Kalin of the Safecast organization has been working hard at building data maps from measurements taken by their mobile data collectors. The current map set includes over a million data points, and even has a few background measurements in various places around the world to serve as a comparison. These baseline measurements were taken with the same hardware that Safecast normally drives around Japan with, so there should be no adjustments needed due to differing equipment.

The Open Science Summit was last weekend, and a great many panelests presented on various aspects of science, research and education, and how open source can play a role.

The above video is a promo video shot a few months ago.

I promised to present a rundown of the winning entries from Element14 and Mitch Altman's Hackerspace Challenge.

The winning entry is from HackerSpace Charlotte, and it is FANTASTIC. I totally agree with the panel on this one. The other entries were incredible, but this one hit all my own visions of good educational gear:

1: Its BIG and easy to see, easy to relate to what is in their book

2: It begs you to play with it

Open research from Daniel Mietchen on Vimeo.

From Fora.tv:

A color blind artist invents a camera that converts colors to sounds, and a paralized woman walks for the first time in 20 years with the help of cyber legs.

Mitch Altman's Great Global Hackerspace Challenge, sponsored by Element14 has come to a close a few months ago, and the winners were announced in May. I realize it is mid October, but this site is just getting started.

A while back, I was doing some research for my book about seismometers. As it turns out, the Chinese had developed a clever system to detect earthquakes centuries ago.

If you have come across the RTC8564 Real Time Clock, made by Epson, you know it is a nice alternative to the Dallas DS1307RTC. I have not found the DS clock floating around Akihabara, but Akizuki Denshi carries the Epson part mounted as a through hole module.