psc

I found it really interesting he frames privacy, surveillance, and power through the lens of information asymmetries.

Requirements are pretty flexible, but the inspiration is largely iNaturalist, and also this very cool project put together by Google Creative Lab back in 2019 https://patternradio.withgoogle.com/

Best place to learn more is to stop by the community Zulip chat (https://orcasound.zulipchat.com/) and ask questions, it's full of really knowledgeable people. Also you can explore the entire codebase here: https://github.com/orcasound/orcasite

https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/deep-listening/

https://depts.washington.edu/uwb/revolutionizing-marine-cons...

Very cool and very powerful technology, it'll be interesting to see how fiber sensing progresses, especially with how much undersea fiber already exists. For subsea power cables, is there a parallel fiber dedicated just for DAS monitoring? Do these get bundled in with data fiber runs as well? I've been curious how well DAS can work over actively lit / in-service fiber.

https://live.orcasound.net/

These hydrophones are a bit more expensive (~$1k per deployment) but still very accessible compared to how much it usually costs. And the goal is to bring the cost down to the ~$100 range (so $5 is very impressive!):

https://experiment.com/projects/can-low-cost-diy-hydrophones...

All the data is being saved (used for scientific research & ML training), with some of the hydrophones going back to 2017, and yes it's quite difficult to listen to and review so much audio. Better tools like the hydrophone explorer UI are much needed (been working on something similar).

One of the things that's surprised me the most is how difficult to keep hydrophones up and running. I can sympathize with both the technical and social challenges—underwater is not a friendly environment for electronics, and it can be difficult to get permission to deploy hydrophones. But it's incredibly rewarding when it works and you capture some cool sounds.

For anyone interested, all the code is open source and acoustic data is freely available:

Code: https://github.com/orcasound/

Data: https://registry.opendata.aws/orcasound/

Community: https://orcasound.zulipchat.com/

> When General Magic finally shipped in 1994 — under the threat of Apple’s Newton — they hadn’t made the Pocket Crystal that Porat first dreamed of in 1989. Instead, they released something they called the Sony Magic Link. It weighed 1.5 lbs (0.68 kg) and was priced at US$800 (US$1560 in 2022 dollars). It offered futuristic features like a touchscreen, downloadable apps and animated emojis — the first of its kind. Fadell thought it would be revolutionary — people could now carry a personal computer with them wherever they went. But nobody bought it. In the end only three to four thousand Magic Link devices were sold, and mostly to family and friends.

There's a documentary too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTdyb-RWNKo

We're building open source tools to listen underwater, focused on monitoring endangered orcas (killer whales) along the west coast of North America. We operate a network of hydrophones that anyone can listen to live (https://live.orcasound.net/). We have a community of over 6,000 citizen scientists who use our tools to help us detect orcas & other marine life. Short-term our goal is to help conservation, long term we want to contribute to scientific research (orca behavior & communication).

It's an incredibly broad project that ranges from:

- hardware (building hydrophones & deploying electronics underwater)

- embedded systems / IoT (capturing & streaming data from our locations)

- live streaming & audio processing

- machine learning & data science (our dataset is nearly 10tb, all open data)

- mapping & GIS

- full-stack web

- design, UX, UI

Tech stack: Python, Elixir, Javascript/Typescript, React, C#, PostgreSQL

We need so many things that there's almost certainly something you can contribute to, regardless of skill level.

If you're interested, come say hi in our community chat on Zulip! https://orcasound.zulipchat.com/