Tag Archives: Statistics

Fun, News

52 Years of Human Effort

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At ZooCon last week I spoke about the scale of human attention that the Zooniverse receives. One of my favourite stats in this realm (from Clay Shirky’s book ‘Cognitive Surplus’) is that in the USA, adults cumulatively spend about 200 billion hours watching TV every year. By contrast it took 100 million hours of combined effort for Wikipedia to reach its status as the world’s encyclopaedia.

In the previous year people collectively spent just shy of half a million hours working on Zooniverse projects. Better put, the community invested about 52 years worth of effort[1]. That’s to say that if an individual sat down and did nothing but classify on Zooniverse sites for 52 years they’d only just have done the same amount of work as our community did between June 2012 and June 2013. The number is always rising too. Citizen science is amazing!

Another way of thinking about it is to convert this time into Full Time Equivalents (FTEs). One person working 40 hours per week, for 50 weeks a year works for 2000 hours a year – that’s 1 FTE. So our 460,000 hours of Zooniverse effort are equivalent to 230 FTEs. It’s as if we had a building with 230 people in who only came in every day to click on Zooniverse projects.

Zooniverse Effort Distribution to June 2013

This amazing investment by the community is not broken down evenly of course, as the above ‘snail’ chart shows. In fact Planet Hunters alone would occupy 62 of the people in our fictional building: the project took up 27% of the effort in the last year. Galaxy Zoo took 17%, which means it had almost 9 years of your effort all to itself. Planet Four had a meteoric launch on the BBC’s Stargazing Live less than six months ago and since that time it has gobbled up just over 5 years of human attention – 10% of the whole for the past year.

What’s wonderful is that our 230 metaphorical workers, and the 52 years they represent, are not confined to one building or one crazed click-worker. Our community is made of hundreds of thousands of individuals across the world – 850,000 of whom have signed up through zooniverse.org. Some of them have contributed a single classification, others have given our researchers far, far more of their time and attention. Through clicking on our sites, discussing ideas on Talk, or just spreading the word: Zooniverse volunteers are making a significant contribution to research in areas from astronomy to zoology.

Congratulations to everyone who’s taken part and let’s hope this number increases again by next year!

[1] In my ZooCon talk I incorrectly gave the figure of 35 years. This was wrong for two reasons; firstly, I had neglected Andromeda Project, Planet Four and Snapshot Serengeti for technical reasons. Secondly I had calculated the numbers incorrectly, in my rush to get my slides ready, and I underestimated them all by about 20%.

News, Statistics

Hard Workers

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We keep track of the activity in the Zooniverse using Google Analytics. There is a lot to keep up with and Analytics does a very good job. Well we like it anyway. I was looking through the stats today and came across an unusual fact: Leicester, a city here in the UK, is the hardest working place in the Zooniverse. No offense to Leicester, but this shocked me.

I’m defining hardest working to mean the most time put into classifying and engaging with the Zooniverse – per user. So in Leicester, users have put in an average of 6.0 hours each since February 2009. There are about 150 Zooniverse users in Leicester and they have put in a whopping 900 hours between them. That is dedication! I’m also assuming that time spent on the site is roughly proportional to time spent actually classifying, merging, etc. I hope so anyway!

So how does the rest of the world compare? Well I’m glad you asked. Here’s the top ten hardest working cities in the Zooniverse:

  1. Leicester (6.0 hours)
  2. Gdansk (4.6 hours)
  3. Auckland (4.0 hours)
  4. Los Angeles (3.8 hours)
  5. Southampton (3.8 hours)
  6. Indianapolis (3.6 hours)
  7. Poznan (3.2 hours)
  8. Minneapolis (3.2 hours)
  9. Denver (3.1 hours)
  10. Helsinki (2.9 hours)

As you can see, Leicester is miles ahead of the crowd. If you know why this might be, please let me know! The top 50 cities are shown in the graph below – there are 10,000 in all. It is interesting to note that the chart really levels off for the most part. It then heads into a steady long-tail. This seems to show that the vast majority of users, regardless of geographic location, have put in just under 2 hours each since February 2009.

HardestWorkingCities

So the natural next step here is to find out which country is hardest working. Apparently it is New Zealand, where Zooniverse users have spent an average of 3.6 hours each working on the site since February 2009. The graph for the Top 50 countries is shown below and reveals the countries where users spend, on average, the most time on the Zooniverse. New Zealand, Portugal and Australia make up the top three. In fact it seems that antipodean users generally spend more time on the site – again, please tell me why.

HardestWorkingCountries

Well that’s my extended coffee break over. If you have specific questions about the stats on the Zooniverse, drop a comment here and we’ll see if we can try and resolve them for you. Have a good week.