Hi. Life's been a bit annoying lately, so I'm sorry that I'm a bit scattered. I'm still trying to post at least every other day, but....well, life.
Today is National Philanthropy Day, which I would normally ignore, but I thought it might be a good time to introduce Citizen Science, in case anyone doesn't know about it and has the time to be interested.
In short, Citizen Science is what it's called when part of a research project gets done by the normal people of the world instead of relying only on what the scientists know. This can be anything from bird watchers tracking what birds are in an area or when they migrate around, how many of a certain insect are around, or helping go through a bunch of scanned papers/letters/historical data to put it into text like this. It's mostly busy-work that's easy to do but takes time, or human eyes instead of computer analysis.
One particular example is that the National Archives are looking for people who can read cursive so that they can help translate old documents for easy references. (Here's a link to the article about it.)
NASA also has several programs that include volunteer options, if you want to look into them-- here.
Otherwise, you can check out the Zooniverse for possible crowd-science options, or The Association For Advancing Participatory Sciences, which used to be called The Citizen Science Association.
For proof that this does good stuff, there is an Academic (ish) journal that talks about the research done by the citizen science groups and what they have accomplished, called Citizen Science: Theory and Practice.
So, you might not have a lot of money to offer, but anyone can help somehow, and this is one way you could if you want. Hopefully these lists have somewhere you can volunteer some time to help Science and do something really cool. Please let me know if you do.
I'll see you again soon.
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