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Distributed Project To Classify SDSS Galaxies
Xandu writes "Be part of a human Beowulf by helping classify millions of galaxies from the SDSS at the Galaxy Zoo. From their about page, "Those involved are directly contributing to scientific research, while getting an opportunity to view the beautiful and varied galaxies that inhabit our universe. Why do we need people to do this, rather than just using a computer? The simple answer is that the human brain is much better at recognizing patterns than a computer. Galaxies are complicated objects that vary in appearance enormously, and yet in some ways they can be very similar. We could write a computer program to classify these galaxies, and many researchers have, but so far none have really done a good enough job. We have not been able to make computers 'see past' the complexity, to reliably identify the similarities that appear obvious to our eyes and brain. For now, and probably for some time yet, people do the best job of classifying galaxies."
Heh, I'll bite. Actually, this is version 2 (which came out 2 days ago). The original Galaxy Zoo was launched in July 2007, and only classified galaxies as spiral or not. This is much more fine-grained and allows for significantly better research.
And seriously, 6 jobs in the last 18 months. C'mon!
--Xandu
I also found that it took me probably 3 times as long to classify a single galaxy, because they've gone from an array of buttons to a tree of decisions for each picture. I hope it's worth it, but it's not as dead-simple to operate and it certainly takes longer.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Yep, some should be spared... I heard they provide a lot of btu's of energy.
(The dumbest argument for a movie plot. Ever.)
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
MTurk isn't free.