This week we are proud to be joined by guest blogger “Best in Latest”. With the recent popular interest in wearable technologies the potential for a dancing citizen science grows. So today she looks at many of these exciting possibilities for us.Wearables for Citizen Science – What Does it Mean to Us? The rise in…
Besides describing some pretty cool science, this article touches on distributed computing as a mode of citizen science but also points to the difficulties of keeping a good citizen science project funded. –LFF Milkyway@Home is in trouble. The citizen science-powered search for our galaxy’s dark matter lost all of its federal funding last…
Dr Geoffrey Belknap explores ways in which members of the public can produce knowledge and participate in research The questions of how, by whom and where science was done in the Victorian period – the century which brought us ‘modern’ science – is never going to offer straightforward answers. Science, and scientific authority was produced and…
This is a reposting of a guest post on VOLCROWE to Crowdsourcing Week submitted by Dr. Eun Young Oh, a senior research associate at the University of Portsmouth Business School. –LFF VOLCROWE (Volunteer and Crowdsourcing Economics) is a research collaboration between the Universities of Portsmouth, Oxford, Manchester and Leeds, funded by the EPSRC and NEMODE…
Let’s deal with the big question first. Has Planet Hunters discovered aliens? The answer is no. But that doesn’t mean that all of the press who have written about us in the last 48 hours, sending a flood of volunteers to the site, are completely misguided. Let me backtrack… A few weeks ago we submitted…
The journal Nature published today an editorial on citizen science, titled ‘Rise of the citizen scientist’. It is very good editorial that addresses, head-on, some of the concerns that are raised about citizen science, but it is also have a problematic ending. On the positive side, the editorial recognises that citizen scientists can do more than just data…
In my last blog post, I introduced Matthew Maury, an American naval officer who began a citizen science project in the mid-1800s that transformed seafaring and drew society closer to science. Now let’s meet his British counterpart, William Whewell, an elite scholar who engaged the public to understand the tides, but in so doing helped…
After the blockbuster movie Jaws, two silly things happened: kids started calling me Hooper (instead of Cooper) and I was afraid even in the deep end of a swimming pool. Logic can battle fear, but not necessarily win. Even though there are hundreds of species of sharks, and about 20 types that ever harm…
We know that grassland habitats are important for the birds we love to watch throughout the summer. Bluebirds and swallows in particular prefer the view from their nest box or tree cavity to be an open, grassy expanse complete with wildflowers and insects. And in order to maintain this picturesque “early-successional” habitat for our avian…
Sevengill Shark “Notorynchus cepedianus” by José María Pérez Nuñez CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Diver-citizen scientists help find out why there has been a recent increase in the number of Sevengill Sharks spotted in the San Diego area The first thing the divers noticed upon reaching the bottom was that there were absolutely no…