My dedicated readers – all three of you! -know that one of the (many) themes that I like writing are all these "citizen science" fun projects that develop, launched and published. Citizen - projects and science are scientific studies that rely on people of all ages and all walks of life to help scientists seek to identify a particular phenomenon. Two of the citizen-science projects that I attended include Christmas Bird censuses (Ron) and observation of the coast and seabirds on team (COASST).
In addition to participate in citizen-science projects, I do what I can to promote citizen-science to the public. Several projects of citizen science that I published stories on include the number of future World Parrot and Foldit, protein folding game - both which I participated in (or plan).
There is a citizen science project new and fun that anyone in the world with computer and internet access can participate: Planet Hunter. This science project is a "game" online has a serious purpose: to identify stars have planets orbiting around them. These stars are identified by finding those whose light becomes dimmer for a short period of time and lightens and then again. This degradation occurs when a planet moves between the star and the observer, in this case, Kepler spacecraft NASA.
NASA Kepler spacecraft measure light emission over 150,000 individual stars in the constellation Swan and saves the brightness of the stars to find planets transit every thirty minutes. These data are transmitted to earth-bound scientists who download it on their computers.
Computers the Kepler team are sifting through data, but the planet hunters project was launched, because scientists know that the human brain is far superior to computers when it comes to detection and identification of trends in large amounts of data.
It is possible that no new planets will not be found or that computers have learned their task that they are fast and better than human beings humans. It is also possible that the "hive mind" hundreds (or thousands?) people everywhere worldwide surf computers Kepler team. But the Kepler team and the planet hunters know that is true, unless the collective "hive mind" tests of their computers. More exciting that simply settle a bet, it is possible that you can be the one to make a scientific discovery really interesting, as well as Caroline Moore, the girl of fourteen New York who discovered a very rare supernova 2008.
Welcome to planet hunters of the Zooniverse.
No comments:
Post a Comment