Kelly is one of the Zooniverse educators based at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. Today is her birthday, so we decided to get her to do a special edition of ‘Meet the Team’ for the advent calendar. In the video she talks about Zoo Teach, which is an educational tool provided by the Zooniverse. Check it out here http://www.zooteach.org/
Seasons greetings everyone! Since you’ve been so good this year we have a very special present for you… a brand new project: Radio Galaxy Zoo. We need you to help us discover black holes.
Earlier this year, Galaxy Zoo expanded to include the infrared. Now Radio Galaxy Zoo involves looking at galaxies in yet another light. This time we are asking you to match huge jets – seen in radio emission – to the supermassive black holes at the centre of the galaxy that produced them. This requires looking at the galaxies in infrared and radio wavelengths. These galaxies are nothing like our own, and your classifications will allow scientists to understand the causes of these erupting black holes and how they affect the galaxy surrounding them.
Get involved now at http://radio.galaxyzoo.org – and have fun discovering black holes in our Universe.
5:45 – Woke up. Decide to swap order of presentation.
7:00 – Breakfast, it is the most important meal of the day after all.
8:00 – Final presentation adjustments done.
8:45 – Public speaking makes me nervous sometimes so put on my favorite dress and purple tights for confidence.
9:30 – First session of the day – Effective Approaches for Addressing Next Generation Science Standards in the Earth and Space Science Classroom. This workshop was facilitated by members of the National Earth Science Teachers Association (NESTA) and began with an overview of how earth and space sciences fits in the NGSS. The presenters nicely summed up the NGSS Performance Expectations as – “involving a lot of action verbs.” Instead of statements beginning with “students will understand” or “students will identify” these new performance expectations begin with statements like “students who demonstrate understanding can develop and use a model to describe…” and “students who demonstrate understanding can analyze and interpret data to determine…”.
The remainder of the workshop focused on Windows to the Universe, NESTA’s learner and educator portal. There are a variety of activities available for use in the classroom. There is a yearly subscription fee if you want to download and print PDFs but activities and worksheets can be printed for free from your browser.
11:00 – Second Session of the day – Making the Connection Between Formal and Informal Education. Staff from the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, the Denver Zoo, and Denver Public Schools overviewed two long-term collaborations running in the Denver metro area. Passport to Health is a bilingual school-year program targeting at 5th graders and their families. Through classes and events in school and at the museum, over 3,000 participants receive tools and knowledge promoting healthy living. Urban Advantage Denver , the second program highlighted, is an in-depth collaboration between local school districts and the City of Denver’s scientific cultural institutions. This program aims to empower every 7th grade student to think and explore like a scientist.
12:30 – Time to present. A small but enthusiastic group of 15 came to learn about a variety of Zooniverse projects and the educational resources available to bring them into the classroom. Sadly the internet decided to be uncooperative, but luckily I had a back-up plan and plenty of screen shots. There were lots of great questions and contact details exchanged. I can’t say much more because I tend to suffer from “post-presenting amnesia”, but it was a great session.
2:00 – Stroll around the second half of the exhibition hall successfully found candy to temporarily relieve my hunger rage. It was great to see the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center and Cornell Lab of Ornithology promoting their excellent programs. Totally have science education crushes on those two.
3:00 – Starving. Back at the hotel waiting for delivery while catching up on email.
It was a great meeting, but it will be nice to be back home in Chicago. ‘Til next time NSTA!
5:45 – Up and atom (sorry, I can’t resist a good Simpsons reference). To the hotel gym for a little wake-up exercise. Criminey, altitude does make exercise harder.
7:00 – Caffeinating and fueling up for a day of science education. Mmmm.. Oatmeal.
7:45 – Checked in and all official. Check out the fancy presenter ribbon 🙂
8:00 am – First session of the day! Understanding the Vision for Science Education from the NRC Framework and the Next Generation Science Standards from Brett Moulding. My takeaway from this was the idea of a “science performance”. Just as students showcase the skills they practice in music class at a concert or a performance, so must students with science. Students need opportunities to try out what they’ve learned by applying them.
9:00 – Found a bench and an unoccupied outlet to catch-up on emails and work on another conference proposal.
10:30 – Random conversation with fellow conference goers about inflatable planetarium domes. Evoked horrifying flash back of nearly being trampled by preschoolers trying to get to the front of the dome to see Elmo at outreach event several years ago.
11:30 – Strolled through first half of the exhibit hall. Nearly gave in and bought an I Heart Science t-shirt.
12:00 – Conference going is hard work, grabbed a bento box to fuel more science education networking!
