Galaxy Zoo Concepts

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science

by Michael Nielsen · 2 Oct 2011 · 400pp · 94,847 words

meaning in knowledge, a third big shift is a change in the relationship between science and society. An example of this shift is the website Galaxy Zoo, which has recruited more than 200,000 online volunteers to help astronomers classify galaxy images. Those volunteers are shown photographs of galaxies, and asked to

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are photographs that have been taken automatically by a robotic telescope, and have never before been seen by any human eye. You can think of Galaxy Zoo as a cosmological census, the largest ever undertaken, a census that has so far produced more than 150 million galaxy classifications. The volunteer astronomers who

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participate in Galaxy Zoo are making astonishing discoveries. They have, for example, recently discovered an entirely new class of galaxy, the “green pea galaxies”—so named because the galaxies

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see Nobel Prizes won by huge collaborations dominated by amateurs? Citizen science is part of a larger shift in the relationship between science and society. Galaxy Zoo and similar projects are examples of institutions that are bridging the scientific community and the rest of society in new ways. We’ll see that

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and the world wide web. They’ve taken enthusiastically to online tools such as email, and pioneered striking projects such as the Polymath Project and Galaxy Zoo. Why is it that they’ve only reluctantly adopted tools such as GenBank and Wikipedia? The reason is that, despite their radical appearance, the Polymath

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Project, Galaxy Zoo, and similar undertakings have an inherent underlying conservatism: they’re ultimately projects in service of the conventional goal of writing scientific papers. That conservatism helps

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effects. In some collaborations it’s easy to divide the problem being attacked into smaller tasks. Recall the galaxy classification project Galaxy Zoo, which we met in the opening chapter. Galaxy Zoo asks contributors to answer questions about just one galaxy at a time, dividing the problem of classifying galaxies up into millions of

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tiny tasks. That’s a simple but effective way of dividing Galaxy Zoo’s overall problem. Sometimes, however, this kind of modularity is much harder to achieve. In the Polymath Project, work was carried out through comments

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cosmological census, the largest ever undertaken, with more than 200,000 volunteers so far classifying more than 150 million galaxy images. When she came across Galaxy Zoo, van Arkel was immediately hooked, and she began classifying galaxies in her spare time. A few days after joining, she noticed a strange blue blob

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widely accepted, many fundamental questions remain unanswered. With that understanding of quasars in mind, let’s come back to the voorwerp. As the people at Galaxy Zoo puzzled over what the voorwerp might be, they considered many possible explanations, and gradually closed in on a simple explanation that seemed to fit all

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at CNN says it all: “Armchair Astronomer Discovers Unique ‘Cosmic Ghost.’ ” What a shock and surprise that a nonscientist could make a significant astrophysical discovery! Galaxy Zoo and the voorwerp are part of a bigger story about how online tools are gradually changing the relationship between science and society. One of the

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most fertile areas where this is happening is citizen science, with projects such as Galaxy Zoo recruiting online volunteers to help make scientific discoveries. In the first half of this chapter, we’ll look at citizen science in depth, seeing how

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people have made to the forum are as stunning as the sight of any spiral, and never fail to move me. —Alice Sheppard, volunteer Galaxy Zoo moderator Galaxy Zoo began in 2007, with two scientists at Oxford University, Kevin Schawinski and Chris Lintott. As part of his PhD work, Schawinski was looking at photos

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the results comparable to careful classification by professional astronomers. Although the rate of galaxy classification gradually slowed from its peak of 70,000 per hour, Galaxy Zoo’s first classification of galaxies was complete after just a few months. That gave Schawinski the data he needed to finish his project. Verdict: yes

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, the conventional wisdom about spirals versus ellipticals was wrong, and some ellipticals really do contain a lot of newly formed stars. Galaxy Zoo began with Schawinksi’s questions, but over time the site has expanded to address a much broader range of questions. Many discoveries have been made

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. But it wasn’t until almost 30 years later that a chemist named William Ramsay discovered helium on Earth.) Enough about spectral analysis; back to Galaxy Zoo and the mystery othat theeas. By this point—December 12, 2007—Zookeeper Kevin Schawinski had become intrigued by these strange galaxies. He decided to take

