Citizen Scientists Help Explore the Moon 60
Pickens writes "NPR reports that NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is doing such a good job photographing every bit of the moon's surface that scientists can't keep up, so Oxford astrophysicist Chris Lintott is asking amateur astronomers to help review, measure, and classify tens of thousands of moon photos streaming to Earth using the website Moon Zoo, where anyone can log on, get trained, and become a space explorer. 'We ask people to count the craters that they can see ... and that tells us all sorts of things about the history and the age of that bit of surface,' says Lintott. Volunteers are also asked to identify boulders, measure the craters, and generally classify what is found in the images. If one person does the classification — even if they're an expert — then anything odd or interesting can be blamed on them. But with multiple independent classifications, the team can statistically calculate the confidence in the classification. That's a large part of the power of Moon Zoo. Lintott adds the British and American scientists heading up the LRO project have been randomly checking the amateur research being sent in and find it as good as you would get from an expert. 'There are a whole host of scientists ... who are waiting for these results, who've already committed to using them in their own research.'"
Mutual Benefit (Score:3, Insightful)
From the faq (http://www.moonzoo.org/faq):
Q: What happens to the classifications I provide?
A: They're stored with those provided by everyone who comes to Moon Zoo. The Moon Zoo team will carefully analyse the results to make sure that collectively we're producing results that are useful to scientists -- keep an eye on the Moon Zoo blog for details. All results will eventually be made public for anyone to use.
I think the problem here is that it is all take and no give. Categorize our images for us! We'll give you the data "eventually". Crazy idea, how about doing the statistical correlation of multiple contributors in realtime and display that information on an overall map of the Moon so there's some sense of progress at the task.
Re:Mutual Benefit (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the problem here is that it is all take and no give. Categorize our images for us! We'll give you the data "eventually".
It sounds a bit childish, really. How can you say it is all take and no give, and then immediately say that they WILL be giving you the results, but only after it has gone through that pesky scientific process.<WHINE>But I want it now!</WHINE>
What is the problem with waiting for the right answer? Zakabog has already pointed out that a real time display could be used maliciously, but it could even skew the results by well-intentioned people. If the first person who submits a result for a given region makes a mistake, then the next person who analyses that region might compare their results with the first and "correct" their own mistake. If you use statistics to build confidence in the results then the last thing you should do is tell the subjects what you are currently expecting them to do. That only uses statistics to compound errors.
Re:Or.... (Score:2, Insightful)
There aren't too many opportunities to teach skills which will help people to actually get ahead.
Such things I'd support, but all "volunteering" has turned into is just giving handouts, these don't help humanity but rather hinder progress.
Re:fuck this (Score:5, Insightful)
amateur scientists are not scientists, however.
Why? According to :
A scientist, in the broadest sense, is any person who engages in a systematic activity to acquire knowledge or an individual that engages in such practices and traditions that are linked to schools of thought or philosophy.
Surely if they do this, then it doesn't matter that they aren't paid or haven't been formally trained in a scientific field. There are limits to what you can achieve without an education, but what defines a scientist is the search for knowledge, not already having knowledge.
Re:Statistical confidence (Score:3, Insightful)
How long has GalaxyZoo been around? Longer than SETI@Home? It's more likely both projects took the hint from how SETI@Home processes data. As another commenter correctly pointed out, these two projects do with spare eyes and brain cycles what SETI@Home does with spare CPU cycles, and all of them rely on having multiple redundant results for the same dataset to verify integrity of the result. It's not exactly rocket science to figure out such a technique would be useful, but SETI@Home has been around for a LONG time, and it's not exactly unknown especially in astronomy circles.