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Do Some Citizen Science

Posted by timothy on from the distributed dept.

Idmat writes "Citizen Science Projects points to interesting projects by "real people, doing real science." Find out how to do volunteer scientific research, and read about current efforts to gather and report data on everything from water quality to variable stars to frog populations."

3 of 10 comments (clear)

  1. What about... by keiferb · · Score: 4, Interesting

    the distributed.net projects? SETI at home? Protein folding? I like contributing to the really neat stuff without needing the advanced degrees to actually understand it.

    1. Re:What about... by DramaGeek · · Score: 3, Interesting

      For anybody that who is interested in this but has no idea where to start, I highly recomend BOINC. It's becoming the standard as more and more distributed projects convert to using it. Right now, SETI, Predictor, ClimatePrediction, and LHC (the particle accelerator). Follow the link for links to each individual project.

      http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

      With BOINC, you can run multiple projects, and it'll split resources between them. On multiprocessor (or hyperthreaded) machines, you can dedicate a processor to each project.

  2. great for everybody by bitingduck · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I had the opportunity to be a special awards judge at the Intel Science and Engineering Fair in 03, and had to look at nearly every project (first to sort for relevance for the award, then to rank those). Some of the coolest ones were the in the environmental science category. Typically it was very bright, excited kids doing good research in their local area to monitor things, or find out the impact of particular events or pollutants or problems. In a lot of cases they went as far as working with their local governments to mitigate problems that they investigated (e.g. dock preservatives damaging waterways). Great examples of "Citizen Science".

    If you ever get to attend the ISEF, I highly recommend it. It was much more fun than most professional conferences I go to.