News, Science

Become a Sunspotter and play Solar ‘Hot-or-Not’

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A few months ago we quietly placed a new project online. Called Sunspotter, it was essentially a game of hot-or-not for sunspot data – and since there were not many images available at the time, we thought it best to just let it be used by the people who noticed it, or who had tried it during the beta test. The results have since been validated, and the site works! In fact there are even preliminary results, which is all very exciting. Loads of new images have now been prepared, so today Sunspotter gets its proper debut. Try it at www.sunspotter.org.

On the site you are shown two images of sunspot groups and asked which is more complex. That might sound odd at first, but really it’s quite easy. The idea behind the science of Sunspotter is summed-up neatly on the Sunspotter blog:

I’m pretty sure you have an idea of which is the more complex: a graduate text on quantum mechanics, or an Italian cookbook? On the other hand, it would not be straight-forward for a computer to make that choice. The same is true with sunspot groups.

Or put another way: like many things in life, you’ll know complexity when you see it. Try it out now: it works on laptops, desktops, tablets and phones and you can keep up to date on Twitter, Facebook, G+, and the project’s own blog.

Screenshot 2014-06-13 19.39.24

Education

Taiwan Teachers Workshop

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Teacher professional development workshops run in conjunction with science meetings offers educators and scientists a unique opportunity to learn from one another.  On Sunday March 2, 2014 the Taiwan Teachers Workshop was held as part of the Citizen Science in Astronomy Workshop  at the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Academia Sinica in Taipei.  The Citizen Science in Astronomy Workshop brought together astronomers, data scientists, and web developers together to discuss the challenges of working with large datasets and best practices in utilizing the power of citizen science to work with these datasets.  Recognizing an opportunity to bring Zooniverse project scientists together with area educators,  Meg Schwamb, Stuart Lynn, Lauren Huang and Mei-Yin Chou worked with teachers to introduce concepts of citizen science with special focus on Planet Four and Galaxy Zoo.  Earlier this year these two projects were translated into Traditional Chinese as part of  Zooniverse’s push to translate various projects into as many languages as possible through the efforts of our extensive volunteer community.

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To add to this translation effort, a number of existing Zooniverse educator resources were also translated into Traditional Chinese including Planet Four & Galaxy Zoo lesson plans and Galaxy Zoo teacher and student guides.  You can find the workshop presentations and links to the translated educational materials at  http://taiwan.zooteach.org/.

 Funding for the Taiwan Teachers Workshop was generously provided by Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and Technology.

 

 

 

News

Zooniverse job at the University of Portsmouth

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As part of the increased involvement in the Zooniverse at the University of Portsmouth, we are offering a two-year research position to work closely with the main Zooinverse development team and help foster local Zooniverse projects within Portsmouth and beyond. This new position is part of the official buy-in of Portsmouth into the Citizen Science Alliance and builds on past and present Zooniverse interest at the university. For example, researchers at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation were involved in getting the original Zooniverse project Galaxy Zoo off the ground in 2007, and they have also explored the subsequent data-set from this ground-breaking citizen science project. ICG researchers such as Karen Masters, Bob Nichol and Tom Melvin remain heavily involved in Zooniverse projects related to Galaxy Zoo. Also at Portsmouth, Joe Cox is PI of a funded EPSRC project entitled VOLCROWE, looking at the economics of online volunteering with particular interest in crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding. This project plans to study the motivations of citizen scientists and explore ways to optimise the breadth and depth of user involvement. The new developer would join this diverse team and help build a growing interest in all things Zooniverse at the University of Portsmouth and beyond.

Details of the job, including how to apply, can be found at http://www.icg.port.ac.uk/2014/04/senior-research-associate-zooniverse/

Education

My Path to Informal Science Education

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It seems as though how one gets into informal science education is different for everyone. I’m going to share my experience of how I became an educator with Zooniverse at Adler Planetarium. I feel very lucky to be in my current position, and there was a lot of researching and networking involved in getting to this point.

My background is in Astronomy and Space Physics. I went to University of Kansas for my undergraduate career and earned Bachelors of Science degrees in Astronomy and Physics with a research certificate. During this time, I was engaged in outreach opportunities and practice presentations through departmental organizations and internships. We were asked to present our research for a variety of audiences, including professionals, school children, and the public. My advisors had taught me that it was part of the job of being a researcher to be able to communicate my work to anyone.