12:30 Second session of the day – STEM! How to Create Rigorous, Authentic Learning for All. An overview of the transformation of Preston Middle School in Colorado into a STEM-centered school. The stand-out point was the importance of engaging faculty in STEM. Specifically, when creating a STEM-focused school, build around the passion of the teachers. Their enthusiasm and passion will draw students in.
1:35 – Realization that in fact I didn’t finish my slides for tomorrow’s presentation.
2:00 – Third and final session of my day – Building Collaborative Partnerships to Advance K-12 STEM Education. A panel discussion of creating collaborations to strengthen STEM educational initiatives. My biggest take away from this session was learning about the National Girls Collaborative Project .
3:30 – Search for afternoon coffee (thanks 7-11).
4:00 – Slides, slides, slides. Put together the last portion of tomorrow’s presentation – Bringing the Zooniverse into the Classroom.
6:00 – A dinner of subpar Mexican food. Perfectly good guacamole ruined by olives.
7:00- Slides done, now to blog.
8:10 – Blog done!
More from NSTA tomorrow.
The grant we have received from Google as part of their Global Impact Award program will allow us to build a platform that can support hundreds or maybe even thousands of new and exciting citizen science projects. A list of the awardees can be seen at the Google Global Impact Award site here http://www.google.com/giving/global-impact-awards/
It means a lot to us at the Zooniverse to have been given this award and we could not have managed it without you, our volunteers. The time and effort you dedicate to our projects shows the world how important citizen science can be, and we’re looking forward to the next few years.
So thanks to you, and thanks to Google!
The Zooniverse team
PS: Just to be clear, this is a philanthropic act from Google – we’ll continue to be an academic project run by the team at Oxford, Adler Planetarium and elsewhere and all your data remains with the Zooniverse as before. Nothing changes, except our ability to scale!
The Milky Way Project (MWP) is complete. It took about three years and 50,000 volunteers have trawled all our images multiple times and drawn more than 1,000,000 bubbles and several million other objects, including star clusters, green knots, and galaxies. We have produced several papers already and more are on the way. It’s been a huge success but: there’s even more data!
And so it is with glee that we announce the brand new Milky Way Project! It’s got more data, more objects to find, and it’s even more gorgeous.
The new MWP is being launched to include data from different regions of the galaxy in a new infrared wavelength combination. The new data consists of Spitzer/IRAC images from two surveys: Vela-Carina, which is essentially an extension of GLIMPSE covering Galactic longitudes 255°–295°, and GLIMPSE 3D, which extends GLIMPSE 1+2 to higher Galactic latitudes (at selected longitudes only). The images combine 3.6, 4.5, and 8.0 µm in the “classic” Spitzer/IRAC color scheme. There are roughly 40,000 images to go through.
The latest Zooniverse technology and design is being brought to bear on this big data problem. We are using our newest features to retire images with nothing in them (as determined by the volunteers of course) and to give more screen time to those parts of the galaxy where there are lots of pillars, bubbles and clusters – as well as other things. We’re marking more objects – bow shocks, pillars, EGOs – and getting rid of some older ones that either aren’t visible in the new data or weren’t as scientifically useful as we’d hoped (specifically: red fuzzies and green knots).
We’ve also upgraded to the newest version of Talk, and have kept all your original comments so you can still see the previous data and the objects that were found there. The new Milky Way Project is teeming with more galaxies, stars clusters and unknown objects than the original MWP.
It’s very exciting! There are tens of thousands of images from the Spitzer Space Telescope to look through. By telling us what you see in this infrared data, we can better understand how stars form. Dive in now and start classifying at www.milkywayproject.org – we need your help to map and measure our galaxy.
Hey everyone, for today’s advent calendar Rob and I made this short video talking about the various ways in which you can take part in the Zooniverse, and the multiple means by which you can keep up-to-date with what we’re doing.
It also serves as an introduction for me, the new Zooniverse community manager. It is a bit silly at points, and we did it in one take with no script, so apologies for the rough feel!
Here are some of the links I mention in the video:
Merry Christmas one and all!
Over the past three years some have said that the Zooniverse Advent calendar is a bit silly. To utterly refute this claim I present the following evidence that all can be citizen scientists: cats love the Zooniverse.
I rest my case.
Each year around this time we like to take stock of the size of the awesome Zooniverse population of volunteers. Last year we celebrated the fact that there were 740,000 of you. That number has swelled to 890,000 now – despite us making it easier and easier for anyone to take part without signing up for a Zooniverse account! At the exact time of writing zooniverse.org reported 891,493 of you – which is actually a prime number . It’s also the colour code for a lovely shade of purple.
