Crowd-sourcing "citizen science," new products and ideas

Citizen engagement is essential to our fast-changing civilization. Politics could certainly use more empowerment of common citizens. So could innovative commerce, and even national defense relies on a robust citizenry. But one area with especially bright prospects, is crowd-sourced -- or individual participation in -- inventiveness and science.

It's a topic I've discussed many times. As a teenager, growing up in Los Angeles, I participated in the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO), gathering mountains of data for professional astronomers, one of countless such groups that you might learn about via the Society of Amateur Scientists. In my new novel Existence, I portray this trend accelerating as individuals and small groups become ever more agile at sleuthing, data collection and analysis -- and forming very very smart, ad-hoc, problem-solving "smart mobs." But even in the months since that book was published, reality seems to be catching up with fiction.

For example, as funding dollars for science are increasingly under threat, a number of groups are offering opportunities for crowd-funded basic research, enabling citizens to interact directly with teams at the cutting edge of some topic. Envision a kind of KickStarter for science research. Dr. Jai Ranganathan, co-founder of the SciFund Challenge, asks "What would this world look like if every scientist touched a thousand people each year with their science message? How would science-related policy decisions be different if every citizen had a scientist that they personally knew? One thing is for sure: a world with closer connections between scientists and the public would be a better world. And crowdfunding might just help to get us there."

Backers receive periodic updates on their chosen projects and direct communication with researchers. They may also receive souvenirs, acknowledgment in journal articles, invitations to private seminars, visits to laboratories or field sites, and occasionally, naming rights to new discoveries or species. One advantage to researchers is that they can receive funding in a matter of weeks, rather than months.

Current projects on the science funding site Petridish include: saving the Samaki fish in the world’s largest desert lake, monitoring glacial lakes, and tracking sharks with satellites. Or on Microryza, you can contribute to tracking Magellenic Penguins, or exploring the stability of neural networks. iAMscientist offers opportunities as diverse as monitoring Diamondback Terrapins with new tracking technologies, and robotic hand rehabilitation for stroke victims. Recent projects on RocketHub's SciFund Challenge include projects to identify new drug candidates to treat Alzheimer's disease, developing artificial photosynthesis, or saving stressed coral reefs on Kiribati. Or you can donate to specific projects, like LiftPort, which aims to build a space elevator. 

If you're looking for more active involvement in research projects, you might try SciStarter, Scientific American's Citizen Science, or Zooniverse, which offers a compilation of projects for citizen involvement, such as studying how solar storms affect conditions on earth at Solar Stormwatch and identifying exoplanets at PlanetHunters. Volunteers can help classify galaxies at Galaxy Zoo, learn to map retinal connections at EyeWire, map the age of Lunar rocks with MoonZoo, or analyze extraterrestrial signals with SETILive. You can donate your home computer's processing power to SETI@Home to help analyze data from radio telescopes such as Arecibo.

Indeed, one worthy project that could help in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence more effectively than the sadly obsolete program at the Seti Institute would be to re-ignite Project Argus, the alternative endeavor of the Seti League, that envisions setting up 5000 radio telescopes in back yards across the planet, keeping the entire sky under observation, all the time, instead of peering through a super-narrow soda straw at distant specks of space, one at a time.  A system far more likely to catch the rare blip of an alien race "pinging" us, which recent calculations show to be more plausible than the imagined tutorial "beacons."  In any event, this is where one millionaire could help thousands of eager (and tech savvy) amateurs to become key members of a worldwide smart mob, hunting ol' ET down!

Citizens have long participated in regional bird counts, as well as monitoring butterfly migration, wildlife, and local water quality. Technology has enabled high quality data collection and recording tools to be widely available to amateurs. You can even do science without leaving your home...the online game Foldit allows gamers to compete to fold protein structures to achieve the best scoring (lowest energy) configuration.

