In recent years, “citizen scientist” projects, in which ordinary people can contribute to scientific research by doing tasks via websites, have become quite popular.
I like the astronomy projects on zooinverse.com like Backwards Worlds - Search for Planet 9 (although this one can be hard to use and I haven’t found planet 9) and Galaxy clumps. I’ve also dabbled in the efforts to digitize information from natural history collections.
So, fellow Straight Dopers, which projects have you enjoyed being part of?
This is the first I’m hearing of it, but it sounds interesting.
I signed up for that SETI thing several years ago. Not sure if they’re still doing that.
15 years ago or so I had Seti@home installed on about a half dozen computers. Over the years computers got replaced and I just sort of forgot about it.
I, too, was part of the SETI@Home panel for a number of years, but I haven’t had the program on my last few computers. I guess I’d forgotten about it, as well.
I took a series of tests through The University of Greenwich, London regarding facial recognition, which I did well at (you see a black and white face for several seconds then have to pick the same face from a group. Sometimes the face will be from a different angle in harder tests).
I eventually progressed through the various difficulties and was ranked as a “super recognizer,” which is apparently not a made up term.
Now the university keeps in contact asking me to help in various studies, which I do if I have the time. TBH it feels like one of those “eh everyone can do this” type things but who knows.
I did one before SETI as well but I have no idea what it was called or my reason for moving to seti. I want to say either the project was discontinued or the program was hogging my computer’s resources to the point where I wasn’t able to get my actual work done.
Another one who did SETI@home. When we first got DSL in 2000. Did it for a year or so, we moved, and never picked it back up. Never thought to look into others.
To all of you who used to do SETI@home, the project transitioned to the BOINC platform Taesahnim mentioned above several years ago. I also run BOINC on my computer, and participate in SETI@home and ClimatePrediction.net. Each one runs 50% of the time.
It was announced as a citizen scientist project to evaluate whether wild animals avoid genetically modified corn in favor of “natural” corn (there’s a bunch of folklorish testimony to this effect, but no real evidence, not to mention a lack of logical mechanism for beastly antipathy to “altered” genes).
What I and a bunch of people did was send in a small amount of money to receive GM and non-GM corn ears labeled only with test numbers (so we were experimentally blinded as to which was which). We set out the ears on our property in identical stands to hold them upright, and recorded which were nibbled and how much, documenting this in photos which were sent to organizers at Biology Fortified. That was three years ago, and there’s been no announcement of results that I can find, nor the published paper that was promised.
There has however been acrimony between organizers which bodes poorly for a resolution of the project.
