Category:Science

Purpose

The Science Laboratory Committee's responsibilities are to:

• Promote and support the sciences at DMS
• Maintain the order, organization, safety, cleanliness, and utility of the Science Lab area.
• Organizationally and administratively support science related classes and SIG's
• To efficiently onboard new members into science committee projects by providing literature and educational resources.

Goals

Science Laboratory Committee exists to educate members in scientific, engineering, analytical, and technical subjects not covered by other committees or groups at Dallas Makerspace. It facilitates this goal through its children Special Interest Groups (SIGs) by providing resources and equipment for SIG projects and areas of study. The SIG's consist of Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Scientific Computing.

A separate but equally important goal is to expand the socially accepted definition of what it means to do science and be a scientist. Those conceptual boundaries were mostly formed by a minority of people from well-off families and prestigious institutions who wanted prestige for themselves at the exclusion of people who they personally viewed as inferior. While academic scientists and R&D research scientists in private industry certainly play an important role in our society, it is important to remember that participation in these communities is gate-kept by economic and social factors that have little to do with the inherent capabilities of a science enthusiast. Science enthusiasts often want to do science, but only have the tools or skills to consume science in the form of online media. Our goal is to make doing science accessible to the common person.

Scientific Training and Education

Science is hard. Every non-trivial science is an interdisciplinary one. Experimental design itself requires statistical, technical, domain, and engineering expertise. Modern science is highly interdisciplinary, which means that collaboration is a necessity.

This fact can make science seem particularly inaccessible and overwhelming to the uninitiated (and, let's be honest, the initiated too), but accessibility is fundamentally a design choice. Scientists typically write articles so that they can be consumed by other experienced scientists, but scientific communication has greatly diversified in recent years. Even the most complicated scientific fields can be made accessible to those who have a strong desire to learn if they have access to both the educational resources and an informed community.

We hope to provide an educational road-map for eager new members who want to do science. While it would be impossible to make a road-map for all possible sciences, it is possible to create a road-map that gives you a solid foundation to break into whatever science you take an interest in. There are many subjects that are almost universally applied in scientific research, so we will start with those. We will assume you have at least a high school level mathematics education, but if not then we recommend that you go through the algebra and geometry courses on https://www.khanacademy.org/.

Some of the recommended books are available in our small science library (which is really just a line of books in the corner of the lab), but you are not allowed to take them off-site or make marks in them. Some of them are loaned to the science laboratory by members.

Generals

Linear Algebra

Reason

Linear Algebra is fundamentally the study of finite-dimensional vector spaces and their transformations, but that definition is probably unhelpful for you at this point. More practically, linear algebra is about the study of matrices, which are 2-dimensional arrays of numbers.

We refer to the shape of a matrix using the convention Num_Row x Num_Column, so we would call the example above a 2x3 matrix. The individual entries in the matrix are numbers we call scalars in this context. You did algebra with scalars in high school. Linear algebra extends your algebra toolkit to algebra with matrices. Understanding how to work with matrices both intuitively and computationally is important because most of the data we will encounter in scientific computing or data analysis are either arranged in matrices or in tensors (a generalization of matrices that allows the arrays to have more than 2-dimensions, but you don't need to worry about that right now). You can't do science if you can't work with fundamental data representations, so Linear Algebra is probably the best place to start your scientific journey.

Learning Recommendations

We recommend that new members to science go through the entire Mike X Cohen Linear Algebra book available at amazon. This book is especially useful for adults who haven't been in school for a long time and will therefore require a soft introduction to this area of math. A copy of this book is often available in the science library.