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a new type of galaxy. You might think the professional astronomers would now move in and take over the project. After all, the amateurs at Galaxy Zoo had just discovered an entirely new class of galaxy! But the pros, including Schawinski, were busy with other things, including Hanny’s Voorwerp, and

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Zooites may be amateurs—they know far less about astronomy than many of the polymaths do about mathematics, and there is more levity in the Galaxy Zoo discussion—but underneath these differences, there is the same fertile sense of ideas growing and being refined, of a conviction that there is something here

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precise criteria characterizing the green pea galaxies, they also became more sophisticated in how they found candidate images. No longer were they just sifting through Galaxy Zoo images by hand. Instead, they went to the original SDSS data, and developed sophisticated database queries that automatically searched the entire SDSS data set for

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smaller. And the galaxies were extremely bright for their size. The green peas and the voorwerp are just two of the many discoveries made by Galaxy Zoo. Another Galaxy Zoo project was to search out images of merging galaxies (see the image on the next page). Mergers are life-changing events for galaxies, and

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in the mergers project. Sometimes serendipity is followed up with extensive systematic analysis, as in the study of the green peas. Follow-up projects Galaxy Zoo 2 and Galaxy Zoo: Hubble have launched, and are providing even more detailed information about some of the galaxies observed by the SDSS, and also by the Hubble

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from its intrinsic scientific interest, Foldit is also interesting as a demonstration of the great complexity of work that can be done by volunteers. In Galaxy Zoo, participants mostly carry out simple tasks, such as classifying a galaxy as spiral or elliptical. In Foldit, players are asked to tackle tasks that would

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from improvement. It’s the same addictive quality we saw earlier in the MathWorks competition, and which is also felt by many participants in Galaxy Zoo. Furthermore, like Galaxy Zoo, Foldit is deeply meaningful to many of the players. Einstein once explained why he was more interested in science than politics by saying, “Equations

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science projects, with ordinary people participating in scientific research in ways unimaginable a generation ago. How Much Will Citizen Science Change Science? Examples such as Galaxy Zoo, Foldit, and the open dinosaur project are interesting and fun. But science is vast, and while citizen science is likely to grow rapidly in the

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. Before the internet, most citizen scientists worked largely on their own, isolated from the encouragement and criticism of colleagues. Today, that’s changing. In the Galaxy Zoo forums you see a community where people help out one another, a supportive environment in which they can learn and grow as astronomers, a place

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do the same. This new type of community building is important, but today’s citizen science projects have a great deal of room for improvement. Galaxy Zoo, Foldit, and most other citizen science projects don’t yet have the kind of structured stepping stones of development and mentorship available to professional scientists

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can be used to create a demanding and rewarding online community supporting citizen science. The biggest citizen science projects have recruited large numbers of people—Galaxy Zoo has more than 200,000 participants—and you might wonder if there is much more room for citizen science to grow. Or has the public

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people to classify galaxies for a couple of hours. If you did that three times, then you’d roughly match the effort put into Galaxy Zoo. Of course, Galaxy Zoo has been ring three years as I write, while Manchester United plays dozens of home games each year. So the Zooites are a notch

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of the time institutions change only very slowly. But, today isn’t most of the time. Online tools are institution-generating machines. Examples such as Galaxy Zoo, Wikipedia, and Linux demonstrate how much easier it has become to create new institutions, and even to create radically new types of institution. At the

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idea. Online tools make it far easier to create institutions, by amplifying ideas faster than ever before, and by helping coordinate action. As an example, Galaxy Zoo began in 2007 with two guys in a pub, working on a budget of chutzpah and imagination. Three years later it involved 25 professional astronomers

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crucial consequence: it would give scientists a strong motivation to create new tools for doing science. Scientists would be rewarded for developing tools such as Galaxy Zoo, Foldit, the arXiv, and so on. And if that happened we’d see scientists become leaders, not laggards, in developing new tools for the construction

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theory] much thought” is from Helge Kragh’s article [112]. Chapter 7. Democratizing Science p 129: My account of Galaxy Zoo is based on the Galaxy Zoo blog, http://blogs.zooniverse.org/galaxyzoo/, the Galaxy Zoo forum, http://www.galaxyzooforum.org, and an article by Chris Lintott and Kate Land [127]. The material on Hanny’s

