getting excited and making things with science. But there has always been a semi-secret secondary mission just for me: hacking hackathons. There are a lot of things I don't like about what I'll refer to as "generic" hackathons. Honestly, I can rant for hours. The summary of those rants is essentially: Design your event with the shyest person in mind. Always be looking for ways to lower the intimidation factor. It's about the people, not the prototype. A great event is a diverse event. It's a Hack Day, not a Mechanical Turk Day. Do not offload your fears, uncertainties and doubts into a bucket of rules and restrictions for attendees. It's that last one that I find event organizers have the most trouble with and it is why I wrote this post.
When I was organizing my first Science Hack Day, I remember losing a significant amount of sleep as the event date neared. I had organized everything to a T. The event format was set, my co-organizers were in line, we had all the supplies. And yet, as I lay in bed each night, the fear crept in. I realized that while I had perfectly organized everything, I couldn't control whether anyone would actually want to work with each other. What if they didn't like each other? What if there were people no one wanted to work with? What if they didn't know what to do with themselves? I lost a serious amount of sleep over this. It's at this point that I think organizers pick one of two paths. They either a) drown their freak-out in inventing rules and structures for attendees or b) continue to lose sleep but ultimately take a leap of faith that humans are smart and it'll all work out just fine. I chose "B".
The event kicked off and later that night as I fell asleep on a hard office floor above the main space, I thought through all the smiles, joy and unbridled creativity taking place underneath me. Like the grinch, my heart grew three sizes that day. I smiled and said to myself: "this is the best thing I've ever done". I've now organized five Science Hack Days in San Francisco (2019 update: now ten in San Francisco and one in Antarctica!) and helped instigate people to organize the event in cities around the world. The 45th Science Hack Day just took place last month, and just this year I was in China, Colombia, Madagascar and Mexico to help with the Science Hack Days there. If you're interested in organizing a Science Hack Day, I've created a how-to guide. And if you're a commercial organization looking to put together a hackathon, do get in touch with me.
Being an event organizer is always a bit terrifying, but it's how you cope with those fears, uncertainties and doubts that is key to the success of any event. While I've written this from the context of organizing a hackathon, I suspect much of this is applicable to a wide range of organizers. Here's my list of the fears to overcome as an organizer (and the overreactions I frequently see).
1. The fear of no collaboration
• The ifs: What if no one works with each other? What if they're too shy to talk to one another? What if everyone just defaults to working on their own?
• The overreactions: Specifying exactly how many people need to be on a team, what types of people need to be on each team, that attendees can only be on one team, and/or how quickly people need to find a team.
• The advice: This was the number one fear that kept me up at night when I organized my first hackathon. Put simply: you need to have faith that humans are smart, awesome and are capable of navigating how to collaborate with one another on their own. That said, there are a number of things you can do as an organizer to make it easier for people to find teams: 1) Have an optional pre-event meetup for attendees to meet each other and the organizers 1-day-to-2-weeks before the event kicks off. This allows people to ask questions, know who the organizers are and meet other attendees ahead of time. 2) Have a shared online space for attendees to toss out ideas and offer to help one another in the weeks leading up to the event. 3) Explicitly tell attendees that it's okay if they don't find a team for a while. Encourage them to eavesdrop on conversations. 4) As an organizer: don't freak out if you don't see anyone building anything for the first several hours. The stress of "nothing is happening yet" is always visible on your face and in turn it can make those around you stressed. I often have to tell organizers that the second day is like Christmas morning: somehow suddenly there's a ton of stuff where there was none before! Of course, if you notice a few people aimlessly drifting or on their own, go talk to them about what they're thinking of doing or who they'd like to work with and then connect them with people you think might be interesting to them.
2. The fear of no ideas
• The ifs: What if no one knows what to do? What if they don't know what to make unless I give them a problem to solve? What if they come up with off-topic ideas?
• The overreactions: Creating a list of specific "challenges" that attendees' hacks need to address. Making the event about a narrow discipline. Only allowing people from a specific industry to attend.
