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Identify Galaxies Using Spare Wetware Cycles
hazem invites us to have fun, learn about galaxies, and actually help astronomers by looking at pictures of galaxies and identifying the type. Warning: it's more addictive than Tetris. From the site: "GalaxyZoo... harnesses the power of the internet — and your brain — to classify a million galaxies. By taking part, you'll not only be contributing to scientific research, but you'll view parts of the Universe that literally no-one has ever seen before and get a sense of the glorious diversity of galaxies that pepper the sky. Why do we need you? The simple answer is that the human brain is much better at recognizing patterns than a computer can ever be. Any computer program we write to sort our galaxies into categories would do a reasonable job, but it would also inevitably throw out the unusual, the weird and the wonderful. To rescue these interesting systems which have a story to tell, we need you."
is this going to work out anything like google image tag game did? so people classify these galaxies and with like 3 or 4 classifying the same galaxy, seeing which tags/classifications are agreed upon?
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Either because it's a dupe or we read about it somewhere else a week earlier.
But hey, keep up the good work, kdawson!
Reminds me of Stardust@Home ( http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/1 1/069248 / http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ )
Funny how human eyes are still needed for these tasks
To Identify them
Wouldn't it make sense to write a program and have it shunt all the uncertain galaxies over to human eyes?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
"Tetris Diary: Day One. This will be an ongoing catalog of the various Tetris shapes I see while playing the game.
First: A cube. Good start!
Second: A clockwise L-shape. I can feel the tension mounting!
Third: A counter-clockwise L-shape. What are the odds??
Fourth: A counter-clockwise S-shape! A trend emerges!
Fifth: A clockwise S-shape. Unbelievable!
Sixth: A STRAIGHT LINE! WE HAVE A STRAIGHT LINE!!!!
I have now reached the top of the screen and the game has ended. Will start again and try to contain my unbelievable excitement over cataloging shapes."
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Gah, you got me. It's been years, but someone finally got me.
This will increase metabolic output causing the propeller on your beanie to have to spin faster.
Higher caloric needs will also translate to increased oxidative stress levels, potentially leading to premature failure of your central processing unit.
Such a project only makes sense if there are a lot of galaxies. And indeed there are: thousands are visible, and estimates of the grand total vary between 100 billion and half a trillion.
Big numbers. But don't forget that each galaxy contains hundreds of millions of stars. Of which ours is just one.
Which should give us all a little humility. But it won't.
C'mon now. First my girlfriend gets hooked on Tetris and then suckers me into it too, so I play awhile/lot and then I start dreaming the little shapes all night, right? And now I'm solving captchas in my sleep! (profit!!!!)
Does this mean my wetware has been assimilated already?
...Of course this discussion is merely hypothetical.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
NewScientist Article:
http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12241-pub
Additional Background info here, linked to from that article:
http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg19425994.
Compare this to the Space.com - AP Article:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070711_ap_o
For whatever reason, the article that Space.com decided to go with fails to mention anything about this project representing a threat to mainstream cosmology or the CMB. Astrophysical enthusiasts reading Space.com, in other words, would not be informed by that article that somebody has even alleged that there is a possible anomalous artifact within the cosmic microwave background. I'm not advocating anything here other than that this appears to be more than a mere "dumbing down" of a complicated story. They could have easily dumbed down the concept of aligned galaxies and why that introduces a problem for the CMB. Instead, we got the following, which appears to not suggest any threat level to BB Theory whatsoever:
This sort of "damage control", if I may call it that, is not really very helpful when it comes to layman trying to understand what to believe.
We must be very careful of how we promote certain sceintific theories over others. It would be very easy to create a false consensus within society using public relations in this way.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
I have trying for a couple of minutes. Most of the pictures has a low resolution I supose this are galaxies far far away. But it is hardly to distinguish nothing.
See today's f8d...
DAMMIT!!
He got me too, since I just had to check what it was that "got you"!