You’re based all over the world, in fact our web stats show that you literally come from every country in the world! However you are mostly located in the USA, UK, Canada, Poland and other Western nations. That means that you likely have quite a large combined carbon footprint. If you’re all typical North Americans then you produce about 20 tons of CO2 each every year. From some other nations if might be only about 5 tons. So collectively you’re producing somewhere between 4 and 18 million tons of CO2 each year. Crikey.
Never mind your carbon footprint – what about your actual dimensions as a group of people? It’s pretty hard to visualise that many people. If you all stood on each others shoulders you’d reach more than 1,500 km (~970 miles) into the sky. Of course then many of would be crushed under the community’s weight so instead let’s lie you end-to-end. At nearly 1,000 miles it would take light about 5 ms to travel along the line and it’s almost as far as the Proclaimers would be willing to walk to fall down at your door.
More acrobatically, if we made you all into a human pyramid then you’d tower 1.3 miles above the surface of the Earth. If you we stacked you into an actual pyramid (square-based) then rather spectacularly you’d be about the same size as the Great Pyramid of Giza. In fact the Great Pyramid is a bit squat, so you’d have the same size footprint in the sand, but would be nearly twice as tall.
We used to measure you by the number of stadiums that you would fill. At 890,000 you’re now much bigger than the world’s largest stadium, Rungnado May Day Stadium in North Korea, which can hold up to 150,000 people. You’d occupy almost 10 Wembley Stadiums, and more than 21 Wrigley Fields.
World religions is a potential way to measure you – though many are quite massive. There are literally billions of Christians, for example. There are, however, more Zooniverse volunteers in the world than Rastafarians or Unitarian Universalists. Though you can’t stand against the Vatican, there are several countries you measure up to. For example at 890,000 you outnumber the people of Cyprus (865,000), Fiji (858,000), and Montenegro (620,000). You’re miles ahead of some smaller nations, including Luxembourg (537,000), Malta (416,000), and Iceland (325,000).
Of course, if you compare us to the armies of the world, things look much better for the Zooniverse. In fact there are only 5 armies larger than us – China (2.2 million), USA (1.4 million), India (1.3 million), North Korea (1.1 million), and Russia (1 million). Does all this mean that we need a flag?!
Finally, let’s get gross. 890,000 people is an awful lot. You collectively shed about 6 kg of skin cells every day. That’s 6 kg of material left to bob around in our atmosphere and to be vacuumed up from the world’s household surfaces. Nicely done, everybody.
I wonder what number I’l be calculating these stats for next year. I’m excited to find out!
[This post is part of the 2013 Zooniverse Advent Calendar]
This time last year we launched the Andromeda Project. The aim was the get everyone’s help in locating the star clusters in the Andromeda Galaxy, our next-door neighbour in intergalactic space. The project went better than we could have imagined, and just over two weeks later we had completed more than 1,000,000 classifications and the project’s science team were busy wrangling data.
In fact, in January Cliff Johnson took a poster to one of the world’s biggest astronomy meetings – the January meeting of the AAS – and presented the results from the Andromeda Project, which had only launched 6 weeks prior. It was an amazing example of the power of citizen science to help researchers accomplish the kind of data analysis that computers cannot do reliably.
We decided to do a second round of the Andromeda Project to complete the job we’d started, using both the data that remained in the archive and also new data that was only just being taken last year when the project launched. So in October 2013 (just two months ago) we once again invited the Zooniverse community to come and find star clusters and galaxies. They once again astounded us by gobbling up the data even faster – ably assisted by a trench of new users brought to the project from Facebook’s popular I F***king Love Science page. In a week the job was done.
The science team have already begun processing the data from this second round and the results are amazing. In fact: they’re right here just for you, just because it’s nearly Christmas and just because we wanted to give you a present. So here they are: the first maps of all the star clusters and galaxies in the data from the PHAT survey of Andromeda. Marked and classified by the wonderful Andromeda Project community.
You can see how the background galaxies are best seen at the outer edges (because we are looking through less material), and the clusters are found predominately in the spiral arms (where more star formation is happening). These plots will form part of the publications the science team and currently working on, and which will most likely appear on the Zooniverse Publications page sometime in 2014. Follow along on the blog, Twitter and Facebook for updates from the science team in the coming weeks and months.
Congratulations to everyone who helped out and gave their time to the Andromeda Project: you were amazing!
So as much as I’d like to wish the Andromeda Project a happy birthday, it seems like I should really wish it a happy retirement. Luckily we have more space-based projects coming soon to the Zooniverse – so the community will have plenty to get along with. However, the Andromeda Project will always have a special place in our hearts for its efficient and dedicated volunteers. Who knows, maybe one day it will come out of retirement for one last hurrah? We can only hope.
Andromeda Project, we hardly knew ye.
Zooniverse 