Blog: Citizen Science Projects, People, and Perspectives
By Darlene Cavalier, Apr 16, 2012
Registration is open for the Conference on Public Participation in Scientific Research (citizen science, volunteer monitoring, community-based research, crowd science). August 4th and 5th, 2012 in Portland, Oregon. $30 with registration for ESA meeting, $95 for this event only. Now accepting poster abstracts and scholarship applications until May 4, 2012. With the rapid growth and … Read more “Call for Abstracts & more – Public Participation in Scientific Research Conf, Portland, OR, Aug 4-5, 2012”
Categories: Citizen Science
By Darlene Cavalier, Apr 03, 2012
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy recently announced the “Big Data Research and Development Initiative.” This may be of interest to researchers and practitioners of crowd sourcing and citizen science. For example, as part of this effort, the National Science Foundation will fund a $10 million Expeditions in Computing project based at … Read more “Big Data is a Big Deal”
Categories: Citizen Science
By Darlene Cavalier, Mar 31, 2012
How can social media be used to accomplish a seemingly impossible task? Today, a social experiment called the “Tag Challenge” sends 5 individuals to roam the streets of New York, DC, Bratislava, Stockholm, and London. The task is to locate them before the sun sets based only on their mugshots. You can contribute by taking … Read more “CrowdScanner: A social media experiment in crowdsourcing. (Join our team, today!)”
Categories: Other
By Darlene Cavalier, Mar 13, 2012
Sergei Winogradsky discovered nitrifying bacteria in 1890, recognizing that these microbes convert ammonia to nitrate (via nitrite). In aquatic environments, ammonia toxicity to fish is avoided almost exclusively due to the activity of these bacteria…or so it was thought. The ability to remove (or oxidize) ammonia was discovered recently in Archaea, which are an entirely … Read more “Aquarium microbial ecology: a living room approach to citizen science”
Categories: Citizen Science, Ecology & Environment, Guest Contributor
By Darlene Cavalier, Mar 01, 2012
Amateur science enthusiasts can join forces with top researchers through Your Research Mission—a new partnership between DISCOVER Magazine and SciStarter.com. NEW YORK, NY. (March 1, 2012) – A “citizen science” movement is sweeping the country. Now, amateur enthusiasts who want to collaborate with leading scientists can visit DiscoverMagazine.com to join cutting-edge research projects. DISCOVER is … Read more “Discover Magazine and SciStarter announce new citizen science partnership”
Categories: Citizen Science
By Darlene Cavalier, Feb 24, 2012
For most people, a citizen science project provides a way to address a specific scientific challenge with the help of volunteers. For a group of researchers from MIT, UCSD, Masdar Institute, and University of Southampton, it is also an opportunity to study what motivates people to join the project. Would you rather receive a badge, … Read more “Incentives for citizen scientists: report, recruit, verify”
Categories: Citizen Science, Guest Contributor
By Darlene Cavalier, Feb 19, 2012
How cool! Imagine if 1,000 people took a photo of the same landmark in a park, let’s say, over a set period of time. We’d realize what’s in that part of the park all the time and what’s there temporarily. Changes in nature (phenological changes, in particular) and other activities would be recorded and trended … Read more “Future of crowdsourcing visual data for scientific study?”
Categories: Uncategorized
By Darlene Cavalier,
If you live in or near Philadelphia, here’s a recent piece from the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Sandy Bauer, on wildlife citizen science projects for you! We especially like this excerpt: And if you REALLY want to get involved, check out SciStarter, which is considered to be the largest aggregator of citizen science and crowdsourced projects. You … Read more “Show ’em what ya got (Philly).”
Categories: In the News
By Darlene Cavalier, Feb 10, 2012
Excuse the shameless self-promotion but we couldn’t resist sharing this Tweet about SciStarter. like Kickstarter but for citizen science: SciStarter! scistarter.com simple, brilliant. — John Pavlus (@johnpavlus) February 8, 2012
Categories: Uncategorized
By Darlene Cavalier, Feb 09, 2012
Some of you expressed interest in viewing the slides I shared during a talk at the Microbe.net workshop at UC Davis. The talk was designed to give an overview of citizen science projects and a peek at the opportunities and challenges ahead for people involved in the production of such projects. It also pointed towards … Read more “The landscape and promise of Citizen Science”
Categories: Citizen Science, Science Policy
