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I hope you are having a fun weekend.
I’m still on a mind-whirling high from attending the ScienceRewired launch event on Thursday last week. ScienceRewired is a philanthropic initiative that aims to promote public engagement in science through digital and social technologies.
Their mission is to aid non-technical science practitioners and the digital domain in working together, to look at science from new perspectives while helping educate and empower individuals to create significant positive change in the world. Their focus spreads across science education, science communication and citizen science initiatives – what’s not to love about that?!
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Citizen science has been gaining momentum since the mid-1990’s, but just in case you haven’t heard the term before, relax.
You already know what it is even if you haven’t heard the label.
Simply put, it’s when amateur scientists or non-professionally-scientific people (i.e. general public) collaborate and help contribute to science. The internet has made this super easy.
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theSkyNet
The "human spokesperson for theSkyNet", Kirsten Gottschalk, gave an engaging talk about the 'passive' (means you don't have to really do much at all to contribute to science = win for lazy people who still care) cit-sci project being used to process astronomical (literally!) amounts of data to understand our Universe and make awesome new discoveries.
This is done by participating citizens clicking a link that enables their computer to process small packets of data that provide small pieces of the huge puzzle that is the work of radio astronomers.
In their first 24 hours, they had over 3,000 registered contributors!
It's so cool.
Watch the video to learn more!
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The contributions generated through people playing this game have contributed to developments in the field and (this is my favourite bit!) has even resulted in foldit players being credited as authors on a published scientific manuscript. Not individually, no. But as Foldit Players aka Players, F. I love that!
Now my mind is spinning about how all this exciting new knowledge and improved understand of the role and forms that citizen science can play in research. So what does this post have to do about canine science? Well, maybe not much.
Yet.
Hope to hear from you soon,
Mia
Yet.
Hope to hear from you soon,
Mia
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Hand, E. (2010). Citizen science: People power, Nature, 466 (7307) 687. DOI: 10.1038/466685a
Khatib, F., Cooper, S., Tyka, M.D., Xu, K., Makedon, I., Popovic, Z., Baker, D. & Players, F. (2011). From the Cover: Algorithm discovery by protein folding game players, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108 (47) 18953. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1115898108
Wiggins, A. & Crowston, K. (2011). From Conservation to Crowdsourcing: A Typology of Citizen Science, System Sciences, 10. DOI: 10.1109/HICSS.2011.207
Parsons, J., Lukyanenko, R. & Wiersma, Y. (2011). Easier citizen science is better, Nature, 471 (7336) 37. DOI: 10.1038/471037a
Citizen science @ Scientific American: http://www.scientificamerican.com/citizen-science/
p.s. we cracked 1,000 likers on our facebook page - I LIKE THAT!
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I love post-conference mind spinning. :)
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed the conference also. It really changed the way I've been thinking about trying to get people on board with dog behaviour research in my area of interest. I was kind of thinking of it as getting data, but now I'm thinking of it as a two-way street. A way to inform, educate, and engage the public in dog science as well as getting lots of delicious data. :)