Berris Charnley – Citizen Science Today

Similar-Looking Ridges on Mars Have Diverse Origins

JPL/CALTECH — Tue, 07 Feb 2017 20:00:34 +0000

Excerpt: Thin, blade-like walls, some as tall as a 16-story building, dominate a previously undocumented network of intersecting ridges on Mars, found in images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The simplest explanation for these impressive ridges is that lava flowed into pre-existing fractures in the ground and later resisted erosion better than material around them....

Editor’s Choice: Historical citizen science to understand and predict climate-driven trout decline

Tue, 07 Feb 2017 20:00:03 +0000

This article shows how the power of today’s analysis techniques can be applied to data collected in citizen science projects from 150 years ago to show how climate change is impacting biodiversity. Indeed, citizen science is not a new methodology for collecting data! – LFF – Abstract: Historical species records offer an excellent opportunity to...

Crowdsourced science: sociotechnical epistemology in the e-research paradigm

David Watson, Luciano Floridi — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 19:00:01 +0000

Abstract: Recent years have seen a surge in online collaboration between experts and amateurs on scientific research. In this article, we analyse the epistemological implications of these crowdsourced projects, with a focus on Zooniverse, the world’s largest citizen science web portal. We use quantitative methods to evaluate the platform’s success in producing large volumes of...

Editor’s Choice: Citizen Scientists Finding New Reptile Species in Southern California

Jason Goldman — Tue, 05 Apr 2016 17:00:26 +0000

One test of a citizen science project’s success is the ability to produce scientific results – and sometimes that’s a case of connecting the right people. This excellent story involves exactly that – and a gecko. On August 14, 2013, Glen Yoshida snapped a photo of a lizard clinging to a wall on his front...

Opening Access with Citizen Science in a Word

Caren Cooper — Tue, 01 Mar 2016 18:00:19 +0000

When Aaron Swartz committed suicide in 2013, he was facing up to 35 years in prison and a one-million dollar fine for 13 felony counts related to violating copyright laws. Today the NY Southern District Court ordered the shut down of a website (Sci-Hub) run by Alexandra Elbakyan, a neuroscience graduate student from Kazakhstan, for...