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draws also on Hanny van Arkel’s blog http://www.hannysvoorwerp.com/, and the original discussion thread started by Hanny van Arkel [67]. The first Galaxy Zoo paper on the voorwerp is [128]. p 131: The alternative explanation of the voorwerp is given in [105, 177]. Some comments on the alternative

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. Lintott, Filipe B. Abdalla, Kevin Schawinski, Steven P. Bamford, Dan Andreescu, Phil Murray, M. Jordan Raddick, Anze Slosar, Alex Szalay, Daniel Thomas, and Jan Vandenberg. Galaxy Zoo: Reproducing galaxy morphologies via machine learning. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 406(1):342–353, July 2010. eprint arXiv:0908.2033. [11] J

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/tt0499549/fullcredits. [66] Hillel Furstenberg and Yitzhak Katznelson. A density version of the Hales-Jewett theorem. Journal d’Analyse Mathematique, 57:64–119, 1991. [67] Galaxy Zoo Forum. The Hanny’s Voorwerp, 2007–∞. http://www.galaxyzooforum.org/index.php?topic=3802.0. [68] Jeffrey S. Gerber and Paul A. Offit. Vaccines and

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Scientific Discovery. Seattle: Microsoft Research, 2009. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/fourthparadigm/. [126] Chris Lintott. He said that they said that he said. . . . Galaxy Zoo (blog), 2009. http://blogs.zooniverse.org/galaxyzoo/2009/07/09/he-said-that-they-said-that-he-said/. [127] Chris Lintott and Kate Land. Eyeballing

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. Jarvis, Shanil Virani, Dan Andreescu, Steven P. Bamford, Kate Land, Phil Murray, Robert C. Nichol, M. Jordan Raddick, Anže Slosar, Alex Szalay, and Jan Vandenberg. Galaxy Zoo: “Hanny’s Voorwerp”, a quasar light echo? Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 399(1):129–140, October 2009. eprint arXiv:0906.5304. [129

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, 1995. [131] Emma Marris. American Chemical Society: Chemical reaction. Nature, 437:807–809, October 6, 2005. [132] Karen Masters. She’s an astronomer: Aida Berges. Galaxy Zoo (blog), October 1, 2009. http://blogs.zoonivese.org/galaxyzoo/2009/10/01/shes-an-astronomer-aida-berges/. [133] Hassan Masum and Mark Tovey. Given enough

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Shirley Wu.Article-level metrics and the evolution of scientific impact. PLoS Biology 7(11): e1000242, 2009. [149] Bob Nichol. This is my first time. . . . Galaxy Zoo (blog), February 19, 2009. http://blogs.zooniverse.org/galaxyzoo/2009/02/19/this-is-my-first-time/. [150] Michael Nielsen. Doing science in the open

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Computer Scientists. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1998. [193] Alice Sheppard. Peas in the universe, goodwill and a htory of Zooite collaboration on the peas project. Galaxy Zoo (blog), July 7, 2009. http://blogs.zooniverse.org/galaxyzoo/2009/07/07/peas-in-the-universe-goodwill-and-a-history-of-zooite-collaboration-on-the

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shared praxis and, 76 arXiv, 161–63, 165, 175, 182, 194–96 ASSET India, 22–24, 35, 41 astroinformatics, 108 astronomy. See comet hunters; galaxies; Galaxy Zoo; Galileo; Kepler, Johannes; Newton, Isaac; sky surveys atmosphere, mapping of, 106 attention. See architecture of attention; restructuring expert attention augmented reality, 41, 87 autism-vaccine

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Project, 150–51 passionate commitment of volunteers in, 40 Project eBird, 150 room for improvement in, 152–53 unrealized potential of, 182. See also Foldit; Galaxy Zoo; society climate, mapping of, 106 climate change: bird populations and, 150 institutional ingenuity and, 171 public policy and, <7204 >157 risks of openness about, 199