And yes, of course my girlfriend saw it flash by, and wondered what it was.
I'll try and explain, but for some stupid knee-jerk reason I made the mistake of saying "nothing!" like she caught me doing something i shouldn't do.
This sucks.
Baboons are cute.
...but I've enjoyed doing it. Sometimes when I'm trying to come up with a solution to a problem, I find the best thing I can do is to focus on something fairly simple and let the ol' subconscious back burner do the work. I feel far less guilty cataloging galaxies than I do playing Solitaire!
Vanya's Law: "In any culture without irony, fart jokes will be the highest form of humor."
You mean this picture? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/15/star_dying _picture/
The good news: it put my name on two physics papers. The bad news: it's boring as hell. The really bad news: if you misclassify something, you'll at best throw someone off-track, and at worst, completely screw with someone else's research.
It's not fun unless you consider classifying galaxies fun, and it leaves itself open to internet asshattery. I hope the project gets pulled. Plus, what are legions of undergrad astrophysics students gonna do during their summer time? Go outside??? Spare them that terror!
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
It would be nice to have my own galaxy.
Let's see:
at 4.1335978835978835978835978835979e-7 Hz this could take a very long time.
What?
and it didn't get picked up? Would it be because I mentioned it was a UK university doing this?
Guys, I modded it down for you and everything! Should i just post what it goes to in the future? BTW, i wrote a special ip filter that blocks that image. Maybe I should release that open source, or at least turn over the image recognition logic to these galaxy identifiers. Might not work, but I thank the God Almighty every time it works for me.
They might want to give more incentive. In the least some feedback would make the task a little more rewardnig. I got bored fairly quickly.
The 'statistics' and the 'show my galaxies' sections are both not working. Perhaps once they are in place, it will be a little more fun to participate. There should be more info, such as "you were the first one to classify this galaxy", or "You were the 100th person to classify this galaxy", etc.
If the site gets popular they might add more features. I'd like to see how many galaxies i've done. How many galaxies other users have done, etc. In any case, I hope it catches on.
Someone created a Flickr pool of the more interesting ones: http://flickr.com/groups/galaxyzoo/pool/
These outfits have been operating unmolested for years.
If I set up a company offering to "name", say, an existing street, or mountain, or even person, for a fee I'm sure I'd be shut down in no time.
I find myself thinking "Are these the arms of a spiral?", then I close one eye, squint the other, stand on my head and rub my tummy for 2 minutes, then I click "Star/Don't know".
p ?id=588017677691715886? Can I name it the "Mammaire galaxy"? :)
They should a "Fuzz" button. Sometimes, that helps.
The most interesting object I've seen so far wasn't in the middle, so I wasn't asked about it but... Any astronomer in the audience can tell me what the object to the North-East of center is in http://cas.sdss.org/astro/en/tools/explore/obj.as
They should borrow an idea from captcha hackers: Identify galaxies to get free pr0n.
Table-ized A.I.
If you google "automated galaxy classification" there indeed are plenty of hits for research projects on such. (However, they are not the same one I originally saw.)
Table-ized A.I.
It's Galaxy: Hot or not?
(really, it's elliptical or spiral, but whatever)
I am sitting at a computer identifying galaxy types and thoroughly enjoying it. It is Saturday night. I am Geek. Thank you. Saturday Night + Computer + Galactic identification = Geek
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
The simple answer is that the human brain is much better at recognizing patterns than a computer can ever be.
you just keep thinking that. i think you're in for a wicked surprise.
If you find yourself signing up at web sites just because the captchas are so much fun, this is the hobby for you!
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Only if I can also name them. I've heard that people are already buying stars. So additionally I would like to own, say, 20% of the stars within the galaxy after determining the type. Of course, I am willing to go to 10% if it is a really big galaxy.
Then it seems an awful waste of space.
Only without the abysmal wages.
-- Cerebus
I am starting to feel very very small...
