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Link to Piled Higher and Deeper

Foldit was founded by the University of Washington Center for Game Science in collaboration with the Baker lab. In the last decade, scientists repeatedly failed to find a solution to the structure of a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus. The scientists have decided to collect a group of gamers and challenged them to produce an accurate model of the enzyme: users are tasked with folding known proteins and are scored on how well they manage to accomplish this task while taking into consideration the physical properties of the molecule. In less then ten days, the gamers came up with the desired solution.

We introduce Peekaboom, an entertaining web-based game that can help computers locate objects in images. People play the game because of its entertainment value, and as a side effect of them playing, we collect valuable image metadata, such as which pixels belong to which object in the image. The collected data could be applied towards constructing more accurate computer vision algorithms, which require massive amounts of training and testing data not currently available. Peekaboom has been played by thousands of people, some of whom have spent over 12 hours a day playing, and thus far has generated millions of data points. In addition to its purely utilitarian aspect, Peekaboom is an example of a new, emerging class of games, which not only bring people together for leisure purposes, but also exist to improve artificial intelligence. Such games appeal to a general audience, while providing answers to problems that computers cannot yet solve.

Monday, January 23, 2012 Computer Games for CrowdsourcingScientific Research Do you like computer games?If yes, here you have two options to play and at the same timecontribute to genetic and biotechnology research: phylo It looks like a game, but it is a tool to improve multiple sequencealignments of DNA regions that may be linked to various geneticdisorders. Sequence alignment is a way of identifying regions of similarity that may be consequence of functional, structural orevolutionary relationship between the sequences. This alignment isusually done with the aid of computer algorithms, however they do notguarantee a global optimization as it will take a prohibitively expensivecomputational power to achieve it.

When institutional repositories were introduced, many libraries embraced them as a means to support and further the cause of open access and the dissemination of scholarly communication. As has been widely reported, however, faculty did not embrace the concept, and repositories generally have not filled up as envisioned.

Seeking proposals on how to implement the Open Source paradigm of the IT industry in the area of Drug Discovery

Craig Montuori, Caltech class of 2008, knows he should devote every waking moment to the startup he cofounded last year. Yet he compulsively spends two or three hours a day on Quora, a question-and-answer website he describes as "very addictive." Michael Wolfe, an entrepreneur deep into his fourth startup, also can't help himself.

Definitive answers to the frequently-asked questions of /r/askscience. If you post, please try to use this format: Question in the title TLDR answer Link to detailed answer (on reddit or otherwise) Post sightings of the question seen on reddit.

Since Google Earth hit the Web in 2005, besides instantly turning all office desk globes into decorative accessories, it has opened the world up to global exploration at the click of a mouse. But it's not just a neat toy; some extraordinary things have been discovered with its one-click access to satellite imagery.

reddit: the front page of the internet

Jimmy Wales, the iconoclastic founder of Wikipedia, made a troubling announcement at the seventh annual Wikipedia conference: Nobody wants to edit Wikipedia anymore. Is Wikipedia going to shrivel up and fade away? Wales told the AP that the number of Wikipedia editors is slowly dwindling.

Goals of the ShanghAI Lectures The ShanghAI Lectures project aims at making education and knowledge on cutting-edge scientific topics accessible to everyone exploring novel methods of knowledge transfer building a sustainable community of students and researchers in the area of Embodied Intelligence overcoming the complexity of a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary learning context bringing global teaching to a new level These lectures about Natural and Artificial Intelligence are held via videoconference at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, the University of Salford/MediaCityUK in the United Kingdom, Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, and about 12 other universities around the globe. Students from the participating universities work together on the exercises, using a powerful robotics simulator software.

Help scientists recover worldwide weather observations made by Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I. These transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and improve a database of weather extremes. Historians will use your work to track past ship movements and the stories of the people on board.

Help solar scientists spot explosions on the Sun and track them across space to Earth. Your work will give astronauts an early warning if dangerous solar radiation is headed their way. And you could make a new scientific discovery.

You can help marine researchers understand what whales are saying. Listen to the large sound and find the small one that matches it best. Click 'Help' below for an interactive guide.

LHC@home is a platform for volunteers to help physicists develop and exploit particle accelerators like CERN's Large Hadron Collider, and to compare theory with experiment in the search for new fundamental particles. By contributing spare processing capacity on their home and laptop computers, volunteers may run simulations of beam dynamics and particle collisions in the LHC's giant detectors

Helping scientists in developing countries to access the power of internet-based volunteer computing and volunteer thinking.

The GalaxyZoo project invites collaborators to take part in an initiative to classify galaxies. By tapping the available time from thousands of gamers and avoiding the expense of labor-intensive non-specialty research, highly qualified scientists are able to focus on specialty tasks and tremendous efficiencies are achieved in terms of speed, results, and reduced research costs.