I got surprised to see this post, which was about smartphones potential for lake ice thickness measurement, has been circulated a lot and gained many views from different countries around the world. However, talking about this ideas through one-to-one discussions with my colleagues and friends, a question cropped up, which made me to write this post: “How would we encourage non-specialist individuals to dedicate their phones, even for a short period of time they’re spending over lake ice, for our GNSS-Reflectometry goal regarding lake ice thickness measurement?”
I have heard a lot from people inside academia saying that environmental issues are somehow apart from financial affairs. In their point of view, when we get through environmental issues/crises, it doesn’t make sense if one talks about costs and economic feasibility, but instead, people should sincerely dedicate what they have, or even don’t, to tackle the issues. Dead Wrong! A commercialized business plan should be, I believe, the first step for turning any research\academic solutions into a practical subject.
I came up with this challenge too, when I was thinking about the idea I proposed in the previous post. In our scenario, individuals go over lake ice covers to spend their leisure time or even to do their routine jobs by, for instance, ice fishing. Now, we’d like to ask them to put their smartphones on the ice surface in a certain short distance off themselves and leave their smartphones there for couple of hours to measure the ice thickness by running our proposed app. How would we make it beneficial for them?
I know that education is a very important and effective way to raise public awareness about harms caused by the downward trends of lake ice duration, which are obviously shown by multiple environmental studies. But I believe that public awareness could not be enough to encourage individuals to devote their smartphones for this purpose; a stronger inspiration would be required.
Cryptocurrencies have already become a very hot topic in financial affairs, and a fast-growing number of businesses and concepts are being defined or re-developed using blockchain technologies. Aside from businesses, scientific activities have also shown potentials to be benefited and funded by endowments placed on the blockchain. Moreover, cryptocurrencies have suggested an opportunity to better protect the integrity and provenance of scientific data. In addition, ENV Finance has introduced itself as a cryptocurrency project aiming to bring environment and finance together; you can read about their project here. Seemingly, we’re not the pioneers of the “cryptoscience” (such an odd word), but we have some examples to refer.
As a result, people who are helping the environment by their smartphones equipped with a GNSS-R app may be awarded by tokens assigned by sponsors. Furthermore, a very recent cryptocurrency has been developed by a group of Stanford’s scientists enabling smartphones to mine blocks. This cryptocurrency, which is called Pi Network, may give us hints on how to encourage smartphone users to measure ice thickness and mine coins at the same time.
I am not a blockchain specialist; but even if I were, any comments, guides, and critiques would still be welcome.
GPSCAT 