Whatever your level of involvement, you can have the satisfaction of participating in humanity's greatest endeavor. In an era when political factions and media empires are waging relentless "war on science" this trend toward active participation -- or providing some financial support -- is the surest way to help support an active, vigorous, future hungry and scientific civilization.

Well... and vote, of course.   And show your crazy uncle the melting of the arctic...

==Crowd Sourcing Ideas and Innovation! ==

Then there's tinkering and creating new products, new services, the sort of thing that Adam Smith (and anyone with sense) proclaimed as the heart and soul of productive enterprise. Sure, good things have happened to help stimulate creativity.  Patent law was (believe it or not) a huge advance over what came before.  Venture capitalists tend to have the imagination of Galapagos finches, but they, too, were somewhat of a step forward. Only, now, as we finally creep out of the dullard doldrums of the Naughty Oughts, there arrive dozens of new approaches that may do a lot of good, stimulating our creative juices.

Unused inventions get crowd-sourced spark: Marblar is the latest in a string of “open innovation” sites that attempt, in one way or another, to encourage inventiveness online.  It does this by crowdsourcing a simple request:find new uses for under-exploited patents.

Related endeavors? ArticleOne asks its community of users to find “prior art” – published documents that show an invention existed before it was patented – to quash patents that firms have been accused of infringing.  (It also helps good/original patents to thrive!)

Or take: Innocentive, where companies and NGOs present problems that they feel need solving – such as how to develop a portable rainwater storage system for the developing world. On the flipside, IBridgeNetwork and Yet2.com post university and corporate research in a bid to find people who’ll license their technology to commercialize it.

== Then build it! ==

And the Maker Trend builds momentum!  Read about new companies that will bring 3D printing to the home. Letting you take a downloaded or self-made template and order up a physical version. Even a sculpture made from your head-scan. Commercial 3-D printing works with only a few dozen types of materials, mostly metals and plastics, but more are in the works. Researchers are experimenting with exotic “inks” that range from wood pulp to sugar. (And stem cells! But that's a different story...)  Some devices can extrude liquid foods, like icing and melted chocolate. Soon we’ll be able to print everything from birthday cakes to electric circuits, potentially making complex electronics from scratch.

"When 3-D printers make an object, they use an “additive” technology, which is to say they build objects layer by layer from the bottom up. (By contrast, other computer-controlled machines, such as the CNC router and CNC mill, are “subtractive”; they use a spinning tool to cut or grind away material.)"

Yes yes.  But will you (gentle reader) forgive me if I add a perhaps mysterious parenthetical? Both methods miss the real deal.  I know how to do it -- create 3D objects -- by actual random access of individual points in space!  But I ain’t telling.

==Programming for Everyone==

While we’re on the burgeoning topic of crowd-sourcing…  Inform the world about Raspberry Pi!  Can a $35 computer persuade kids to put down their smartphones and try their hands at programming?   Or at least explore the guts that make things work? Another part of the new Maker Movemen.

Long before I keynoted a recent Maker Faire, I was trying to throw incendiaries about this matter.  For example in the Salon Magazine article “Why Johnny Can’t Code,” which complained about the lack of a common – very basic – programming language in all computers. Something simple, reliable and universal -- remember when ALL "home" computers had such a lingua franca language that all kids could fool with?  One so common that textbook publishers used to include try-it-at-home exercises in all the math and science books. Yes that language sucked.  But millions of kids got a taste of what made the pixel move -- (an algorithm!) -- and that does not happen anymore.

(Incidentally, that article brought me more hate mail than even my pieces dissing Star wars!)

Perhaps Raspberry Pi will help to change that, yet again.Tomorrow’s kids may know more about the “guts” of their technological world than the video-game generation does.  In part thanks to great efforts like this.

== And finally... some sci-miscellany ==

Physics wonks!  Uncertainty over the Uncertainty Principle? Canadian researchers have cleverly used "weak measurement" methods to glimpse the polarization of a light wave before it enters a strong measurement device, in order to appraise whether the effects of measurement are as predicted by the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle.  If verified, the results might indicate that Uncertainty caused by measurement may be but smaller and more complex than we thought.  Maybe.