The following supplementary pages and courses are also great educational resources for linear algebra that will help you master the material

1. https://d2l.ai/chapter_preliminaries/linear-algebra.html - Dive Into Deep Learning's Linear Algebra Section
2. https://github.com/fastai/numerical-linear-algebra/blob/master/README.md - Computational Linear Algebra Course
3. The highly celebrated 3Blue1Brown YouTube series Essence of Linear Algebra

Current Research Interests and Projects (As Of 2/20/2023)

• Biology
  • Tissue Culture
• Biomedical
• Chemistry
  • Biochemistry
• Physics
  • Nuclear Fusion
• Astronomy
  • Exotransportation
• Aerospace
• Rocket SIG
• Weather
• Scientific Computing
  • Numerical Linear Algebra
  • Deep Learning
  • Hardware

Members

• Committee Chair: Kobin Caddick the Wise
• Committee Vice-Chair: Sam Frondorf
• Lab Manager: Whoever we can trick into doing it
• Purchasing Officer: Kobin Caddick
• Josh Melnick
• Ken Purcell (@Lampy)
• Jerry Ethridge (@jerryet)
• Daryl Barth
• Christopher Williams
• Rob Virkus
• Russell Crow (@Russell_Crow) - the gladiator and engineer
• Yury Kovalenok the Generalist
• Nathan Sanders
• Mike Zetts
• Nicolas Lopez

Rules

• Leadership should include a detailed financial report with every formal meeting.

• Proper chain of appeal for issues within the committee. (Serious issues should be taken directly to the DMS Board or proper authorities).

       a.	It should first be discussed privately with the most appropriate appointee or project lead.
       b.	If the issue is not resolved, it should be escalated to the committee chair and discussed privately.
       c.	If it is still not resolved, it should be brought up for discussion at the next regular meeting among committee members in person.
       d.	Final attempt to address the issue should be added to the agenda for the next formal meeting as new business. It should be submitted 1 week prior to the formal meeting.

Meetings

Meetings are posted in advance on the events calendar

Upcoming Committee Meetings

March 19, 2023

From 2023 Feb 19 onwards, minutes have been moved to source.dallasmakerspace.org

Previous Meeting Minutes:

Science Committee Meeting 2023 Jan 15

Science Committee Meeting 2022 Dec 18 (elections)

Science Committee Meeting 2022 Nov 13

Science Committee Meeting 2022 Oct 16

Science Committee Meeting 2022 Sep 18

Science Committee Meeting 2022 Aug 15

Science Committee Meeting 2022 July 17

Science Committee Meeting 2022 June 12 (elections)

Science Committee Meeting 2022 May 15

Science Committee Meeting 2022 April 17

Science Committee Meeting 2022 March 13

Science Committee Meeting 2022 Feb 13

Science Committee Meeting 2022 Jan 16

Science Committee Meeting 2021 Dec 12 (elections)

Science Committee Meeting 2021 Nov 14

Science Committee Meeting 2021 Oct 10

Science Committee Meeting 2021 Sep 12

Science Committee Meeting 2021 Aug 15

Science Committee Meeting 2021 June 13 (elections)

Science Committee Meeting 2021 May 9

Science Committee Meeting 2021 Apr 11

Science Committee Meeting 2021 Mar 14

Science Committee Meeting 2021 Jan 17 (elections)

Science Committee Meeting 2021 Jan 2

Science Committee Meeting 2020 Nov 15

Science Committee Meeting 2020 Oct 18

Science Committee Meeting 2020 Aug 30

Science Committee Meeting 2020 June 26 (elections)

Science Committee Meeting 2019 Dec 01 Science Committee Meeting 2019 July 22 Science Committee Meeting 2019 June 16
Science Committee Meeting 2019 May 19
Science Committee Meeting 20161406
Science Committee Meeting 20162704
Science Committee Meeting 20161904

More

• PROJECTS PAGE
• EQUIPMENT
• LIBRARY PAGE
• PREVIOUS EXPERIMENTS AND NOTES

How To Join

1. Show up any given Sunday at 2:30pm in the Science Laboratory area
2. Send an email to the committee chair: [email protected]
3. Add your name to the "Members" section of this wiki page.

Training (this section to be updated)

1. Currently at this time reach out to the current chair @kobin on talk or come to science committee meeting.

Discussion

Science Committee discussions are held via the forums and Google+:

• Science Talk Forums

All pages related to the Science Committee.