Ask Slashdot: Do Citizen Science Platforms Exist? (arstechnica.com) 105
Loren Chorley writes: After reading about a new surge in the trend for citizen science (also known as community science, civic science or networked science), I was intrigued by the idea and wondered if there are websites that do this in a crowd sourced and open sourced manner. I know sites like YouTube allow people to show off their scientific experiments, but they don't facilitate uploading all their data or linking studies together to draw more advanced conclusions, or making methodologies like you'd see in academia straight forward and available through a simple interface. What about rating of experiments for peer review, revisions and refinement, requirement lists, step-by-step instructions for repeatability, ease of access, and simple language for people who don't find academia accessible? Does something like this exist already? Do you, Slashdot, think this is something useful, or that people are interested in? Or would the potential for fraud and misinformation be too great?
Lots of them. (Score:5, Funny)
Search for 'flat earth', 'vaccine autism', 'creation science', 'labor economics', 'sociology' etc etc.
The thing they have in common? The people involved wouldn't know science if it bit them on the ass. Instead they grind axes.
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Search for 'flat earth', 'vaccine autism', 'creation science', 'labor economics', 'sociology' etc etc.
And real scientists, too! (Score:3)
Search for 'flat earth', 'vaccine autism', 'creation science', 'labor economics', 'sociology' etc etc.
The thing they have in common? The people involved wouldn't know science if it bit them on the ass. Instead they grind axes.
And all of the "real science" that encourages citizen participation only has the citizens doing trivial things.
Things like running "Folding@Home", viewing astronomical photographs looking for potentially interesting things, sending in local samples for analysis - things that any high-school kid could do.
Find something in the astronomical photograph and you'll be listed as the discoverer, along with the *real* scientist who did the analysis. Send in a sample and you'll be listed as the contributor, along wit
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St. Louis zoo was passing out vials, asking people to find local samples of algae and send them back to be cultured. They were looking for high-yield cultures that could be used for aquaculture. A fine idea, and interesting for a child, but not actual citizen science.
Science as in real science generally involves a LOT of grunt work.
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Unfortunately, that is pretty accurate. Science is a pretty complicated thing in that it requires you to understand why the scientific method works and everything else tried so far fails. You usually do that on a concrete subject and often in the context of a PhD. Just reading up on it is not enough, you have to see it work and have to see the alternatives fail to really understand why it is the only way to do things. Yes, that takes several years of working on one or a small set of closely related problems
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"Math" is not the scientific method. It is an result of the application of the scientific method. And it does not apply to reality directly. Some you can apply to reality by use of a translator like Physics, but there is a ton of Math that does actually not apply to physical reality at all.
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Math is _older_ than scientific method and is akin to philosophy.
There is no 'hypothesis' in math,, no 'experiment', no 'reproduction of results'. There is no 'proof' in science. Math is just axioms and their logical conclusions.
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Nonsense. You have no clue what Math is. There are hypotheses (called "Theorems") and there are experiments (called "finding a proof") and there sure is "reproduction of results" (i.e. verifying proofs by others). Maybe talk to some actual mathematician some time?
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When you're wrong, you should just admit it.
This just makes you look 12.
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Re: "The second thing "Citizen Scientists" usually fool themselves about is how slow scientific work almost universally is and how little you typically have to show for a lot of work. Hence they often try do do things faster and that universally fails. Because the thing is, if you have a little, incremental, but scientifically sound result, this result will basically stand forever."
It's interesting to watch you guys work yourselves towards the "no, not possible" answer. It seems to me that this conclusion
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Science is hard? Science is only done at the PHD level?
What you and the OP are talking about is conducting E-X-P-E-R-I-M-E-N-T-S.
Yes Virginia, ANYONE can do it. Little kids in grade school do them. Students in high school do them. Yup even undergraduate students do them.
The complexity and sophistication of the experiment will depend on your level of understanding of the subject of investigation and access to equipment. Thus s
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You apparently never have heard of models, of theories and of verification of said theories. _That_ is hard. Doing experiments is easy (well, sometimes), but getting useful results and interpreting them is hard. Incidentally, when a result is known and well verified, repeating the experiments falls under "education" or "entertainment", not "Science".
Re: Lots of them. (Score:2)
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Thanks!
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Fuck your cynicism (Score:1)
I participate here.
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/
Your choice if you want to make some gridcoin
The most cynical thing I've ever heard... (Score:3)
Life is like a big long meeting, nothing gets done and nobody's opinion gets changed.
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Dream on...you sound like a hippie.
Science is _hard_.
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Re:Lots of them. (Score:4, Informative)
Search for 'flat earth', 'vaccine autism', 'creation science', 'labor economics', 'sociology' etc etc.
The thing they have in common? The people involved wouldn't know science if it bit them on the ass. Instead they grind axes.
