Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Galaxy Zoo shows how well crowdsourced citizen science works

Not much new here, but a nice article, Galaxy Zoo shows how well crowdsourced citizen science works. "The Internet has enabled the public to participate in science in a way that was never possible before. Starting with SETI@home and a growing number of other projects that use the BOINC infrastructure, home computer users could contribute processing time to actual science projects and, in return, get a glimpse of some of the analysis that was being performed on their computers. But these projects left the public as passive participants, watching as their computers did all the heavy lifting. There are many problems where humans are actually better than computers, and a new set of projects is using the Internet to harness the abilities of non-scientists to contribute towards a scientific goal."

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