Using Distributed Wetware To Analyze Mars Craters

A non-mouse Cow Herd writes: "Here's an interesting NASA project that popped up on sci.space.sience a while back: This site allows volunteers to classify craters on mars, essentially a human distributed image processing program. They are even starting a moderation-like quality rating. So what do you think ? Would you devote your spare cycles to this ? Will the get quality work or just a lot of First Posts ?" Seems almost (but not quite) paradoxical to use an ultra-high-tech infrastructure to organize non-automated piecework, but until there's a sand mouse for crater-recognition, it seems like a really smart idea.

Comments

There is already a distributed project like this..

[tinikkel]

it's located at http://charlz.dynip.com/gutenberg/

You proofread OCR'd text for Project Gutenberg using the raw scanned image to fix anything. You can do as little or as much as you want.

I can see an opportunity for abuse!

[Spazntwich]

*(L)user 1* Hey! That's a crater!
*(L)user 2* Cool! Which one?
*(L)user 1* Nevermind, it's just a picture of your mom! (Or other filthy object.

Seriously, using PEOPLE to do anything that requires more than clicking and flaming? I don't know if this project is gonna work.
---

been done

[Soong]

but with people. this is just www.amihotornot.com for craters.

Very interesting but not enough

[Ektanoor]

The palimpsest craters and the nearly wiped craters are some of the most important for age classification. This allows to provide a real picture of the age of Mars landscape. Recently some other things came into the game, the "crater-deformed" landscape. Structures, mainly in sedimented regions, that still retain traces of anciant craterization. These ones are the most hard to detect. Only the circular deposition of sediments, and some deformations on soil still show that we are in presence of craters.

All these ones can only be find through image processing. And oh my! Here the work is HUGE. Image processment allows mostly to remark the details of landscape. And we are not looking for craters in the right place but exactly in very wrong places. A wiped out crater in a edge of a cliff will give you a hint on how old such cliff is. Another crater in a sedimentary region will show how long sediments covered the landscape. And there is no common law to ease this task.

Meanwhile this classification is not bad at all. However I doubt that NASA will get any good on it. They are too stuck to their ideas of old dry Mars check a few things about ages. For example, I wondered how old they would call such crater like the pedestal crater in Janssen's Crater. At the beginning I thought that the thing was a "post-water" crater. In fact the study of very small craters showed that the thing hit Janssen's while still a sea. And it kept being such for much longer. The signature of small, nearly wiped and mostly invisible craters showed a very long period for the presence of water. An that Janssen still holds a lot of its morphology of that period.

Btw. Till now, water runs from a few places there. It oesn't live too long in the surface but it is there, underground, in the millions of liters.

I thought the answer was known

[Vassily Overveight]

From the FAQ :

Q. What scientific questions can be answered by the data that we clickworkers are providing?

A. The first stage of this pilot project is only trying to answer some meta-science questions:

Is the public ready, willing, and able to help science?

Many years ago, volunteers (mostly housewives) were enlisted to help analyze thousands of photos of cloud-chamber tracings. Scientists were looking for evidence of a particular particle, and in those days only human inspection could be used. To make sure that the volunteers would find the trace if it showed up, photos with phoney traces were periodically inserted. As I recall, the program was considered a success. It seems to me that the question has been answered. And I would also think that a similar process of inserting known items to make sure the volunteers are doing a proper job could be used.

Real uses of unskilled labor

[Thalia]

There are other projects organized by Open Mind that are designed to have non-skilled users teach computers character recognition and voice recognition. The handwriting recognition system is already on the Web. By using many individuals, the computer is taught to consistently recognize items.

I think the NASA project is basically make-work. After all, after all of the users have added their time and energy, the results are thrown away. They're not used to teach computers to recognize craters in the next evolution.

The point

[Ektanoor]

You don't see the point here? Crater classification is needed to create the historical map of Mars. Till now many analysis are made in the "pick-frame" method. You pick several frames through some method of selection. You analyse them nd throw a conclusion. Good and Bad. In my experience I saw a few times when NASA splitted a very good one, confunding a landscape formation with other just by ignoring some frames.

A systematic selection of craters will allow to form a more strightforward picture of the landscape. This work is massive. And computers, here, have several drawbacks to achieve this. Craters may have some common and well seen morphologies. But they also have a lot of individual traces that no computer will ever detect. Some of these traces can be quite confusing. For example a wiped out crater occurs to be more recent than its nearly preserved neighbor. Funny, but it does occur.

Right now it is possible that this clickwork is quite raw. But still is the right step to go. We need that map. Or else we will keep seeing hordes of investigators claiming that this place is that old, no it is that new or it's an alien face...