I know this was tagged as "funny", but it's disturbingly close to the truth. At a recent Flat Earth Convention [arstechnica.com] (yes, really) the folks seemed to genuinely believe they were doing legitimate science to "prove" that the earth isn't round. They regard folks who do actual peer-reviewed science as part of some "conspiracy by the elite" and therefore not to be trusted.
Zooniverse (Score:5, Informative)
Check out Zooniverse - https://www.zooniverse.org/ [zooniverse.org] - there's a lot of projects that are helped by citizen science. A nice platform where human powered processing can contribute. I don't think there's the kind of review etc you're asking for, but it does have a very nice interface for building your own project, contributing to others etc.
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The internet has been like this since the day it became publicly accessible. If you think "Fake News" was invented by Russians in 2016, there's a time-traveling Nigerian from 1995 who'd love to sell you some herbal cock enhancers.
Science Gateways (Score:1)
There's a trend in the academic community towards that are known as science gateways. It's not well defined what a science gateway is, but they often integrate computational science tools and infrastructure (HPC, Globus online data transfer, visualization, etc.).
I'm currently working on a project that utilizes one such science gateway platform from Purdue known as HUBzero. It's essentially a CMS tailored towards science (branched from Joomla!). Their FOSS release has virtually no community and a lot of shor
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I would love to see a git-journal where pull requests are reviewed by peers for submission.
Not after "first to file" from America Invents Act (Score:2)
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Generally, science is distributed through trade publications, not patents. The intent is different for the two.
Publications announce new results and discuss the analysis behind them. Whereas patents announce new inventions and defend their utility.
Look, I understand your frustration with the arduous and lengthy process of filing and obtaining a patent. But let's not confuse patents with peer-reviewed scientific papers.
Citizen Science Tahoe (Score:3, Informative)
Here's one active effort:
https://citizensciencetahoe.or... [citizensciencetahoe.org]
They have an app for "citizens" to collect data about water quality at Lake Tahoe. They post the results on the web site.
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Pfizer claims to already be using crowdsourcing to solve long-tail problems, so somewhere between your "absolutely not" and their "yes, we're already doing it" is the right answer. [scaledinnovation.com]
Well, there's HamSci (Score:3)
While it's not general-purpose, there is Ham radio Science Citizen Investigation [hamsci.org], "a platform for the publicity and promotion of projects that are consistent with the following objectives:
Advance scientific research and understanding through amateur radio activities;
Encourage the development of new technologies to support this research; and
Provide educational opportunities for the amateur community and the general public."
If you are looking for a more universal organization, you might look at this organization's means and methods for some ideas.
iNaturalist & eBird (Score:1)
In the same way that there isn't a simple interface to methodologies and projects in academia or science in general, I doubt you'll see one in citizen/community science.
That said, there are some remarkable projects (or umbrella projects) that are purpose-built for the projects they support. Large-scale ones (besides Zooniverse, already mentioned) include:
https://www.inaturalist.org/ [inaturalist.org] — observations of living organisms
https://ebird.org/ [ebird.org] — t
ALL science should be citizen science (Score:3)
With the possible exception for militarily-applicable research, no science should be government-sponsored. At all.
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Oh look you've found a different way of spelling "gubmint is teh ebul".
Re:ALL science should be citizen science (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, we have government-sponsored research to thank for your being able to share that comment with us. Without government-funded science for both peaceful and military purposes you wouldn't have computer to type your comment on, nor an internet or World Wide Web to transmit it over. You not only wouldn't have a smart phone, you wouldn't have a cell phone, or any phone at all for that matter. Or even electricity, most likely.
You can't rely on wealthy investors and venture capitalists to fund science for which there is not a clear application, customer, or business model, especially if that business model does not lead to profitability or an IPO in a relatively short period of time. Thirty years ago the first web browser was still two years away. The first web browser that anybody has heard of was still five years away. The only networking business case for the rabble that anybody really imagined was dial-up service à la Prodigy, Compuserv, and America Online -- and those services largely kept customers inside their walled gardens and made it difficult or impossible to access the internet itself. Even after Mosaic appeared in 1993 (a government-funded effort, by the way) and people started to get their first taste of the web as we know it, it was still years before private investment grew significantly because people needed to get online for any of it to matter, and doing that required both public investment and new business models.
The usual suspects were first on the scene, of course: The first time I encountered a camgirl with a live video stream was in 1996....
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Your kind have been repeating this line for years. It is bullshit — because it presupposes, that, had ARPA not funded what later became known as "the Internet", no one else would've done it either.
That's nonsense. Private companies did fund and successfully built networks of railroads, telegraph, and telephone. They would've built the current Internet, when the technology developed — as it did i
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I think you might need to review your history a bit. Private funding didn't come in for any of those until the government had provided so much support that it reduced risk to "acceptable" levels. Yes, private funding made all of those networks pervasive, but government funding made them possible.
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Been there, argued that. Step one, where are your citations?
This is where your shrink away, or offer me to "google it". Nope, you do that. I'll wait.
