This article – in the Royal Astronomical Society’s Astronomy and Geophysics journal – is a wonderful crossover between two different Zooniverse projects. Ships logs included in the Old Weather project fed the curiosity of Solar Storm Watch volunteer Jules Wilkinson, who wrote up the aurora logs of the USS Jeannette Abstract: Julia Wilkinson and a…
By now the story has become something of a local legend. It goes something like this: Brian Brown, entomology curator at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, bet a museum donor that he could find a new species, entirely unknown to science, just about anywhere. It sounds like an audacious claim until you realize…
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…
Abstract: Kinsey Reporter is a global mobile app to share, explore, and visualize anonymous data about sex. Reports are submitted via smartphone, then visualized on a website or downloaded for offline analysis. In this paper we present the major features of the Kinsey Reporter citizen science platform designed to preserve the anonymity of its contributors,…
Forget about selfies. In California, residents are using smartphones and drones to document the coastline’s changing face. Starting this month, The Nature Conservancy is asking tech junkies to capture the flooding and coastal erosion that come with El Nino, a weather pattern that’s bringing California its wettest winter in years — and all in the…
Early in 2015, a group calling itself the Nappy Science Gang hit the parenting scene in the U.K. It was made up of moms and dads who used cloth nappies – or diapers – with their kids, and wanted to know the best ways to keep them clean and safe. The Nappy Science Gang is…
It’s the end of the day, you’ve worked hard, and now you’re home and it’s time to relax. So you open up your laptop and settle in to transcribe some bee specimen labels. Or the packing list of a space shuttle. Or the field notes of a naturalist tromping through early 19th century Ireland. It…
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…
“It appears the world-changing event didn’t change anything, and it’s disappointing,”said Pieter Franken, a researcher at Keio University in Japan (Wide Project), the MIT Media Lab (Civic Media Centre), and co-founder of Safecast, a citizen-science network dedicated to the measurement and distribution of accurate levels of radiation around the world, especially in Fukushima. “There was…
This paper is just one example showcasing the great strides that have been taken in the arena of “Citizen Historians” as more and more archives are opened up for transcription and metadata tagging by volunteers. –LFF Abstract: Operation War Diary, launched in 2014, is a crowdsourcing project in which ‘Citizen Historians’ tag First World War British Army…