Citizen Science

In this high tech world that we live in, it is easy to look at science as something that is not really accessible to the average person. Sure, there are tons of science shows on cable TV. But it’s hard to imagine that there is anything that the average person can do to make a meaningful contribution to science.

Well, it turns out, you CAN do real science. Anyone can.

Galaxy Zoo asks you to look at pictures of galaxies and classify them. Automated telescopes are taking millions of pictures of deep space objects. But computers are poor at analyzing the photos and classifying the objects. A computer can’t tell a spiral galaxy from a globular one. But people are great at it. And even better, it turns out that your average, untrained person is BETTER at it than trained astronomers. Astronomers tend to over think what they are looking at and to project pet theories onto the images. Untrained people just report what they see.

So if you’re looking for something kind of mindless to do while you unwind from work, you can sit there and play a few meaningless hands of solitaire on your computer. Or you could look at a few dozen photos of galaxies and do something that is very valuable to science. Classifying the photos helps answer questions like how many galaxies are spiral, and how many are globular. Of the spiral galaxies, what is the average number of arms they have? How many have a center bar? You can’t answer those basic questions until you look at each and every photo and describe the object you see.

But it can be more than doing the grunt work. Sometimes you get to make your own discovery.

Hanny Van Arkel, a Dutch schoolteacher and Galaxy Zoo volunteer saw something strange on one of the photos she was working on. She posted it up on the forum, asking what the funny blue thing was. Turns out it was something that no one had ever seen before. She discovered a new class of deep space objects, now called a Voorwerp (Dutch for object) and the one she discovered has been named Hanny’s Voorwerp.

Another site that will give you a chance to do real science is BOINC. This site lets you pick from dozens of science projects. Everything from doing research on cancer, to monitoring earthquakes. BOINC lets you down load a screen saver to your computer. You then pick the type, or types, of projects you want to help. When you are not using the computer, the screen saver kicks in and starts using your computer to process data. The idea is that computer time on the real high end research computers is still hard to come by. But, there are millions of desktop computers that are sitting idle at any given moment. So it uses your computer when you are not doing anything. It will do a small part of a complex operation, and return that result to the central database.

The BOINC project I have been doing lately is a bit different.

I have been doing earth quack monitoring for these people. They use the BIONC network to link up thousands of computers that have a motion sensor attached to them.

This gives them a world wide network of earthquake monitors for almost nothing. Many laptops actually have a motion detector built into them. This device helps protect the hard drive if the laptop is moved or dropped while the computer is writing to the disk. So the software is set up to use this device to monitor for earthquakes. Or you can buy motion sensor form them for about $50 to plug into to your home computer. They will send one to a school for free.

I always thought that Arizona didn’t have earthquakes. But it does. I pick up about 10 a week. Some are quakes that are really in California, but the shock waves are still detectable here. Some are local quakes that are really just too small for people to feel or notice.

So you can do meaningful science right there from your computer. Anyone can. Get out there and do some science.