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.

been done

[Soong]

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

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.