Random science thought...Is science a one-man enterprise?  Diametrically opposite to fantasy's romantic images of wizards, the best scientists publish and share as quickly as they can.  And even when they have towering egos, they know they aren't doing it alone. The Poster Boy is a good example. Galileo is credited with a number of discoveries during the Gosh-Wow-Look! era of astronomy.  Yet very few were uniquely his.  As one of you commented recently: "Marius concluded that Jupiter had moons one day later than Galileo.  David Fabricius published a pamphlet several months before Scheiner made his meticulously documented series of observations, which in turn was a month or two ahead of Galileo.  Harriot as usual was ahead of everyone, and as usual never published.  Sure, he deserved attention as the sun around which science revolved in his era." (See my short story about Galileo at Harvard!) "But take Galileo out of the equation, and all the same discoveries are made.  We'd be talking about Scheiner's sunspots, Fabricius' lunar mountains, Marius' moons of Jupiter, or Lembo's phases of Venus!"

== Final Notes ==

Sexiest job of the 21st Century: Data Scientist, according to The Harvard Business Review.

Should our 8 hours of sleep be divided into "firste sleep" and seconde sleep"?

Is it really about to be 2025... the home time of the Jetsons?  Here's a contemplation of the Jetsons, and how they influenced our attitudes (and expectations) of the Future. Even more chilling, it will soon be 2015, the (back to the) Future of Marty McFly... and where's my Mr. Fusion?

Yes, I know... this was a long posting.  But it's about the really important stuff!  Alas, next time we'll return to the aggravating irritation known as politics.

Ways to carry this revolution forward...How you can help!

Finally! Clarity. And now, each of us can find ways help to carry this revolution forward.

One way -- simply add a little to the tsunami of small donations to Senator Obama's campaign... and contributing to the Democratic Party, so the fight can be taken down to the level of Congressional and state districts, where the real transformation awaits. Seriously, if you donate to one, please match with the other.

Nevertheless, it is both futile and unamerican -- as well as rather pathetic -- to yearn for salvation at the hands of some charismatic leader-politician. That sends the wrong message, especially to the politicians! At another level, this year is about ending Culture War the only way it can be won... by swaying our fellow citizens, one at a time. Each of us taking responsibility to change this battlefield our country's become. Not by attacking Red America, but by shattering the Red Coalition. By asking “decent conservatives” to leave the neoconservative cult that has ruined their movement and nearly ruined our country.

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Not all conservatives will be approachable. Even the minority who are still willing to talk -- like that quirky but lovable uncle of yours -- may take umbrage if you go after them with typical liberal cant or Michael Moore rants. The method I have recommended is to show the decent-but-in-denial “ostrich” conservatives that they have been betrayed by the GOP even in strictly conservative terms. 

I’ve provided a detailed playbook, The Ostrich Papers: How it Will Take All Decent Americans to Restore Decency to America, for awakening such ostriches -- along with a much shorter, handy Cheat Sheet for Ostrich Hunters.

And there are plenty of “roused ostriches” out there who can make yours feel not-alone! Here’s an example: Frank Schaeffer writing in the Huffington Post.

Then again, if your ostriches can’t stomach Obama, steer them to the Libertarians! I am unabashed about wishing libertarians - who at least have a foundation of freedom-loving sincerity - would become more reasonable and pragmatic, then earn their proper place as America’s second party (while the Republicans go the way of the Whigs and Know-Nothings!) True, this year’s LP candidate is an especially nasty and noxious piece of work; still, if small government republicans were to flood into the LP, it could both help demolish the GOP and transform libertarianism itself, perhaps even turning it into something worth talking about.

