Citizen Science and Grid Computing

japonicus writes "The Economist has an article summarizing the current state of distributed computing (think SETI@home and its ilk), which suggests that distributed-human projects are going to be the next big thing. (We discussed one such project, the Galaxy Zoo, a few months back.) The distributed-computing platform BOINC is about to expand to human processing. Distributed proofreaders have been a longstanding success (yet inexplicably failed to get even a mention in the article); but there are a lot of other projects waiting in the wings."

Comments

'Citizen' science

[Arthur B.]

The Economist coined that out of their ass? Seriously, the current acception of 'citizen' is a person taken as subject to the laws of a specific government. What does *that* has to do with voluntary distributed computing? Nothing! They just assume voluntary distributed computing = virtuous, virtuous = good citizen, and there bingo citizen becomes synonymous with virtuous. Participation in a common project becomes not a personal contribution, but a contribution from us, *as subjects of a government*.

I'm not nitpicking, this is scary.