Everyone knows there are lots of species yet to be discovered in rainforests and remote parts of the world. But hundreds are being discovered every year in Europe too - most of them by amateurs.BBC News.
It’s our pleasure to invite you to join the Citizen Science Open Technical Workshop to be held Wednesday 30th January 16:00 CET virtually using Google Hangout. You can attend the meeting and send all your comments in this Youtube channel or this twitter account.The workshop is organized by the Open Knowledge Foundation.
The interim findings of a massive five-year citizen science project, involving more than 25,000 surveys and 500,000 people, have been published. The Open Air Laboratories (Opal) project was designed to get people outdoors and provide a chance to get involved in scientific research.
At the moment I am working on a research design that helps me investigating parameters for participation in open science. The design is, to be honest, not cut in stone yet and my methodological ideas change every now and then. Nonetheless, I documented my overall ideas for a research design in an open 1.5 pages document, accessible via Google Docs (this link). If you have a few minutes free on your hand and interest in the topic, I invite you to scim through the document and leave comments if you have any good thoughts, ideas, criticism and suggestions.
DISCOVER Magazine is partnering with Instructables and SciStarter, an online citizen science community, to solve real problems facing researchers. The Citizen Science Contest is your opportunity to help millions of regular people contribute to scientific discovery. Prizes include a Celestron telescope, DISCOVER subscriptions, and time-lapse cameras! But hurry, the deadline is January 21, 2013.
In a recent post, Caren Cooper focused on scientist-driven citizen science. This perspective offers a framework for many citizen science projects. Citizens participate in established research agendas to assist scientists collect, aggregate, and/or analyze large data sets. But citizen science can also be participant-driven.
PLOS Blogs.
“When you think of citizen science, what do you think of? I know in my case, I think of people out (maybe with their kids) measuring snowfall, finding birds, or listening at night to hear different kind of insects in various environments.
And yes, that is all definitely citizen science. But citizen science can be, and should be, much more than that.”
Scientific American Blogs.
Millions of people around the world come home to four legs and a wagging tail, and many spend some of their time together playing. While dog-dog play has been studied extensively, dog-person play, which takes on a different form and appears to have different rules, has not attracted nearly as much scholarly attention. At the Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab in NYC, we are investigating the different ways people and dogs play together and the behaviors they use. And, we need your help (well, you and your dog’s help).
Scientific American Guest Blog.
Citizen science is a method of conducting scientific research that uses people withoutformal scientific education or training to gather the data needed for the experiment. In some cases, the data has already been collected and volunteers help mark up it up to make it usable by scientists. This technique helps gather and/or process large amounts of data that would be impossible for one scientist, or even a team of scientists, to gather and process on their own. This is important because large data sets reveal trends that would be impossible to see on a smaller scale. Many citizen science projects focus on some type of environmental monitoring, however subjects can range greatly.
by Allison Scripa.
The conservation status of the whale shark, Rhincodon typus, remains uncertain. Throughout their range, whale sharks are a focus for wildlife tourism and many identification photographs taken by tourists have become available online, presenting a potentially valuable source of data for monitoring populations using mark–recapture techniques. However, the suitability of these photographs for mark–recapture models has yet to be investigated.
A review of more than 230 “citizen science” projects says the involvement of volunteers offers “high value to research, policy and practice”.
The review reached a number of conclusions about the value of data collected by volunteers:
- The development of technologies was “revolutionising citizen science”, for example through online recording and smartphone apps;
- Data quality could be excellent, but was not fully recognised by all researchers or policymakers;
- It is a cost-effective way of collecting environmental data
- There was potential to make considerably more use of citizen science that currently was the case.
BBC News.
EyeWire is a Citizen Science project aimed at mapping the neural connections of the retina. All you have to do is play a relaxing and absorbing game of coloring brain images!
SciStarter.
The National Science Foundation (USA) nvites reporters to participate in a live webcast on citizen science on Tuesday, July 31, at 3:00 p.m. EDT.
This webcast will cover how citizen scientists are helping to advance science, the rapid growth and future of citizen science, and the Frontiers issue and conference on citizen science. The August 2012 Special Issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, which is published by the Ecological Society of America (ESA), is titled Citizen Science-New Pathways to Public Involvement in Research and is available for free download starting at 12:01 a.m. on August 1 on the Frontierswebsite. This issue is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The guardian:
Thanks to the web, few areas of human inquiry remain out of our immediate reach
This WSJ article is a couple of days old, but I never linked to it. It presents some of the stories people keep mentioning on citizen science. So here we go …