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Herbaria@home, herbarium records, snapshot of the world before agriculture, including areas now completely obliterated. Found plant, Ghost Orchid, thought to be extinct.

Plant don’t move, but they do invade, e.g. Oxford Ragwort. Scilian plant introduced in 1700 to an Oxford botanical garden, escaped, and now has spread out across UK. Roesbay willowherb, but railways have distributed seeds and now it’s everywhere. Plants also go by road, e.g. Danish scurvy grass, should be coastal, but now has colonised verges.

Plant populations are in flux. Modern survey data alone isn’t enough, so need the historic data to give context.

Web based project to

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Einstein@Home is a traditional citizen science project. Have 100,000 computers at any one time contacting project and looking for work. People join the project by joining website, download & install software, and then leave it alone. Get a screensaver (which is very pretty!), and when their computer is idle it is analysing data.

Physics experiment data. Not simulating, but taking real data about physical world and searching for very weak signals that reveal neutron stars – very compact, small start, 10km radius, which beams radio waves like a lighthouse. As beam passes by Earth you see a flash. Forms when

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Most citizen computing projects can do no wrong. That does not apply to climate science. ClimatePrediction.net raises a few hackles, often in situations such as a recent meeting about investment in supercomputer, and when someone said, “I hear you can do a lot of this on PS3s nowadays?” there was a degree of hostility.

It’s just a way of addressing certain problems. People think of models as being done on a petaFLOP Cray XT-6, but most climate scientists don’t have access to these. They can have access to citizen scientists.

Climate modelling depends on:

• Complexity, e.g. number of processes,

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Comp scientist at UC Berkley, building platform for citizen science. Looking for commonalities, software support that addresses community’s needs to make it easier for scientists to use volunteer power. Tech is only one piece of the solution.

Build platforms for:

• Volunteer computing
• Distributed thinking
• Education

Computational science:

Simulations are now so vastly complex that they can only be done on computer. Simulations at various scales,  e.g. proteins, ecosystems, Earth, galaxy, universe. . Need lots of computing power because need to fit models to observed data. To predict what’s going to happen you need to run thousands or millions of simulations.

Generation of new

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Where’s George? is a project tracking one dollar notes in the US. Put a stamp on the note, and log it on the website. Creates link between the two places where the not was logged. Provides a lot of data about how money moves around the US, therefore data about how people move around the US.

Administrative system of US: Divisions contain States contain Counties. Spatially compact hierarchical structure historically evolved with geographic determinants.

Human mobility – are these divisions spatially compact, determined by geography? How much geography is encoded in the network of money movements?

Can make groups of

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I’m here at the Citizen Cyberscience Summit for the next two days. Expect quite a few notes (although probably not all session!).

Lessons in crowdsourcing.

Nothing new under the sun. Science shaped by forces that have existed a long time, and we understand them. Works on calculation and making mathematical models work. That has long history as being citizen science, going back 200 years. Take large task, divide into small exchangeable jobs, send out into the world with instructions on how to do them. Charles Babbage wrote extensively about this in the 1830s.

Babbage was thinking about this because of

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• Data Converter
  Kevin: This looks very handy for data journalism. Paste in CSV or tab-delimited data into a form, and it will output the data in common web data formats such as JSON, XML, Actionscript or Ruby.
  (tags: data converter json excel csv xml conversion tools 2010)
• How will location-based services play out for publishers?
  Kevin: Ellie Behling at eMedia Vitals writes: "Despite slow adoption rates, media brands should pay attention to location-based services. Localized information is probably the next frontier for information; it's just catching on slowly. As the technology evolves and smartphones become more popular, adoption will increase."