The Flint water crisis has caused all sorts of reflections on citizen science practice; this blog, from Scientific American, examines the broad range of science communication that attempts to make dialogue between public and (professional) scientists a two-way street. –Chris Comedian Lily Tomlin once asked, “Why is it when we talk to God we’re said…
You hear variations of the same concern over and over: “can you please add a way to skip images?” “I wish I had a way to tell you that I’m really unsure on some pictures.” “Some of these are so hard. I’m worried that I’m going to mess up your data!” If you run an…
Ninety-three percent of all marine plastics are smaller than a grain of rice (Eriksen et al 2014). This summer I made a research voyage through one of the world’s five gyres, huge slow-moving currents in the middle each of the world’s five oceans that tend to accumulate floating debris, including plastics. When our trawls pulled up…
Their young peers have been poisoned for months by the presence of toxic lead in the tap water. Now the members of a Brownie Girl Scouts troop from a nearby town have written letters to Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, expressing their anger and concern over the situation and demanding that the water crisis in Flint…
I was really surprised the first time someone asked — I think it was in a review of a proposal — about whether it was ethical to do citizen science. “Isn’t this exploitation?” was how the concern was phrased. Getting unpaid people to do what was previously paid work might seem problematic. As citizen science…
An article published in PLOS One tracking academic papers mentioning ‘citizen science’ caused a lot of discussion in the last month. My take is here, but Caren Cooper’s blog does a much better job of exploring the issues. –CJL Citizen science is skyrocketing in popularity. Not just among participants (of which there are millions), but…
Today is an important day for participation and innovation in the federal government. The White House officially launched the Federal Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Toolkit, a tool that provides information and resources to help federal agencies use the power of public participation to help solve scientific and societal problems. The launch of this toolkit solidifies the White…
The arrival of ‘ash dieback’ in 2012, a fatal disease that aggressively infects trees, in the UK was big news, and generated a range of citizen science responses. This thoughtful article, from Judith Tsouvalis at the University of Nottingham, looks at the sometimes awkward relationship of such programs with language used by those concentrating on…
Crowdsourcing. We talk about it. We educate people how to use it. But it is also an overused and underappreciated word, according to Forbes. Its influence is now spawning to government affairs thanks to the Internet. In 2013, President Obama called out to the federal agencies to use Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing to tap the wisdom of…
If you’ve lived in a city, you’ve probably encountered something like New York City’s Tenth Avenue after a rainstorm: a place that was so windy, the ground is littered with broken umbrellas. Why don’t we use that impressive windpower? The answer lies partially in technology–the turbines able to take shifting, multidirectional urban winds were only…