• The advice: Know that everyone has ideas and everyone is creative whether they admit it or not. There are two things I recommend for all events: 1) make it diverse, and 2) make any structures optional. I often see hackathons that are about a very narrow subject and I personally find them to be lacking in the serendipity that makes these events worthwhile in the first place. For instance, people often ask me to do a "space hack day", which would no doubt be super awesome to geek out with all my fellow space nerds at, but it'd be a monoculture of only people who already identify as space nerds. What I love about Science Hack Day and hackathons in general is getting people to play with things they have no experience with and getting these super unusual collaborations of astrophysicists, fashion designers, web developers, lawyers, writers, Navy officers, etc. Of course, it's possible to make a specific-topic hackathon a success, but go into it knowing that you'll need to do significant outreach to make sure you have diverse attendees (e.g. "I know you're a neuroscientist, but I'd love to have you come work on space stuff for a weekend!"). Also, I'm not opposed to offering challenges altogether - I just think they should be optional suggestions. It breaks my heart to see attendees get super excited about a hackathon and then realize they have to choose from a list of pre-determined challenges to participate. Let your attendees surprise you. Off-topic ideas can and have gone on to make meaningful impacts.
3. The fear of no incentives
• The ifs: What if no one is motivated to build things for free? What if they don't take our event seriously?
• The overreactions: Using money, flat screen TVs and other wildly expensive material goods as prizes.
• The advice: While some will say big prizes helps legitimize their event, I would argue that it's not worth how it changes the feel of the event. Big prizes can change an event that would otherwise be about collaboration and sharing of ideas to an unwelcoming competition where teams shut themselves away from everyone and are more focused on the prize than the journey. In a way, expensive prizes cheapen the work people do. It turns what should otherwise be an intrinsic drive to build things to an extrinsic drive to build what is going to win over everyone else, regardless of personal interest in it.
4. The fear of no outcomes
• The ifs: What if there aren't any brag-worthy outputs from this event? What if they're all one-off projects? What if they don't solve any real problems?
• The overreactions: Helicopter-parenting the attendees with mentors. Creating specific "challenges" that attendees' hacks need to address.
• The advice: This is probably the most common fear I encounter in other organizers. It's often external - feeling the pressure from bosses or other organizations to demonstrate how the event made an impact. People mistakenly believe that what makes an impactful hackathon is the hacks instead of the people. It's easy to see why this mistake is made: hackathons regularly brag about what products or start-ups got their start at their event, completely overlooking that what really came out of the event was the people, not the product. You're not going to solve giant issues in a weekend. You're not. What you will be doing is bringing people together to create sparks for future collaborations and ideas that they wouldn't have had or acted on otherwise. You're empowering people to play with things they have zero experience in. You're giving rise to people who are otherwise overlooked for solving problems. You are showing people that they belong. For some people, a hackathon can be a life-changing event. For others, it'll just be a fun thing they did one time. But either way, you are changing the relationship people have with a topic area, and in itself, that is changing peoples' lives for the better.
5. The fear of no-shows
• The ifs: What if no one shows up because it's free? What if everyone shows up because it's free? What if I can't estimate how many people will show up?
• The overreactions: Charge everyone a small amount of money to attend so that there won't be many drop-outs and/or don't overbook the venue in case everyone shows up.
• The advice: I am a die-hard about organizing free events whenever possible. I am always annoyed when events charge an entrance fee and it's clear that they don't need the money to run the event - they just are using money to manage attendance. Free events are not easy. It does mean that you can't precisely estimate the number of people who will show up (though, the same can be said for many paid events). Every event is different, but if you're organizing an event where anyone can register for free, my best advice is to always double-book. No matter how awesome the venue, how free the food, how convenient the location - always double book. I think why it annoys me so much to see events charge that don't need to is because the organizer is essentially offloading their problems onto the attendees instead of dealing with the issue themselves. I know it's harder to estimate attendees if it's a free event, but that's your job. Don't charge people money unless it is 100% necessary for the operation of the event. While $2 or $5 might not seem like much to you, to others it's a barrier to entry that's entirely unnecessary.
6. The fear of no skills
• The ifs: What if non-tech-savvy people show up? What if people feel like they don't have any skills? What if they don't have any experience in the subject matter?
• The overreactions: Requiring a specific set of skills or experience to attend.
