Posts

April 16, 2013

+

4:45 PM | Media Is Unreal: Bring Media Literacy into Science Literacy

Last year, a colleague struggling to find the right word to express her thoughts in a group discussion asked, “What is the opposite of media?” I paused before giving my answer, waiting to hear other thoughts. There was only silence. I answered, “Reality, of course.” My cousin is a teacher and he does a thought-provoking [...]

March 05, 2013

+

5:47 PM | Animal Care Ethics in Citizen Science: My Conundrum

Several recent blog posts and a session at Scio13 (discussed here) have addressed ethical issues in citizen science. Ethics in research is taken extremely seriously in academia: every single research project that involves human subjects gets reviewed by an independent committee (an Institutional Review Board, IRB) before it begins. When citizen science involves human subjects, [...]

February 28, 2013

+

5:00 PM | Pearls across the Zooniverse: When Crowdsourcing Becomes Citizen Science

Recently, Adam Stevens looked at where crowdsourcing ends and citizen science begins and raised his doubt that the projects in the Zooniverse qualify as citizen science. According to Stevens, categorizing images (“data crunching, plain and simple”) is what happens before science really starts. When I run a race, it appears to start with the bang [...]

January 22, 2013

+

10:32 PM | The Citizen Science of Climate Change: We are not bystanders

Superstorm Sandy prior to the 2012 Presidential election put climate change on the mind of many voters. Earlier this month, a Federal Advisory Committee of 13 collaborating agencies released a Draft Climate Assessment Report for public review. The data show the climate is already changing: rising sea-level, ocean acidification, damage to infrastructure, and impacts on [...]

January 10, 2013

+

6:00 PM | The Most Stressful Science Problem

Last week Forbes Magazine listed university professor as one of the top 10 least-stressful jobs. Academics, particularly scientists, were indignant and flooded Forbes with stories asserting stress levels that induce Einstein hair in a world that doesn’t appreciate their work. There are two sides to science: the deadlines, constant searches for funds, and long hours [...]

November 21, 2012

+

10:01 PM | Stone Soup for Thanksgiving: understanding bird disease through citizen science

When somebody opens their front door to pick up the morning newspaper and sees a dead bird below their hedge, they get curious for answers. As soon as they stoop down for a closer look, an Indiana Jones adventure unfolds within the confines of their backyard. Was it poison, disease, predation, starvation, old age? Is [...]

August 30, 2012

+

11:39 AM | Victorian-era citizen science: reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated

In my last blog post, I introduced Matthew Maury, an American naval officer who began a citizen science project in the mid-1800s that transformed seafaring and drew society closer to science. Now let’s meet his British counterpart, William Whewell, an elite scholar who engaged the public to understand the tides, but in so doing helped [...]

August 23, 2012

+

12:12 PM | Retro Science – Part 1

My teen and tween daughters have started wearing big sunglasses. They feel confident and cool because they think this style is radically new and flamboyant. Would it burst their bubble to show them a picture of Jackie Kennedy in those shades? I don’t think so—they’d simply mix in styles from other decades like today’s “jeggings” [...]

July 03, 2012

+

4:32 PM | Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Data

Ever since Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, we celebrate with a day of relaxation, barbecues, and the pageantry of dazzling fireworks. Little known is that in 1776, Jefferson had a second great vision that shaped the United States. Like the Declaration, his second vision also relied on citizens relishing civic duty and claiming their [...]