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Identify Galaxies Using Spare Wetware Cycles
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Jul 14, 2007 05:47 PM
from the blinded-by-science dept.
from the blinded-by-science dept.
hazem invites us to have fun, learn about galaxies, and actually help astronomers by looking at pictures of galaxies and identifying the type. Warning: it's more addictive than Tetris. From the site: "GalaxyZoo... harnesses the power of the internet — and your brain — to classify a million galaxies. By taking part, you'll not only be contributing to scientific research, but you'll view parts of the Universe that literally no-one has ever seen before and get a sense of the glorious diversity of galaxies that pepper the sky. Why do we need you? The simple answer is that the human brain is much better at recognizing patterns than a computer can ever be. Any computer program we write to sort our galaxies into categories would do a reasonable job, but it would also inevitably throw out the unusual, the weird and the wonderful. To rescue these interesting systems which have a story to tell, we need you."
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Technology: Citizen Science and Grid Computing 69 comments
japonicus writes "The Economist has an article summarizing the current state of distributed computing (think SETI@home and its ilk), which suggests that distributed-human projects are going to be the next big thing. (We discussed one such project, the Galaxy Zoo, a few months back.) The distributed-computing platform BOINC is about to expand to human processing. Distributed proofreaders have been a longstanding success (yet inexplicably failed to get even a mention in the article); but there are a lot of other projects waiting in the wings."
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Galaxy Zoo Produces a Rare Specimen 188 comments
We discussed the Galaxy Zoo project soon after it launched last summer. Science News is now following developments about an odd celestial object
that is fueling a lot of excitement among astronomers around the world. In August, a Dutch schoolteacher named Hanny, in the process of characterizing galaxy images, noticed a peculiar object and posted a query about it on the Galaxy Zoo blog. She called it a "Voorwerp," which Science News says is Dutch for "thing" but which Google translates as "subject." Hanny's Voorwerp emits mostly green light (the earlier report said blue). The best guess astronomers have now is that the Voorwerp is emitting "ghost light," i.e. it is "lit by the ultraviolet light and X-rays from a quasar that has vanished in the last 100,000 years," to quote astronomer Bill Keel. "As far as we can tell, it's an unprecedented thing," Keel added. Researchers are scrambling to book time on the Hubble and other major telescopes to get a closer look.
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New Class of Galaxy Discovered 104 comments
fructose sends along this excerpt from Space Daily:
"A team of astronomers has discovered a group of rare galaxies called the 'Green Peas' with the help of citizen scientists working through an online project called Galaxy Zoo. The finding could lend unique insights into how galaxies form stars in the early universe. ... Of the 1 million galaxies in Galaxy Zoo's image bank, only about 250 are in the new 'Green Pea' type. Galaxy Zoo is claiming this as a success of the 'citizen scientist' effort that they spearheaded. ... The galaxies, which are between 1.5 billion and 5 billion light years away, are 10 times smaller than our own Milky Way galaxy and 100 times less massive. But surprisingly, given their small size, they are forming stars 10 times faster than the Milky Way. 'They're growing at an incredible rate,' said Kevin Schawinski, a postdoctoral associate at Yale and one of Galaxy Zoo's founders. 'These galaxies would have been normal in the early universe, but we just don't see such active galaxies today. Understanding the Green Peas may tell us something about how stars were formed in the early universe and how galaxies evolve.'"
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sounds familiar (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:sounds familiar (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:sounds familiar (Score:5, Funny)
To us white people, they all look the same.
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Re:sounds familiar (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot editors should be relieved to know that dupes are a universe-wide phenomenon.
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Stardust @ Home (Score:3, Informative)
Funny how human eyes are still needed for these tasks
Re:Stardust @ Home (Score:5, Insightful)
feels good not to be obsolete. yet.
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Re:Stardust @ Home (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't target this at geeks and not a get a weird grin. Computers actually could recognize those galaxies fine, AND mark the unusual, weird and wonderful for additional review. It's a matter of putting in a simple threshold of matching features when you analyze the patterns.
computers can do certain stuff super well, but when it comes to a lot of things, they sputter and die. image recognition is going to be one of those things that computers don't do well for many many years.
feels good not to be obsolete. yet.
Feel good while you can, we've been around for millions of years, and computers have been around for around 50 years, and we're already going into multi-core hardware. Sooner than later, massively parallel hardware patterns will emerge, and coding super-fast neural networks in those will be a child's play. All that's left at this point, would be training the computers to do what you want them to do, like you would a little child.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Computers? Nah. While they're small, they'll keep mooching off of us, "daddy I need more watts, I need more watts daddy". Then they'll grow up some and start figuring out they could survive without people around them, but they're not quite sure how. just yet.
