Today, I propose that we talk about crowdsourcing in science, or "how the crowd can work massively to reach a goal". This notion developped recently fast in advertisement and publicity-making.
However, the "citizens doing science" notion appeared few years ago and has so far been a big success for several projects.
No need to be an expert in most of the cases : human beings are just naturally so good to recognize patterns and written sentences, what computers are not. And also, crowdsourcing opens a broad opportunity for worldwide gathering of information, which is not available with normal study laboratories fundings.
**** information collecting ****
Numerous blogs are already existing where people exchange about the animal species they observed during their last hikes. There is a crowdsourcing projects based on this big success around nature observation:
- http://www.ispotnature.org/communities/global : Did you spot a fish, a bird, an insect in the back of your garden or during a recent trip around the World ? Then just take a picture of it and share it on ispotnature, and someone will give you an identification of what you spotted !
**** Recognition ****
The human brain is way above any computer in terms of shape, pattern and writing recognition. Several projects are using our natural high abilities in the domain to help science !
- http://www.galaxyzoo.org/ : a website where astronomers (beginners to confirmed) are invited to observe space pictures and sort spatial objects by shape/class and categorie (age, ...): the best helpers will even been given pictures with unidentified galaxies, that they will be the first to discover on Earth ! !
- http://www.galaxyzoo.org/ : a website where astronomers (beginners to confirmed) are invited to observe space pictures and sort spatial objects by shape/class and categorie (age, ...): the best helpers will even been given pictures with unidentified galaxies, that they will be the first to discover on Earth ! !
You surely did encounter these distorted numbers and letters when trying to connect at your favourite website. Just learn know that Google has been developping recaptcha with a precise idea in the back of their mind : you actually (willingly or not) helped Google to digitize all the e-books of google that couldn't be read or translated directly via the computer force !
**** Donation of time ! ****
Yes, we are talking about calculation time donation. As your computer is never using 100% of its capacity, you can actually donate the non-used power of your computer when it's switched on so that a lab or a project calculates with it. Several domains are using a lot of calculation power and need these donations (Bio-Medical studies, Climate, ...). The results of these calculations are always publicly displayed for the scientific comunity. .
If you want to participate, here is a list (non-exhaustive) of projects which can use your help and lending them a bit of your computer power that you don't use anyway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects
**** Conclusion ****
Crowdourcing in science showed its success in 2010 when more than 200k people partcipated to the "World Water Monitoring Day" and gave information of their neighbour rivers.
There is a big chance that with the development of the social networks, the science crowdsourcing has a bright future in front of itself.
Good share, good day !
T.
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