I went on to graduate school at University of Michigan for Space Physics. My graduate advisor was quite supportive of us participating in education and outreach, but I quickly learned that this is not the case with all advisors. After spending three years in a science program geared toward becoming a researcher, I changed my academic goals. I wanted to work primarily on informal science education.

I had been so focused on conducting research for the past six years of my life that I was not sure how I make such a jump to another path. I started by looking for volunteer opportunities and working on my graduate advisor’s NASA Education and Public Outreach (EPO) grant. I also asked everyone I met at museums and through NASA EPO about how they got into their informal education positions.

Some of the career paths I heard from informal educators involved graduate programs in education or museum studies, participation in teacher training programs, and employment or volunteering throughout high school and college at informal education institutions. I did a search for programs (programs I found are included below), but I ended up finding out that there was a graduate certificate program at Michigan that could be completed in one year. Within two months I had found the program, applied, met with the director, and was accepted for the following year’s program. No one from my department had been involved in this program and as it turned out very few science or engineering students ever had. I felt very lucky with how things worked out.

The Museum Studies Program at University of Michigan seems quite thorough for a program that can be completed in one year. The program includes museum seminar courses covering all aspects of museums, several museum visits to experience different types of museums, elective courses involving the museum area of your interest, and a practicum or museum internship. The practicum is where your networking skills really come in handy and was how I found an internship at Adler Planetarium. I interned in the citizen science department where I now work, and some of my fellow museum studies students also found work at the institutions they interned at. Most museum internships are unpaid, but the museum studies program at University of Michigan tries to help people out with funding during their practicum. Volunteering can also give you experience though, since some volunteers work on a particular project in an area that interests them.

From my experience thus far, I recommend a few things. First, volunteer, even if you only have 3 hours a week to help out. It shows that you are interested in being a part of that field and gives you experience. I also recommend taking advantage of as many opportunities as possible to learn more about informal education, because it happens in many places that you would not always suspect. Finally, make sure you get out there and network. It could be through workshops, volunteering, or even online sites such as LinkedIn. Meet other people in informal education to hear about the path of their career and to gain a connection with other institutions and people in the field.

Museum Studies Programs

Museum Education Programs

Informal or Science Education Programs

There is a group of informal educators at Northwestern University that have been putting together resources like this, you can find these resources at: https://sites.google.com/site/stembridgenetwork/home

News

Helping the California Condor with ‘Condor Watch’

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Today we’re launching a new, and hugely important Zooniverse project: Condor Watch. The are only around 200 California Condors living in the wild and they are in serious danger from lead poisoning, which they get by eating carcasses shot with lead bullets. Getting a better idea of how they interact and socialise is crucial to ongoing conservation efforts.

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Using camera traps, ecologists in the US have been observing them in the wild. However the sheer volume of images is now overwhelming. Starting today we need your help to look through the first set of data: 264,000 images of condors eating, socialising, and nesting. Ecologists need everyone’s help to identify the individual birds from their numbered tags. Your efforts on this project will help preserve an endangered species – and we think that’s really special.

Try it now at www.condorwatch.org…

News

The Heartbleed Bug and the Zooniverse

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On Monday Internet security researches discovered a critical vulnerability in a piece of of software called OpenSSL. The so-called Heartbleed vulnerability affected numerous sites on the Internet that rely on OpenSSL to provide encrypted connections over HTTPS. This bug has been present in the library since March of 2012 and allows malicious users to gain direct access to the memory of a server terminating an HTTPS connection.

We want to let our users know that we were among almost 66% of sites on the Internet vulnerable to this bug, and your data (including your Zooniverse password) might have been compromised due to this exploit. As of now, all our infrastructure has been updated to secure against the Heartbleed vulnerability, and our SSL certificates have been changed.

Unfortunately given the nature of the vulnerability we cannot know what, if anything, may have been obtained, but as a precaution we are recommending that our users change their passwords on the Zooniverse just in case.

