Tired of getting your hands all greasy when greasing up a baking dish or pan before putting it in the oven? Maybe you want an easier way to butter your toast in the morning? This hack takes an old—and very clean—roll-on deodorant container, some melted butter, and a little patience and gives you an actual roll-on butter pen, perfect for all of your fat-making needs. More »

Most people consider Github just a repository for code and a place where developers can collaborate on projects and visitors can download cool new open-source applications. It's definitely that, but there's much more available to you as a Github user if you know how to take advantage of it. Here's how you can use Github to host your webapp and make it accessible to visitors, as a good-looking website that lists your projects, or even a personal nameplate site you can direct people to. More »

(This article was first published on Simply Statistics, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)

Here are a few ideas that might make for interesting student projects at all levels (from high-school to graduate school). I’d welcome ideas/suggestions/additions to the list as well. All of these ideas depend on free or scraped data, which means that anyone can work on them. I’ve given a ballpark difficulty for each project to give people some idea.

Happy data crunching!

Data Collection/Synthesis

Creating a webpage that explains conceptual statistical issues like randomization, margin of error, overfitting, cross-validation, concepts in data visualization, sampling. The webpage should not use any math at all and should explain the concepts so a general audience could understand. Bonus points if you make short 30 second animated youtube clips that explain the concepts. (Difficulty: Lowish; Effort: Highish)
Building an aggregator for statistics papers across disciplines that can be the central resource for statisticians. Journals ranging from PLoS Genetics to Neuroimage now routinely publish statistical papers. But there is no one central resource that aggregates all the statistics papers published across disciplines. Such a resource would be hugely useful to statisticians. You could build it using blogging software like Wordpress so articles could be tagged/you could put the resource in your RSS feeder. (Difficulty: Lowish; Effort: Mediumish)
Data Analyses

Scrape the LivingSocial/Groupon sites for the daily deals and develop a prediction of how successful the deal will be based on location/price/type of deal. You could use either the RCurl R package or the XML R package to scrape the data. (Difficulty: Mediumish; Effort: Mediumish)
You could use the data from your city (here are a few cities with open data) to: (a) identify the best and worst neighborhoods to live in based on different metrics like how many parks are within walking distance, crime statistics, etc. (b) identify concrete measures your city could take to improve different quality of life metrics like those described above - say where should the city put a park, or (c) see if you can predict when/where crimes will occur (like these guys did). (Difficulty: Mediumish; Effort: Highish)
Download data on state of the union speeches from here and use the tm package in R to analyze the patterns of word use over time (Difficulty: Lowish; Effort: Lowish)
Use this data set from Donors Choose to determine the characteristics that make the funding of projects more likely. You could send your results to the Donors Choose folks to help them improve the funding rate for their projects. (Difficulty: Mediumish; Effort: Mediumish) 
Which basketball player would you want on your team? Here is a really simple analysis done by Rafa. But it doesn’t take into account things like defense. If you want to take on this project, you should take a look at this Denis Rodman analysis which is the gold standard. (Difficulty: Mediumish; Effort: Highish).
Data visualization

Creating an R package that wraps the svgAnnotation package. This package can be used to create dynamic graphics in R, but is still a bit too flexible for most people to use. Writing some wrapper functions that simplify the interface would be potentially high impact. Maybe something like svgPlot() to create simple, dynamic graphics with only a few options (Difficulty: Mediumish; Effort: Mediumish). 
The same as project 1 but for D3.js. The impact could potentially be a bit higher, since the graphics are a bit more professional, but the level of difficulty and effort would also both be higher. (Difficulty: Highish; Effort: Highish)

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While you're certainly not limited to IKEA, they're the best source for some seriously hack-able furniture. If you're looking for some fun projects this weekend, grab and IKEA catalog and check out these awesome IKEA hacks. More »

The iPad isn't locked to one carrier, but its MicroSIM card format makes it difficult to use other data plans, whether in the U.S. or overseas. A straight edge and some scissors are all you need to make a full-size SIM fit. More »

For all the magic that Apple promised an iPad box would contain, they definitely left out one thing: a stand. Whether you've got five bucks or some ingenuity and free time, here are seven cheap or free iPad stands. More »

Whether you've got an an iPad, a different snazzy tablet, an Android phone, or some other touchscreen device, sometimes your fingertip isn't the ideal input device. With a few common materials, you can make an effective and inexpensive stylus for your touchscreen. More »

Not too long ago, David Findlay built a device capable of communicating with just about any model of iPod via the dock connector using an Arduino Nano, PodGizmo breakout board, an old USB iPod connector, and a momentary switch. While it may not sound like a big deal, there is more to it than one might think: namely programming a device (in this case the Arduino Nano) to be able to receive, interpret, and respond to messages sent from an iPod. 
This means teaching it to speak Apple Accessory Protocol and, although proprietary in nature, it has been fairly well documented around the Internet. Finland slung some code so that his iPod touch was hooked up to one of the famous Staples Easy buttons in his car. Now he could easily play and pause his iPod touch without having to fiddle with the on-screen controls.

Fast-forward several months and  Findlay had all but forgotten about the project when he was asked by the folks that run Make magazine to talk about it. In particular, they wanted him to talk about the library he created for communicating with Apple’s portable audio players. He said yes, and decided to dive back into the project and attempt to add additional functionality to the project. 
Finland's first go around only involved tackling the the Simple Remote portion of the Apple Remote Protocol, which handles things like mute, next playlist, skip, and turning the device on and off. With newfound interest, however, he has now tackled the Advanced Remote portion, which opens up a bevy of new functionality, including getting names of songs, albums, artists, and track time; toggling shuffle and repeat mode; and all the other neat functionality that iPods have.

This newly released library of code will surely appeal to the do-it-yourself hackers who love tinkering, soldering, and programming. Someone could theoretically even build his or her own iPod speaker solution with a plethora of different options and feedback. The more daring could hard-wire a solution to a car’s in-wheel audio controls. Personally, I envision some sort of bicycle solution that docks the iPod on the handlebars but allows riders to control the device without taking their hands off the handlebars. An even more enterprising individual could rig something like this up to a sudden motion sensor so that when someone enters a room, the iPod begins to play.



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