Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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 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.
I'm sorry,but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all. It's now called Urectum.
Reminds me of the game Mass Effect 2. They had a little Easter egg in there.
You had to harvest planets for mineral resources in order to have the raw materials for upgrading your equipment. You harvest a planet by orbiting it and sending robotic probes to the surface that presumably bring back the raw materials from their landing sites. When you send a probe down to any planet, your ship's computer (an AI) says things like "launching probe" or "probe launched".
You can visit the Solar System in this game. If you orbit Uranus and launch a probe there, the computer voice says "Now Probing Uranus". It says that only once and it's the only time it says anything other than the standard phrase.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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".
It sounds a bit childish, really. How can you say it is all take and no give, and then immediately say that they WILL be giving you the results, but only after it has gone through that pesky scientific process.<WHINE>But I want it now!</WHINE>
What is the problem with waiting for the right answer? Zakabog has already pointed out that a real time display could be used maliciously, but it could even skew the results by well-intentioned people. If the first person who submits a result for a given region makes a mistake, then the next person who analyses that region might compare their results with the first and "correct" their own mistake. If you use statistics to build confidence in the results then the last thing you should do is tell the subjects what you are currently expecting them to do. That only uses statistics to compound errors.
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.
You might want to check out some of those pictures before jumping in with speculations.
Craters are being lit from various dirns, depending on the latitude, longitude and Sun position. This sort of imagery needs a human mind to correctly process it. Furthermore, it's not only about "counting craters", but identifying other interesting features (such as crater bouldery, artificial structures, linear features, moulds and so on). Plus, images have varying degrees of clearness (I found some corrupt images as well, pity you can't report them). The "Boulder Wars" minigame itself is rather interesting too.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
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+