Thanks to technological advances in sensing technologies our urban environment is equipped with tiny but powerful sensors that generate a vast amount of data. This data is being used by companies, governments, and research institutions to monitor, analyze, and optimize our everyday life. Following the OpenData movement, this data is often available for the broader…
The Practical Farmers of Iowa have released their latest study on the effects of apple cider vinegar supplementation in feeder pigs. Apple cider vinegar is held to being a health tonic that promotes beneficial gut bacteria, improves digestion of feedstuffs, enhances performance, and helps decrease parasite load. PFI cooperator, Tom Frantzen, supplemented three groups of…
I was on a call with Teresa Murphy-Skorzova, Community Growth Manager for OpenSignal, an app that uses crowd-sourcing to aggregate cell phone signals and WiFi strength data throughout the world. Teresa began to explain how OpenSignal maps signal strength and how this process contrasts the way cell phone networks map it. “We aren’t following a…
This blog is a summary of a very dynamic workshop that took place at the end of the NZ Ecological Society Conference last week in Christchurch. Amazingly, around 30 scientists, students, academics, teachers, consultants and project coordinators summoned their remaining energy to discuss some key citizen science topics. Earlier in the year, a call was…
I thought this post significant as I personally found the idea of discovering multiple new species – even if they are flies – in a heavily urbanized area such as Los Angeles to be astonishing. – LFF The latest buzz in the world of newly discovered insects was not in a distant jungle far away but…
The community protocol meeting for the Ashaninka Land Monitoring Project happened on September 5, in Apiwtxa village, with the participation of the community, of the anthropologist Carolina Comandulli representing the Extreme Citizen Science (ExCiteS) research group, and of the partner organization Comissão Pró-Índio do Acre (CPI-AC). In the morning, the anthropologist presented to everyone what…
Mapping for Change, the social enterprise that I co-founded, has been assisting community groups to run air quality studies for the past 5 years. During this period we have worked in 30 communities across London, carrying out studies with different tools – from collecting leaves, to examining lichens, to using diffusion tubes. We have also followed…
In the previous post, I described the creation of the Zooniverse Project Success Matrix from Cox et al. (2015). In essence, we examined 17 (well, 18, but more on that below) Zooniverse projects, and for each of them combined 12 quantitative measures of performance into one plot of Public Engagement versus Contribution to Science: Public Engagement…
The true potential of citizen science comes through in this article – the power to change the world when combining “traditional” scientific methods with data generated through citizen science. This is a call to arm the farmers of Africa with a citizen science network that would help them learn about and maintain the health of soils. – LFF…
If you enjoy turkey this Thanksgiving, take a moment to think not about the bird on your plate but rather the birds outside your home. With increasing urbanization taking away more natural habitat, local wildlife is having difficulty finding food. Bird feeders have become a popular way for homeowners to help local wildlife and contribute to…