Time to go south.

Today is my last day at the Toolik Field Station. It has definitely been an interesting couple of weeks. I have enough projects to keep me busy for 5 years, let a lone the 1 year of the grant. There's everything from larger-scale novel networking approaches to building Arduino "scientific accessories" for Google Glass. The big lesson to be learned though, is that just about anyone can benefit from a little bit of technology in their workflow....but thinking creatively on how to apply technology is the real challenge. I'm pretty sure my work would have been pretty short here if I would have shown up with only Google Glass and only was interested in applying that specific device to science problems. The same would have been true if I only was here to do AWS work. But, putting the two together, and then throwing in some ideas on using Arduino to augment commodity technology, and a little bit of the national and university scientific landscape helped immensely. The grant is about building a few Google Glass projects, but more importantly it's about figuring out how to help accelerate science with the technology that can be afforded. Sometimes, the biggest most impressive gear isn't really what you need in the field. It is also often cost prohibitive. You might be able to get away with a cheaper grade of say, laser or IR, that will still serve the purpose but not take over your entire budget. Software is also the key to making commodity technology just as good as the proprietary stuff. Proprietary software is still generally stand-alone, and well proprietary, which makes the technology itself less desirable if there is a cheaper, more integratable solution that can still do the job at lesser resolution. This isn't of course the truth for every experiment, but it's definitely a shift in thinking that wasn't present even a few years ago.

Fox - from the Haul Road to Deadhorse, AK

So I have a lot of work ahead of me, but this has definitely been a productive trip. Barring the issues with the video call removal on Google Glass, and a disappointing but expected wireless network performance, things went very well. Hopefully video calling will be back on Glass soon, and the fiber network should be up at the station sometime before summer ends. Oh, and if anyone reading this is interested in doing a little start-up work building tablet / Google Glass accessories for scientific field work, private message me on Google+ or email me.

Caribou crossing the road - Haul Road to Deadhorse, AK