There are other things we can do. Volunteer for poll-watching or precinct work. Help a local state assembly campaign! Again, these low-level races are where change matters most. Here’s my own favorite: Find and register any unregistered voters and help students prepare to vote absentee, in November. (This often messes them up.) Get better acquainted with any members of the military you know, and listen, humbly, to their concerns.

And listen for signs of whatever last-ditch trick the neocons have up their sleeves. Currently, paranoia is running rife over a possible attack on Iran, with betting that the US Navy won’t cooperate, but the Air Force is a-raring to go. Signs and portents are studied, like the recent firing of Admiral Fallon from head of Central Command... and the even more recent firing of several Air Force officials by Defense Secretary Gates. (The former was clearly a putsch by the Bush White House. The latter MAY be something of a counter-attack by Gates.)

Is Gates the “adult in the room” who will defend us from some awful stunt? Some final frat-boy prank? Will the intelligence community rouse itself, at last, and remember its duty to protect us even from monsters at the top? Stay tuned.

===As “Mr. Transparency”... Let’s say I approve...===

On the same day that he became the presumptive Democratic nominee for President, Sen. Barack Obama submitted a bill to expand public access to information about government spending. The bill, known as “The Strengthening Transparency and Accountability in Federal Spending Act of 2008,” was crafted on a bipartisan basis with Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK). Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, is also an original co-sponsor of the bill, as is Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE). This is far bigger than it looks! Because I contend that the biggest ripoff of the Bush Administration was its use of “emergency” over-rides to bypass normal contracting rules!

Say what? Contracting rules? How boring! No wonder almost no pundits or newsfolk have even glanced at this issue. And yet, it is arguably the main purpose of the Iraq War! Forget Michael Moore’s ditzo-moronic explanation that “it’s all about oil.” Do YOU see floods of Iraqi oil pouring into the west? No, follow the actual money! While our armed forces suffer and bleed and lose their readiness, almost a trillion dollars has poured into the open maws of “field service contractors” like Halliburton, KBR and Blackwater, through no-bid, crony contracts to Bush family friends, bypassing normal procedures... because this is an “emergency.”

Let there be no mistake. THIS is a top reason for the war, because -- other than demolishing our alliances, economy, readiness, reputation and happiness -- it represents the number one assertive effect of all this trauma. Everything else is window dressing. And that is why Senator Obama’s bill is so important. (Note, as evidence for how important this is, Senator McCain is also behind it. He may be wrongheaded and half crazy, but at least he isn’t a corrupt traitor.)

===Make Science an Issue!===

Is Obama going to be the first politician who actually gets it, that all the polls and focus groups and pablum-advice from consultants follow public opinion? A politician can also lead it! And one place where a suprise turn might make a real difference is by assertively making science and technology an issue.

Yes, it would seem that middle Americans and battleground states aren’t interested. And yes, most scientists are already backing BHO. Still, even mentioning the devastation that the GOP has wrought upon our scientific and technological leadership could resonate more powerfully than any consultant would imagine. There are hundreds of thousands of savvy people out there who would see this as a sign that Obama can see a few steps beyond an election.

And nothing says “hope” better than expressing a belief in our ability to solve problems.

And yes, I’ve mentioned this before. Among my “suggestions to the Democratic Congress” l was one that should have been a no-brainer, automatic first-step. Upon entering office, Nancy Pelosi should simply have re-established the independent Congressional science and technology advisory apparatus that was dismantled by Newt Gingrich and his colleagues, as the very first shot in the Republican War on Science. I do not know why she and her fellow congressional leaders have abstained from such a simple, inexpensive and dramatic step, which could be achieved without even much worry about a presidential veto. It would make clear the most extreme partisan difference of all, between one side that is “reality based” and the other, with its dependence upon fevered dogma and rejection of evidence.

Of course, beyond scoring political points, it would also simply be the right and smart and responsible thing to do. Anyway, I’ll keep plugging at this -- and I hope you folks will, too.

