Being a “citizen scientist” means you make the Style section of the New York Times, not the Science page"

We’ve got plenty of our own in Boston and New England. In fact, Harvard hosted a conference this summer called “”https://blogs.nature.com/boston/2010/06/14/singularity-comes-to-harvard">The Rise of the Citizen Scientist.

Local freelance scientists run classes and host meet ups – See Somerville’s Sprout & Co:

Sprout is a community education and research organization devoted to creating and supporting the community-driven learning, teaching, and investigation of science.

Some feed data to researcher and regulators See the Massachusetts Statewide Roadkill Project

The project aims to minimize the impact of roads and traffic on rare and non-game wildlife, while improving highway safety, through cost-effective research, planning, and implementation of partnerships with citizens and communities of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts

Others keep an eye on the skies. Both BU and Harvard open their observatories to the public. Also see “Planet Hunters” out of Yale.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft is one of the most powerful tools in the hunt for extrasolar planets. The Kepler team’s computers are sifting through the data, but we at Planet Hunters are betting that there will be planets which can only be found via the remarkable human ability for pattern recognition.

This is a gamble, a bet if you will, on the ability of humans to beat machines just occasionally. It may be that no new planets are found or that computers have the job down to a fine art. And yet, it’s just possible that you might be the first to know that a star somewhere out there in the Milky Way has a companion, just as our Sun does. Fancy giving it a try?…

The Kepler team has been developing computer algorithms to analyze light curve data because it is not possible for them to visually inspect every light curve. While we expect computer programs to robustly identify things that they are trained to find, we are betting that there will be a number of surprises in the data that the computer algorithms will miss.

The human brain is particularly good at discerning patterns or aberrations and experiments have shown that when many people work together, the collective wisdom of the crowds can be better than an expert. Planet Hunters is an online experiment that taps into the power of human pattern recognition. Participants are partners with our science team, who will analyze group assessments, obtain follow up observations at the telescope to understand the new classification schemes for different families of light curves, identify oddities, and verify transit signals.

For more, see the “Science for Citizens” blog.