Group items tagged

part of the bbc's citizen sciene thingy 'so you want to be a scientist. it's like a game show for science experiments if you're not familiar. the bookmark will take you to the online participation part of one of the experiments selected. here's the main page. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/sywtbas/ "This experiment is being run by citizen scientist Izzy Thomlinson for BBC Radio 4's So You Want To Be A Scientist?. It aims to find out what you think about unpleasant sounds. Please read the following statement and click Take Part Now! if you agree to participate."

remember my proposal on citizen scientists .... :-)

The partnership brings together leading IT providers and three of Europe's leading research centres, CERN, EMBL and ESA in order to provide computing capacity and services that elastically meet big science's growing demand for computing power.

Helix Nebula provides an unprecedented opportunity for the global cloud services industry to work closely on the Large Hadron Collider through the large-scale, international ATLAS experiment, as well as with the molecular biology and earth observation. The three flagship use cases will be used to validate the approach and to enable a cost-benefit analysis. Helix Nebula will lead these communities through a two year pilot-phase, during which procurement processes and governance issues for the public/private partnership will be addressed.

This game-changing strategy will boost scientific innovation and bring new discoveries through novel services and products. At the same time, Helix Nebula will ensure valuable scientific data is protected by a secure data layer that is interoperable across all member states. In addition, the pan-European partnership fits in with the Digital Agenda of the European Commission and its strategy for cloud computing on the continent. It will ensure that services comply with Europe's stringent privacy and security regulations and satisfy the many requirements of policy makers, standards bodies, scientific and research communities, industrial suppliers and SMEs.

Initially based on the needs of European big-science, Helix Nebula ultimately paves the way for a Cloud Computing platform that offers a unique resource to governments, businesses and citizens.

"Helix Nebula will lead these communities through a two year pilot-phase, during which procurement processes and governance issues for the public/private partnership will be addressed." And here I was thinking cloud computing was old news 3 years ago :)

Nice initiative, isn't it?

some citizen science added to this would make it even better ... as it is it's rather, boh ...

Well, true - making data public is one thing, and making others to work through them for you is another... I love the new term "citizen science" though (and an explanation on the Wikipedia page why they had to invent a new one because "crowdsourcing" is soooooo - politically - wrong).

One more nice citizen scientist example as I try to find for space since some time. Any good ideas this mit inspire you to?

why don't you programme one and get rich?

Would love to but this requires *TIME* :-( Automatic image-based mushroom recognition... perhaps could do as a FP7 study... it may save lives actually!

NASA Releases Tool Enabling Citizen Scientists to Examine Asteroid Vesta Vesta Trek is a free, web-based application that provides detailed visualizations of Vesta, one of the largest asteroids in our solar system. NASA's Dawn spacecraft studied Vesta from July 2011 to September 2012. Data gathered from multiple instruments aboard Dawn have been compiled into Vesta Trek's user-friendly set of tools, enabling citizen scientists and students to study the asteroid's features. The application includes: -- Interactive maps with the ability to overlay a growing range of data sets including topography, mineralogy, abundance of elements and geology, as well as analysis tools for measuring the diameters, heights and depths of surface features and more. -- 3-D printer-exportable topography so users can print physical models of Vesta's surface. -- Standard keyboard gaming controls to manoever a first-person visualization of "flying" across the surface of the asteroid. "There's nothing like seeing something with your own eyes, but these types of detailed data-visualizations are the next best thing," said Kristen Erickson, Director, Science Engagement and Partnerships at NASA Headquarters in Washington DC.

some of the quotes in there are a bit limit ... :-)

I would well imagine a team at an other space institution, with their own diigo, commenting on that news ... ;p Interesting trend nonetheless. At the NASA Space Apps Challenge, few teams proposed a similar G&C application but for the rover Curiosity... this is certainly a good approach for citizen science.

One more reason why we should be much more open about all these EO data we have .... The two citizen scientists, Kian Jek and Robert Gagliano, are listed as authors on the scientific paper recently published. I love this: the digital nature of these data make it far, far easier to analyze the science than it was in the past, and also easier to get the data out to people. Because of this, we have an explosive growth in these kinds of projects. Planet Hunters is great, but then so is Galaxy Zoo, Moon Mappers, Ice Hunters, and so many others. You can find several of these collected at the CosmoQuest website.

Wiktor is also collecting these science games in the ACT-wiki. You should have a look at: http://sophia.estec.esa.int/actwiki/index.php/On-line_Games_4_Science

During one of these meetings I asked directly whether the government would move to close down the Guardian's reporting through a legal route - by going to court to force the surrender of the material on which we were working. The official confirmed that, in the absence of handover or destruction, this was indeed the government's intention. Prior restraint, near impossible in the US, was now explicitly and imminently on the table in the UK. But my experience over WikiLeaks - the thumb drive and the first amendment - had already prepared me for this moment. I explained to the man from Whitehall about the nature of international collaborations and the way in which, these days, media organisations could take advantage of the most permissive legal environments. Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him that Greenwald lived in Brazil?

The man was unmoved. And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history occurred - with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. "We can call off the black helicopters," joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.

Whitehall was satisfied, but it felt like a peculiarly pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age. We will continue to do patient, painstaking reporting on the Snowden documents, we just won't do it in London. The seizure of Miranda's laptop, phones, hard drives and camera will similarly have no effect on Greenwald's work.

The state that is building such a formidable apparatus of surveillance will do its best to prevent journalists from reporting on it. Most journalists can see that. But I wonder how many have truly understood

Sarah Harrison is a lawyer that has been staying with Snowden in Hong Kong and Moscow. She is a UK citizen and her family is there. After the miranda case where the boyfriend of the reporter was detained at the airport, can Sarah return safely home? Will her family be pressured by the secret service? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-23759834

Leopold - this reminded me your lunch the other day. some interesting science too :)

so what can we do in this area? how can "we use citizen scientists for space"?

this is what I call a nice example of crowdsourcing or citizen scientists .... (remember my idea in the ideastorm ?? :-)

"Just as Pierre de Fermat scribbled his famous last theorem in the margins, professional scientists, academics and citizen scientists can annotate equations, figures and ideas and also write in the margins." Interesting way of analyzing research in the 21st century

serious gaming came back!