Based on the quality of the images, I can't even tell whether the galaxy is clockwise spiral or anti-clockwise spiral. The quality is horrible. If the galaxy looks like it is at a 45 degree angle, is that edge-on or elliptical or what? I think the images need to be better before this is useful. Help us help you is my message to the owners of that site.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
I thought that they already did! That's why we see everything twice - so that we can filter out the articles that we have already seen in order to prevent us from seeing everything twice.... Oh wait.
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
I puzzled why clockwise/anticlockwise should matter, given that it's indeterminate for any tilted galaxy (seen from 'underneath'?). Now I understand the 'axis of evil', I guess it's only the fact of the spinning (confirmed by people's agreement on apparent direction) that matters. Once you know it spins, you can work out from the apparent elongation of the blob which (two possible) axes might be involved. That's enough for a statistical test of the 'axis of evil'. Or is it?
rather use my "wetware" cycles on alcohol and masturbation.
Each of those objects appears to be a point source, meaning a star. The pair has roughly the same brightness and same color, so presumably they're similar-mass stars at the same distance. Just eyeballing the magnitude to be ~17 and the spectral type to be early M, they're probably located within a kiloparsec (~3000 light years).
Microsoft delenda est!
Here !
Maybe I am not the kind of people they are trying to attract, but I wonder: Why have this kind of "security" on a project like this?
It bugs me that the clockwise and anti-clockwise buttons are not symmetric. The very fact that one of the buttons is on the left and another in the center might bias people toward clicking one more often than the other, I think?
The easy way to solve this would be display each image to users as the original 50% of the time, and as the mirror image 50% of the time, reversing interpretation of the user input where appropriate. Then any biases should cancel out. But, if their grid overlay is accurate, they don't seem to be doing this.
They've probably already considered this and found it not to be a problem, I imagine, but maybe they haven't, and then the results might not be valid..
I have playing with this for a while and I feeling almost the same sensations of a kid looking through his new telescope.
I don't know if my time will be usefull for science, but at least I like to participate in this kind of initiatives.
After hours playing Tetris I usually feel guilty for my waste of time.
There are beatifll pictures and the fact that I could discover something really interesting encorage me.
I should be more initiatives like this.
I guess the "ragingfist.net" domain name was too subtle? Or the goatse domain host?
This is one of the most beatiful pictures.p ?ra=156.44275121&dec=13.71685856
I am not an astronomer, but I think it is a huge colision of an eliptical galaxy sucking a huge eliptical one.
http://cas.sdss.org/astro/en/tools/chart/chart.as
It just crops up at a different point in the process.
In the old days, you'd expose a bunch of film plates of a given chunk of sky, then have your assistant / grad student / whatever overlap them and look for anything that "appeared" or "moved" across the different frames.
5-10 years ago, you'd take digital images, then have your assistant / grad student / whatever "blink" back and forth between them, doing the same thing.
Nowadays, you take lots of digital images and feed them into a supercomputing cluster which analyzes them, then spits out a list of the things that "appear" or "move" that are most likely to be good targets for you... then you have your assistant / grad student / whatever take photometry, spectra, etc. to check on them.
The process gradually becomes more efficient, but the wetware's still in there - it's just being used in places where it matters most.
(I'm part of the wetware for one such project, in the / whatever category.)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I've been doing the galaxy thing for half an hour. I'm all like 'Links? Click click clickity click!'
The sheer enormity of the universe makes my (lay) mind wonder - could Earth be part of a bigger system? If all stars and planets were neurons, the galaxies could be like enormous brains, or something. Just a thought. :-)
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
"you insensitive clod," as in, "I am a genocidal maniac, you insensitive clod!"
Anyone know what this is?
588298661962973323
there is a video on google's tech talks by Luis von Ahn in it he talks about this and shows some of his on work in this field.
They are missing the obvious way to do this: "To see hardcore adult action click on the button that best describes the galaxy pictured above."
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning