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Citizen Scientists Help Explore the Moon
Pickens writes "NPR reports that NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is doing such a good job photographing every bit of the moon's surface that scientists can't keep up, so Oxford astrophysicist Chris Lintott is asking amateur astronomers to help review, measure, and classify tens of thousands of moon photos streaming to Earth using the website Moon Zoo, where anyone can log on, get trained, and become a space explorer. 'We ask people to count the craters that they can see ... and that tells us all sorts of things about the history and the age of that bit of surface,' says Lintott. Volunteers are also asked to identify boulders, measure the craters, and generally classify what is found in the images. If one person does the classification — even if they're an expert — then anything odd or interesting can be blamed on them. But with multiple independent classifications, the team can statistically calculate the confidence in the classification. That's a large part of the power of Moon Zoo. Lintott adds the British and American scientists heading up the LRO project have been randomly checking the amateur research being sent in and find it as good as you would get from an expert. 'There are a whole host of scientists ... who are waiting for these results, who've already committed to using them in their own research.'"
What's the chance that volunteers will "discover" that the man in the moon is actually Colbert?
Will citizen scientists help explore Uranus?
waka waka
20th century Marxism is not progress...
Now we will able to see all the alien moon bases before NASA and their NWO friends have a chance to PhotoShop them out.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Would they put my name as a coauthor of the papers? Yes? Deal!
From the faq (http://www.moonzoo.org/faq):
Q: What happens to the classifications I provide?
A: They're stored with those provided by everyone who comes to Moon Zoo. The Moon Zoo team will carefully analyse the results to make sure that collectively we're producing results that are useful to scientists -- keep an eye on the Moon Zoo blog for details. All results will eventually be made public for anyone to use.
I think the problem here is that it is all take and no give. Categorize our images for us! We'll give you the data "eventually". Crazy idea, how about doing the statistical correlation of multiple contributors in realtime and display that information on an overall map of the Moon so there's some sense of progress at the task.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Maybe they learned this from the distributed computing folks? SETI@Home and World Community Grid take advantage of the same process.
I think I found an important rock! Oh wait, it just a regular rock. Nevermind.
...would be to use the statistically-validated user input in a feed-forward image recognition neural network utilizing error feedback that would "learn" to identify the various features of interest. Use edge detection to identify the features of interest (for instance, by number just like a paint-by-number canvas), and have users "identify" what they see. We're talking about invariant scale here, which vastly simplifies the learning process as well as automated feature measurement.
I was doing this in the '90s using multi-band spectral imagery from LANDSAT with good success. I would imagine there have been some advances in this area since that time.
Why not just use a computer to count craters? The current algorithms for optical recognition should work rather well for 'find circles'. Not that it's nice that they're involving us normal folk in their fancy science, but this is the sort of mundane task that computers are made for....
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
...these citizens could spend their time volunteering their time and skills in their community and actually make a fellow human's life better on this planet. While this might be a good ploy to pique the interest of some students, I'm trying to figure out how this effort won't be moot in a few years when the computer image recognition/analysis software can do the same task much more efficiently.
since when did citizen mean amateur?
scientists are citizens too, you know. amateur scientists are not scientists, however.
Generally the difference between a skilled amateur and a professional is that the professional is getting paid. Of course there are unskilled amateurs, but for that matter there are also unskilled professionals.
Anyone who follows and correctly applies the scientific method is a scientist. Money changing hands has nothing to do with it. Think about it, if it were otherwise then why would NASA bother to solicit the input of amateurs for a scientific project?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
The training involved isn't that difficult. If it is something you are interested in, I would say it is easy. The confidence analysis is quite compelling and very accurate. (As accurate as you can get with statistical analysis. I plan on having an error rate of about .5% Which is pretty good.
However, Once every two hundred times, I am going to find an interesting anomaly that would make Richard Hoglan proud.
amateur scientists are not scientists, however.
Why? According to :
A scientist, in the broadest sense, is any person who engages in a systematic activity to acquire knowledge or an individual that engages in such practices and traditions that are linked to schools of thought or philosophy.
Surely if they do this, then it doesn't matter that they aren't paid or haven't been formally trained in a scientific field. There are limits to what you can achieve without an education, but what defines a scientist is the search for knowledge, not already having knowledge.
This is exactly the sort of mind numbing work grad students should be doing for a pittance. This will put them out of work! We are not providing the right incentives to create our next generation of scientists.
(that was supposed to be humor)
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The whalers on the moon, they carry harpoons!
Zero.
I cant wait to see how 4chans skriptkiddy army is going misuse this...
Surely if they do this, then it doesn't matter that they aren't paid or haven't been formally trained in a scientific field. There are limits to what you can achieve without an education, but what defines a scientist is the search for knowledge, not already having knowledge.
I'd argue that the scientific method is what makes a scientist, not "systematic activity to acquire knowledge"
Otherwise you end up with crap like "creation science" which starts with premises that ignore observed/tested facts and then runs off giggling into fantasy land.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
For those who don't know, Chris Lintott is one of the people behind the related project Galaxy Zoo, and for the past 10 years has been a presenter of the BBC astronomy programme The Sky At Night.
And why not use computers? Lintott says they can only identify what they are programmed to look for, and might miss the unusual. "Computers don't make discoveries," he says. "They don't point at the thing in the corner and ask the question: What's that?"
Computers can however, identify what they are programmed to look for, and then indicate any areas which have features which they do not recognise. At the very least he should write a filter to parse out the completely typical images before getting the general public to do his work for him.
This guy is either too lazy or cheap to write some image analysis software, or a luddite who doesn't trust computers.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
Amateur scientists aren't professional scientists; they don't make a living doing science. That's the distiction being made by the grandparent.
Moon Zoo is one of many projects on http://www.zooniverse.org/
It's a great way to learn about the various images/data being captured, both in our solar system and beyond, while actually contributing something to the scientific community. There is something extremely exciting about watching a clip of the sun and seeing a comet appear out of nowhere and zoom around the sun with its tail pointing away. Or being among the first to notice a new solar storm which might affect astronauts in orbit. Or spotting tiny little foot prints on the lunar surface from one of the Apollo missions in one of the images presented! It does get tedious at times, but the little discoveries make it interesting and rewarding overall. Plus they are great learning tools for curious people, both young and old - the scientists seem to frequently answer all sorts of questions on the forums regarding the images, projects and basic science surrounding them.
I'm not associated with any of the projects, I just find them interesting from time to time. I've learned a lot from the projects and have SEEN a lot more of the Universe around me because of them.
If that's the distinction being made by the grandparent, then why didn't he say so? He said, very clearly: "amateur scientists are not scientists".
Yet having knowledge provides context in the search for knowledge.
A great example of this is with the same organizations "Solar Stormwatch" program, frequently people will ask in the forums for confirmation of their interpretation of something they've seen. Someone with experience can say, that is "X", mark it, or ignore it, as appropriate.
The purpose is to improve the signal to noise ratio, which increases the productivity of researchers.
We have Moon image data from the 1960s rotting away on magnetic tape that
has NEVER been analyzed due to lack of time and priority on the scientists' part.
Data from satellite/manned missions has ALWAYS overwhelmed the processing and
analytical stages. This is one "dirty secret" NASA has never really admitted.
I created a required Zooniverse account in order to try out the Moon Zoo. New Zooniverse accounts have "show email" and "receive newsletters" automatically enabled by default. Shame on them.
Is that Roger Waters on The Dark Side of the Moon?
why isn't there a mentioning of the similar (older) project stardust@home?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardust@home
shame on you /. moderators