Author: Digital Citizen

GISHWHES Should Award for New Friends and/or Facebook Friends Made from Doing It

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GISHWHES, or The Greatest International Scavenger Hunt The World Has Ever Seen!, is a global community of individuals (94 countries and growing!) that “gather” online once a year, form international teams, and then go out into the real world and create “art” the likes of which the world has never seen.

One of the things that come from this is people reaching out to other people. New friendships, or just Facebook friendships, are born as a result. I think they should award a point for every one new friend made. Cap it at something like 50 and have people document it somehow. It’s not a lot of points, and probably hardly even worth the effort. However, it’s an easy 50 points and the true value lies in reiterating to people that they just made 50 new friends because of the contest!

There might be a Guiness World Record in there somewhere, too, I’d bet, if the documentation is done reasonably well enough. Helps earn and validate the points.

Don’t you think that’s worth the 50 points?

A 3D Printing Contest Suggestion for NASA

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NASA will be sending a 3D printer into space in June 2014 with the fifth SpaceX supply mission for the International Space Station (CNN). You can read all about the why and such in the article linked. What I’d like to propose is a cool and simple little contest prize.

The prize would be that the winner would get to send a 3D printing file of his/her choice to be printed in space, and sent to him/her when it’ll get send back to Earth with the next transport back of astronauts. The winner would then have something that was 3D printed in space! Maybe even the FIRST object 3D printed in space to give it historical significance and value, that is important.

Having the FIRST piece as the prize would definitely up the ante rather than just any piece!

Of course, the object would have to be within some reasonable and practical limit like volume since material, weight and space are precious commodities on the ISS. And one would want to be sure it worked on Earth with a sample printing, though how to compensate for lack of gravity would have to be dealt with by NASA.

As for the contest? Well, let NASA decide that. Maybe it could be a 3D printer object sculpting contest. Maybe it could be a bidding contest for the object chosen by NASA. Or anything else, for that matter. It’s the prize of something printed 3D in space…

So NASA, are you up for it?

Analysis of a Sample Favourite Characters Correlation Survey, Part 1

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A few weeks ago, I shared a fun short survey with regards to people’s favourite fictional characters to see if there were demographic trends. It was for me to learn the capabilities of Google Forms, with a survey that would have some meaning to hopefully generate interest for doing something on a larger scale in the future. Most of those who answered would have been associated with Halifax (Nova Scotia) based Facebook groups of geek/nerd interest like Hal-Con (our local “comic-con”), Anime-at-Large and Jules Verne Phantastical Society (JVPS, steampunk), but they were definitely not the only ones. Thanks to all those who did it, and shared it, including Michael McCluskey (aka Fat Apollo).

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My TREK Fashion

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In Star Trek: Into Darkness, the cadets had grey uniforms like shown below. Continue reading →

Using Google Forms for WordPress Surveys Instead of PollDaddy

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With your WordPress blog, you can have a free embedded polling tool with PollDaddy.com. However, it is terribly limited if you want to use the free version. Recently, I gave Google Forms a try and immediately wondered why anybody would use PollDaddy given what Google Forms can do??? Continue reading →