Citizen Science: Feed Your Curiosity
By David Pescovitz (from Boing Boing) on May 11, 2011
In 1900, the National Audubon Society invited amateur birdwatchers to count the birds they saw on Christmas. Still an annual event, the Christmas Bird Count, a census of birds in the Western Hemisphere, is probably the longest-running large-scale citizen science experiment in history. The phrase "citizen science" is used to describe projects in which individuals volunteer their minds, or as is often the case these days, their microprocessors, to tackle big scientific challenges. Here are a few citizen science projects online that aren't just opportunities to contribute to the greater good of scientific research. They're also surefire ways to spark your sense of wonder in your world:
Open science pioneer Ariel Waldman created this clearinghouse for space geeks who want to participate in offworld exploration but may not have a science background and probably can't afford a ticket to orbit. It's a terrific portal to a variety of space-related projects inviting public participation, from analyzing moon crater images to developing open source hardware.
San Francisco's Save the Redwoods League just launched a mobile app to crowdsource photos of individual trees and their locations. Biologists will use the images to track the effect of climate change on our forests.
Computers have failed at classifying the hundreds of thousands of galaxies imaged by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope archive. Turns out, people are pretty good at it though. Galaxy Zoo asks you to look at the beautiful galactic images and classify them according to their shape.
First launched as a student project, Project Noah is a smartphone tool for snapping photos of flora and fauna and uploading them to a central database. In return, you'll get an ID of the organism often within 24 hours and the joy of having contributed to one of many field missions led by scientists around the world. "I'm trying to bring back that wonderment; I'm trying to reignite that curiosity for the natural world that we had when we were younger," co-founder Yasser Ansari has said.What are the big scientific questions you think could be answered through citizen science? ==================================================================
As co-editor of Boing Boing, David Pescovitz is a collector of online anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities. He is also a research director at Institute for the Future.
Comments