• The advice: This is where I find organizers showing a lack of creativity. Again, allow attendees to surprise you. It should be your job to think through creative ways almost anyone could contribute. Over the summer, I spoke with an attendee who saw everyone building hardware or coding apps and felt like she had no skills to contribute. I talked with her about how hacks can be anything - they could be a video, or a comic book, or a cardboard prototype, or a Wordpress site that manually aggregates things into a useful resource. She ended up creating a video. As an organizer, spend some time to think about how people from all walks of life can create things that might be outside of your focus. Instead of asking the "what if?", brainstorm on the "what could?". What could a community manager do to help build a scientific app? What could a neuroscientist and an astrophysicist build together? What could someone without a laptop create? What could a team consisting of no developers use to prototype ideas? My hope is that as an organizer, you'll be able to dream up many ideas. Prototyping isn't about specific skills, it's really just about having the drive to realize a concept in whatever way you can - be it drawing, video, cardboard, websites, apps, hardware, software, wetware or performance art.
I'm helping NASA turn science fiction into science
I'm both excited and humbled to announce that I'm joining the external council for NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program! NIAC nurtures visionary, sci-fi-esque ideas that could radically transform future NASA missions. Essentially, NIAC is one of the coolest of the many cool programs at NASA.Just recently, NIAC announced funding for 12 projects including a submarine for Saturn's moon, Titan, a comet hitchhiker, and an asteroid wrangler (pictured above, via Robert Hoyt). The previous round of funding saw projects researching everything from human stasis (suspended animation) for long duration space travel to 3D printing biomaterials on Mars. The whole catalog of awards from 2011 onwards is online.If that isn't exciting enough, the NIAC External Council (NEC) is an amazing group of individuals that I am honored to be joining. The council is chaired by Frank Martin who worked on the science operations of Apollo 16 and Apollo 17. The other members include Frank Drake, of the famous Drake Equation who pioneered the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and also created the Arecibo message; Penelope (Penny) Boston, who studies extremophiles and how they can inform us of potential life on Mars; David Brin, a notable science fiction author and science futurist; John G. Kramer, who is conducting experiments on quantum entanglement and authored two hard science fiction novels; Michael Yarymovych, a former VP at Boeing and Chief Scientist of the U.S. Air Force; and Larry Young, a professor of astronautics at MIT and has been involved in an extensive amount of biomedical research and engineering.NIAC was originally formed in 1998 (at that time the "I" stood for "Institute). The program was then canceled in 2007, but a National Academy of Sciences report in 2009 urged Congress and NASA to reinstate the program:
The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) was formed in 1998 to provide an independent source of advanced aeronautical and space concepts that could dramatically impact how NASA develops and conducts its missions. Until August 2007, NIAC provided an independent open forum, a high-level point of entry to NASA for an external community of innovators, and an external capability for analysis and definition of advanced aeronautics and space concepts to complement the advanced concept activities conducted within NASA. Throughout its 9-year existence, NIAC inspired an atmosphere for innovation that stretched the imagination and encouraged creativity. Utilizing an open, Web-based environment to conduct solicitations, perform peer review, administer grant awards, and publicize its activities, this small program succeeded in fostering a community of external innovators to investigate advanced concepts that might have a significant impact on future NASA missions in a 10- to 40-year time frame.Recommendation 3.1: NASA should reestablish a NIAC-like entity, referred to in this report as NIAC2, to seek out visionary, far-reaching, advanced concepts with the potential of significant benefit to accomplishing NASA’s charter and to begin the process of maturing these advanced concepts for infusion into NASA’s missions.
NIAC, now with the "I" standing for "Innovative", has been back in the business of being awesome since 2010. You can follow some of the awesomeness surrounding NIAC and their funded projects on Twitter at http://twitter.com/NASAIAC.Now for how you can help me: so much of NIAC's success is thanks to the creative and brilliant people that propose ideas to investigate. In the comments, I welcome your suggestions on what organizations NIAC could consider reaching out to in order to further the diversity of breakthrough ideas submitted each year. I encourage you to think broadly: biohackerspaces, sci-fi conventions, Disney imagineers, or who knows... pretty much any places that foster (or have the attention of) bright people who have the capability to conduct intensive scientific research and/or prototyping of exciting, "out there" concepts that could move space exploration forward.