 

Education

Cosmic Curves: Investigating Gravitational Lensing at the Adler Planetarium

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Today’s post comes from Kyle Sater, Senior Educator for Public Program Development at the Adler Planetarium. Kyle’s enjoys making STEM fun and relevant for everyone, especially when it involves Star Wars and legos. He lives in Chicago with his wife, who is also an educator, and his lovable cat Boots. 

It’s a funny thing: Einstein was usually right. His General Theory of Relativity predicted that gravitational masses can alter the direction of light, creating strange lensing effects in deep space. In short, light can be bent and we can see those effects—sometimes arcs, sometimes full-on rings, in far-away galaxies.

In 2013, the Adler premiered Cosmic Wonder, full-dome sky that takes guests on a journey to the far reaches of space—to places like enormous galaxy clusters, some which are acting as gravitational lenses because of their gravitational mass (with the help of elusive dark matter). To further the experience for guests after the show, the Public Programs department developed a cart program that attempted to make lensing more…tangible.

As you can imagine, the challenge was taking a relatively abstract concept, like gravitational lensing, and creating a museum program suitable for guests with different background knowledge. At the Adler we engage in “backward design,” meaning we develop 1 or 2 large learning goals and work backwards to find instructional methods that will work on the floor. But we also value inquiry-based exploration and want guests to have fun! So we started with a basic premise, “How can we detect the invisible?” and “How can light be bent?” and create experiments to explore these concepts. In this case, we utilize a quilting frame with taught fabric interwoven with a battery-powered light strand, and placed a heavy object (billiard ball) on the fabric. This helps illustrate that, even if we can’t see an object, its mass “warps” space-time and can bend light. As a follow up, we challenge guests to use a special acrylic lens and a laser to create their own “lensed objects” on the exhibit wall.

Adler Planetarium floor interpretation volunteers ready to engage museum guests with Cosmic Curves.
Adler Planetarium floor interpretation volunteers ready to engage museum guests with Cosmic Curves.

Our in-house team of facilitators, Mission Specialists, are crucial to the success of floor programs like Cosmic Curves. This program, more than others, requires a comfortability with the content, especially since they’re talking about cutting-edge topics in cosmology. And even then, guests can always surprise you! After all, a 1st grader and a grad student studying physics are coming from vastly different places.

Zooniverse projects, like Space Warps, and apps like GravLens only further the experience for our guests. So get classifying on spacewarps.org or learn more by coming to the Adler!

News, Zoo Roundup

Wrap-Up from the Workshop on Citizen Science in Astronomy

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Last week was a productive and busy week in Taipei for the attendees of the workshop on Citizen Science in Astronomy at the Institute of Astronomy & Astrophysics at Academia Sinica (ASIAA).

In case you missed the live webcast, all the slides from the invited talks on the first day as well as video recordings are archived online at http://csiaworkshop.zooniverse.org/

At the workshop dinner, with the help of an iPhone and a Lazy Susan, Chris took a video of all the participants. You might spot some familiar faces from the Zooniverse and various project science teams:

Members of the Galaxy Zoo team also held a short hangout later in the week:

All and all, I think I can speak for everyone who attended by saying it was a successful workshop with the general consensus being, that funding permitting, in a few years everyone would like for a similar workshop to happen again.I look forward to hearing about the results and papers produced from the efforts to better combine classifications  started at the workshop over the coming months and year. Keep tuned to the Zooniverse blog and project blogs for updates.

This workshop was possible due to the support of the Zooniverse and the financial support from the Ministry of Science & Technology and ASIAA in Taiwan. Other co-organizers on the Science Organizing Committee were Chris, Rob, Stuart, and Arfon and on the Local Organizing Committee: Shiang-Yu Wang.

Education

Thoughts From the Classroom: Kat

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Kat is sharing her impressions of Galaxy Zoo and Radio Galaxy Zoo as the fifth post in our Thoughts From the Classroom series.  

My name is Kat and I attend a school called GATE Academy.  Let me tell you a story about my experience with Galaxy Zoo.

Two months ago, my teacher discovered Galaxy Zoo.  She thought it would be a good class activity, so she had us read some articles as background information for what we were about to be doing on Galaxy Zoo.  These articles included information about the different characteristics of the different galaxy types and how this galactic information ties into the evolution of our Universe.  It hadn’t occurred to me before that galaxies tie into the Universe as a whole, but it made sense once I read it and I thought it was fascinating.  Then we started actually classifying galaxies as our class assignment.