Only now another thought occurs to me. Rep. Pelosi might consider adding a layer to the science advisory apparatus. Here’s what I recommend. In addition to setting up methods to ensure that the main science advisory panels remain politically neutral, she might call for an outer, advisory commission, consisting of one eminent scientist or other professional, appointed by each member of Congress, independent of party. These 535 luminaries (who would serve pro-bono) would receive all Congressional technical reports and have the right to post, online, their own appraisals and discussions. In effect, it would be the “scientific and technical shadow” of Congress, since each senator or representative will have chosen (upon advice) the “best” technically savvy person in his or her district, who is also basically compatible with his or her viewpoint.

At minimum, the resulting online deliberations should be interesting and involve a higher level of scientific discourse than those in Congress itself... though still having a strong correlation with the general views of the elected representatives of the people. But the advantages go further.

1) This could staunch propaganda about the main Congressional advisory panels being biased, since the shadow commission would keep a wary eye.

2) If this outer commission reaches consensus to accept (or revise) a particular proposal, then it would provide political cover for the Senator or Congressperson to do the same.

3) And now the less-elevated but politically potent part. There is a significant portion of today’s Congress that is genuinely loony and biliously hateful toward science. These men and women claim not to be, and hence, they would have to cooperate superficially, and appoint their own members to the commission. But this will put them into a terrible bind. If they choose somebody eminent, with genuine credentials and peer respect, they risk getting unwelcome news from their own appointee. On the other hand,, suppose they pick a “scientist” of the flaky, fifth tier, primarily on the basis of some dogma-driven agenda like climate change denial or creationism -- then this will put the representative on record, in the open. The appointment will be open for glaring scrutiny... and politically-damaging hilarity.

This commission would be a complete win-win for Pelosi and the Congressional Democrats. Alas, though. Bets whether anything like it will happen?

===And on a related note...===

Nothing better distills the need for subtlety, in this changing political environment, more than the news that (forced by a court order) the Bush White House has finally (four years late) released its official, compiled assessment of the likely effects of global climate change on the United States and its citizens. The good news? They now are on record admitting GCC is real, major, threatening and driven hard by human-generated pollution. The bad news? We are still being led by people who were forced to admit this, after years of lies and deception.

Where does subtlety come in? Don’t you want to just run around and rub this in the noses of all those morons who parroted the Fox News “balanced” line, calling for “more research” while at the same time torpedoing science budgets? Well, remember that we aren’t in this for the satisfaction of screaming. In order to achieve pragmatic results, we must distinguish between “ostriches” and “troglodytes.”

Trogs are folks who are hopeless. They are enemies of the Enlightenment for reasons that are too deep and psychological ever to rise up and offer loyalty to a modern civilization that’s been very good to them. Underneath their surface rationalizations -- e.g. religious dogma, ‘suspicion of government’ (while vampirically using it), or imperialism - lies a far more basic layer of loathing that you’ll never ease or palliate with reason. Facts mean nothing, since they have been wrong repeatedly, for the last half century - about civil rights, womens’ rights, the environment, education - yet they keep adapting with stunning agility, for example, putting pictures of Martin Luther King - and Clarence Thomas - on their walls and denying that they had ever been racist. Just watch how, within a year or two, these same folk will start denying that they had ever been Climate Change deniers! What’s needed right now is for folks to get these trogs on record, before the latest sudden veer of conservatism has a chance to really take hold. Get them to stake their future credibility upon their fast-decaying denial mantra. If possible get it in writing. But at minimum, get them to say it, aloud.

Ostriches are another matter. I speak of them extensively elsewhere. These folks are victims of the neocon madness. We need them to lift their heads, in order to end Culture War. In order to do this, the latest neocon veer should be used as a pointed example, to show them that they cannot trust Fox or the exploitive right. If they want a decent conservatism, they will have to rise up and help re-invent it, by separating it from the monsters now controlling the movement. First step: helping us send the neocons packing.

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See more: Politics for the Twenty-first Century