RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
| Subject: The rise of the citizen scientists and more benefits from the thawing Arctic Sat May 17, 2014 9:53 pm | |
| Thousands of citizen scientists are answering the call of crowdsourcing sites to do the grunt work, brainwork and even funding of applied scientific research. And, instead of bristling at the prospect of noncredentialed, unschooled wannabes playing in their sandboxes, bona fide scientists are inviting them to jump in, sift through their data and even join in their games, some of which solve significant problems.
Examining data is the way the most unskilled aficionados are advancing science. Through the Zooniverse portal, run by the Citizen Science Alliance, citizen scientists comb through and scrutinise images of the Milky Way to search for stars that could host planet-forming discs, go through antebellum ship logs to recover Arctic weather observations and examine fathoms of ocean to ascertain the size and floating direction of plankton. For more than 1 million citizen scientists logging in, it’s an unskilled, unpaid labor of love.
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/the-rise-of-the-citizen-scientists-20140516-zrcij.html |
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