In retrospect, I should have been amazed and acknowledged how incredible looking at these far-off galaxies was, but I just didn’t see it at the time.  I overlooked it because my mind was set on it being a class assignment and how I just needed to do it to get a good grade.

When I started, all that came up on my screen were pictures of blobs of clumpy blurry things.  I wasn’t very impressed.  Everyone around me, though, started seeing beautiful, wonderful images of incredible galaxies.

This is when I understood what a privilege it was to be participating in this new, cutting edge, amazing research.  On my screen showed actual galaxies from outer space.  It struck me how little we know about the universe around us, because nobody really knows what’s out there.  We have hypotheses, but, honestly, anything could be out there. I became proud of the blobs I classified, because you really needed to look and observe the characteristics, unlike perfect, sharp, clear galaxies (but these were really quite beautiful).  There was more mystery in the blobs for me, so classifying them correctly (or as close as I could get) became my challenge.

I learned a lot about classifying these galaxies along the way. The Zooniverse taught me about how galaxies can be spiral, irregular, or smooth, with bars, clumps, and varying sizes of central bulges.  I learned about how black holes are visible in radio telescopes but not in infrared.  I also learned the different types of black holes, such as compact, extended, and multiple.

After seven weeks of classifying these galaxies, my classmates and I had classified over 9,000 galaxies.  We were all proud of our accomplishment and of all we had learned along the way. I definitely recommend you at least try classifying on Galaxy Zoo, whether its galaxies or black holes or what have you.  Why not?  Don’t you want to say you’ve had the experience?  Would you like to contribute to our knowledge of the universe, or even do your OWN original research about the wonders around us?  If you have any of those interests, or just want to check it out because it sounds cool (and trust me, it is), definitely go to Galaxy Zoo and start classifying.

CitizenScience, News, Science

Workshop on Citizen Science in Astronomy

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This weekend several members of the Zooniverse development team and many representatives from the science teams of Galaxy Zoo, Planet Hunters, Space Warps, Moon Zoo, Radio Galaxy Zoo, Planet Four, and the Andromeda Project are traveling to Taipei, Taiwan for the workshop on Citizen Science in Astronomy. I wrote about this workshop last November when it was announced. The Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Academia Sinica (ASIAA)  in Taipei, Taiwan (with support from the National Science Council) along with the Zooniverse are organizing this workshop.

The aim is to bring together for a week  computer scientists, machine learning experts, and the scientists from astronomy and planetary science based citizen science projects with the goal of taking the first steps towards addressing the critical questions and issues that citizen science will need to solve in order to cope with the petabtye data deluge from the the next generation observatories and space missions like the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). I think it’s fair to say this is the largest gathering of Zooniverse astronomy and planetary science project teams assembled in one place. I’m looking forward to what new algorithms to better combine and assess your classifications will be developed during the week and to all the interesting results that will come out of this workshop.

In addition to the main workshop, there will be a teacher workshop held on March 2nd for local teachers in Taiwan co-organized by Lauren Huang (ASIAA), Mei-Yin Chou (ASIAA), Stuart Lynn (Adler Planetarium/Zooniverse), Kelly Borden (Adler Planetarium/Zooniverse), and myself . In preparation for the workshop, the ASIAA Education and Public Outreach (EPO) Office translated Planet Four into traditional character Chinese. You can find out more about the translation effort here. At the teacher workshop, we’ll be introducing citizen science and how it can be used in the classroom along with presenting the traditional character Chinese translations of Planet Four and Galaxy Zoo.

The first day of the main workshop will be a series of introductory talks aimed at getting everyone thinking for the working sessions later in the week. If you’re interested in watching the workshop talks,  we’re going to try webcasting the first day’s sessions on Google+ starting on March 3rd 9:30am in Taiwan (March 2nd at 8:30pm EST ). The schedule for Monday can be found here. You can find the links for the morning and afternoon video live streams here. If you can’t watch live, the video will be archived and available on youtube through the same link.

You can follow along for the rest of the week on Twitter with the hashtag #csatro.

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