Now, that is rich. As if you have somehow visited another reality, where the Internet did not develop without
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Railroads:
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Sell your chump list, duh. They're fucking volunteers! Fat of the land.
Don't sell that list too cheap. Those are awsome leeds. I bet I could sell ten percent a carbon credit monthly subscription, and I'm no salespro.
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Yes! Plug (Score:2)
BugGuide.net (Score:1)
The bar is very high (Score:1)
It's an excellent question, Loren (Score:3)
Hi, Loren. I am going through the responses to your thoughtful question, and am sort of imagining your reaction as unimpressed by the answers (please correct me if I am wrong).
The fact of the matter is that we live in a unique time insofar as we have more access to information and wisdom from crowds than ever before. You might imagine that this explosion of resources should have some disruptive effect upon the way that science is done today -- something that mirrors what Amazon did to e-commerce when it commercialized the long tail ... the argument being that since specialist scientists are essentially laypeople outside of their specializations, it's conceivable that "the crowd" can outperform these specialist communities when it comes to problem-solving tasks which involve a great amount of synthesis and generalist knowledge (which is honestly not today highly valued in academia). If you've had any of these thoughts, then realize that you are not completely alone: In fact, Rob Spencer at Pfizer has I think very well documented that the crowd can indeed be mined for solutions to some of the most challenging technical challenges [scaledinnovation.com]. Pfizer has been doing just that for some years already, and they claim that the approach works.
Before continuing, I want to differentiate the two fundamentally different types of "citizen science". It can be either top-down or bottom-up. Top-down citizen science is just laypeople doing the legwork for some pre-existing academic work (many of the answers refer to this sort of work). I would argue that the far more interesting vision for citizen science involves enlisting the support of crowds towards solving certain problems which the critics of modern science have argued academia is itself struggling to address, and I call this approach "bottom-up". For the rest of this post, I will specifically focus upon bottom-up citizen science.
I would argue that learning the most common and most poignant critiques of modern science must be the first step towards designing a citizen science crowdsourcing platform, for the simple reason that laypeople are never going to completely replace the specialist. What you really want to achieve with these sorts of projects is a synergistic effect from combining the wisdom of crowds with the power of specialist science. An approach which fixes one or more observable problems with modern science could produce such an effect. But, like I said, to be sure that you are in the right ballpark, you have to become an expert in critiques of modern science. This first step is actually the one which Slashdotters seem to have the most difficulty with, and it is likely the reason why the answers to your question are not so great (sorry guys, downvote me if you must, but I am being honest).
If this is seeming too vague to be actionable, it may be useful to dig into a specific example. One very serious problem with the modern science approach is the infamous "publish or perish" problem [junod.info]:
Citizen Science: Data Collection (Score:2)
environmental monitoring w/ sensors (Score:1)
a common misunderstanding (Score:2)
There's a common misunderstanding that published science is always done by well trained professionals in well outfitted labs. That's not the case.
Most authors on scientific papers are graduate students. These are by definition untrained people new to scientific research. Most paper authors don't have a PhD. Most science labs are stocked with decades out of date equipment. It's pretty trivial to build better equipment on your own with a bit of engineering knowledge and some searching of scientific surplus s
citsci.org (Score:2)
Consider citsci.org [citsci.org].
The link is re looney tunes anti-science. (Score:1)
If not, please clarify.
There are many that use citizens/public/us to look at blood flows in mice brains for Alzheimer research, as well as SETI and protein folding.
Good luck.
protocols (Score:2)
What about rating of experiments for peer review, revisions and refinement, requirement lists, step-by-step instructions for repeatability, ease of access, and simple language for people who don't find academia accessible? Does something like this exist already?
For methods and protocols, there's protocols.io [protocols.io].
Yes... (Score:1)
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This is actually a good example. Open Science Framework is very useful.
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AC, you beat me to it! :)
Yes, Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/ [osf.io]
Allows researchers to upload their data, methods, algorithms/calculations, etc.. Allows anyone else to check and report errors/problems and suggest improvements. Open data can also be re-purposed but that may be an open temptation to indulge in p-hacking.
Public Lab (Score:2)
Public Lab is probably the best known - https://publiclab.org/ [publiclab.org]. Here's how they describe themselves: Public Lab is a community where you can learn how to investigate environmental concerns. Using inexpensive DIY techniques, we seek to change how people see the world in environmental, social, and political terms.
I wrote an article about the DIY science community [economist.com] last year that tells you a bit more about how they and other "community science" outfits got started. (If the site asks you to subscribe just clear
Birding has a long history of citizen science (Score:1)
Amateur science (Score:2)
Check Out the Open Humans Foundation (Score:2)
There are lots of opportunities to contribute (either your personal data, or code/tech.) There are open APIs to let you design opt-in activities using everything from step data off of personal devices to entire genomes.
https://www.openhumans.org/ [openhumans.org] [openhumans.org]
OBJ DISCLAIMER: I was just elected to the OH Board of Directors...