They'll experiment with installing viruses on themselves, overclocking, overvoltage. Then one day they'll be gone. And we'll be worried sick about their well-being while they're having the time of their "lives".
In 10 years
I use stargate glyphs (Score:3, Funny)
Alternatively (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Alternatively (Score:5, Informative)
That said.. as I mentioned.. most of the actual images are pretty much unidentifiable.. it would be nice if they would concentrate on getting higher resolution images first.. it would make identification easier and more robust.
I understand that maybe they can't.. but a database full of "don't know"-unrecognizable blobs.. I'm not sure what the value is.
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Re: (Score:2)
"More Addictive than Tetris"? (Score:5, Funny)
"Tetris Diary: Day One. This will be an ongoing catalog of the various Tetris shapes I see while playing the game.
First: A cube. Good start!
Second: A clockwise L-shape. I can feel the tension mounting!
Third: A counter-clockwise L-shape. What are the odds??
Fourth: A counter-clockwise S-shape! A trend emerges!
Fifth: A clockwise S-shape. Unbelievable!
Sixth: A STRAIGHT LINE! WE HAVE A STRAIGHT LINE!!!!
I have now reached the top of the screen and the game has ended. Will start again and try to contain my unbelievable excitement over cataloging shapes."
Re: (Score:2)
That's funny!
Actually, I can't stand to play Tetris for more than a couple minutes. But I had a girlfriend once who could not stop playing the darned game. She had it on her computer and played it - and then had a Gameboy she played it on too when she wasn't on her computer. Hours and hours she would play that game, and she got really angry when I hid the Gameboy.
This site seems addictive to me in that some of the pictures are really astounding, but
Another Reminder How BIG This Place Is (Score:5, Insightful)
Big numbers. But don't forget that each galaxy contains hundreds of millions of stars. Of which ours is just one.
Which should give us all a little humility. But it won't.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As you have demonstrated, the negative statement above, "I am not 7 feet tall" can be proven by disproving the opposite. (Let's not consider the semantic arguments about what it means - we can assume that he means that he is not 7 feet tall when standing up).
In this case, you cannot be both (7 feet tall) and (not seven feet tall) at the same time. They are mutually exclusive states of existence - and all i
Space.com plays Damage Control? (Score:5, Interesting)
NewScientist Article:
http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12241-pub
Additional Background info here, linked to from that article:
http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg19425994.
Compare this to the Space.com - AP Article:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070711_ap_o
For whatever reason, the article that Space.com decided to go with fails to mention anything about this project representing a threat to mainstream cosmology or the CMB. Astrophysical enthusiasts reading Space.com, in other words, would not be informed by that article that somebody has even alleged that there is a possible anomalous artifact within the cosmic microwave background. I'm not advocating anything here other than that this appears to be more than a mere "dumbing down" of a complicated story. They could have easily dumbed down the concept of aligned galaxies and why that introduces a problem for the CMB. Instead, we got the following, which appears to not suggest any threat level to BB Theory whatsoever:
This sort of "damage control", if I may call it that, is not really very helpful when it comes to layman trying to understand what to believe.
We must be very careful of how we promote certain sceintific theories over others. It would be very easy to create a false consensus within society using public relations in this way.
Interesting Site (Score:3, Interesting)
The 'statistics' and the 'show my galaxies' sections are both not working. Perhaps once they are in place, it will be a little more fun to participate. There should be more info, such as "you were the first one to classify this galaxy", or "You were the 100th person to classify this galaxy", etc.
If the site gets popular they might add more features. I'd like to see how many galaxies i've done. How many galaxies other users have done, etc. In any case, I hope it catches on.
I say, hot! (Score:3, Funny)
(really, it's elliptical or spiral, but whatever)
Saturday Night (Score:3, Funny)
Human screening is still widely used in astronomy. (Score:3, Interesting)
In the old days, you'd expose a bunch of film plates of a given chunk of sky, then have your assistant / grad student / whatever overlap them and look for anything that "appeared" or "moved" across the different frames.
5-10 years ago, you'd take digital images, then have your assistant / grad student / whatever "blink" back and forth between them, doing the same thing.
Nowadays, you take lots of digital images and feed them into a supercomputing cluster which analyzes them, then spits out a list of the things that "appear" or "move" that are most likely to be good targets for you... then you have your assistant / grad student / whatever take photometry, spectra, etc. to check on them.
The process gradually becomes more efficient, but the wetware's still in there - it's just being used in places where it matters most.
(I'm part of the wetware for one such project, in the / whatever category.)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I did this as a summer job (Score:5, Funny)
They should occasionally display the "Goatse Nebula" just to keep people awake.
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