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, 140, 155 Milky Way, 96, 97, 99–100, 127, 140 paired, 140 Sloan Great Wall of, 97, 99, 100, 112, 116. See also sky surveys Galaxy Zoo, 5–6, 129–31, 133–42 cognitive surplus and, 154 computer algorithm trained by, 151 everyday astronomy contrasted with, 141–42 gravitational lenses and, 140

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as goal of, 9, 181 scientific papers assisted by, 140 societal change and, 158, 159, 169–70 voorwerps and, 129–33, 140, 142, 155 Galaxy Zoo 2, 140–42 Galaxy Zoo: Hubble, 140–41 Galileo, 3, 102, 158, 172–73, 174–75, 183 Galton, Francis, 19 Gando, Burkina Faso, 46–48 GenBank, 4, 6

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citing other people’s data in, 195 collective projects leading to, 9, 181 comment sites for users of, 179–81 credit associated with, 193–94 Galaxy Zoo’s contributions to, 9, 140, 181 vs. new values of sharing, 204 open access to, 6, 160–65 in open source science, 87 pirated online

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Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), 96–105 data-driven intelligence and, 112, 114 data sharing by, 102–5, 108–10, 181 data web and, 111 Galaxy Zoo’s use of, 138, 139, 140 new pattern of discovery and, 106–7 potential of networked science and, 175 Schawinski’s use of, 134 spectra

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World

by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams · 28 Sep 2010 · 552pp · 168,518 words

can’t participate meaningfully in scientific research. But conventional wisdom turned out to be wrong, and now thanks to a massive Internet-enabled collaboration called Galaxy Zoo, Schawinski and his colleagues are investigating possibilities that most astronomers only dream of exploring. The common thread in the examples above is the growing realization

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an army of armchair astronomers would help them sort through the millions of galactic images they had stored up in their databases. The result was Galaxy Zoo, a clever online citizen science project where anyone interested can peer at the wonders of outer space, while simultaneously helping advance an exciting new frontier

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in science. The premise of Galaxy Zoo was simple. Users would be shown an image of a galaxy and asked two basic questions: Is the galaxy an elliptical galaxy (a type of

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to do this, the first thing I say is prepare for success.” Two and a half years later, merely claiming success may be an understatement. Galaxy Zoo is thriving, with more than 275,000 users who have made nearly 75 million classifications of one million different images—far beyond Schawinski’s original

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50,000. If Schawinski were still laboring on his own, it would take him 124 years to classify that many images! But Galaxy Zoo is about more than just looking at pretty pictures of galaxies. The project has resulted in real scientific discoveries, with several papers already published using

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the data and a dozen or so more on the way. The Galaxy Zoo team—which includes astronomers from Yale and Johns Hopkins universities in the United States, and the University of Oxford and the University of Portsmouth in

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Kingdom—has often been surprised by the results. Bill Keel, an astronomy professor at the University of Alabama who studies overlapping galaxies, decided to ask Galaxy Zoo users to contact him if they came across an example of this rare phenomenon. Throughout his career, Keel had studied the dozen or so overlapping

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galaxies then known to astronomers. Within a day of posting his question on the Galaxy Zoo forum, he had more than one hundred responses from users who had indeed found such galaxies. Today, thousands have been identified. To be sure

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, Galaxy Zoo is only possible because Schawinski and his colleagues have eschewed the usual inclination to keep their discoveries private until they are ready to publish. “We

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collaboration in the Internet is a powerful multiplier,” Schawinski says. “It makes research possible that just wasn’t possible before.” In fact, the success of Galaxy Zoo has already inspired a growing portfolio of complementary projects. Zoo members can now hunt for supernovae or simulate cosmic mergers on their computers to help

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. “It’s not like one person can collect the data, analyze it and then exhaust all the possibilities with it.” As we saw with the Galaxy Zoo project, increasingly powerful telescopes like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the data they generate have fundamentally changed astronomy. A decade ago, astronomy was still

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there are trailblazers to show us the way in a world where we have data about anything and everything. And in scientific pioneers like Neptune, Galaxy Zoo, and Calit2 we are seeing a new kind of analysis, a new kind of science, and a whole new kind of organization come into being

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crisis-mapping application that revolutionized relief efforts in Haiti. In chapter 9, we met Kevin Schawinski, a PhD student who became the driving force behind Galaxy Zoo, one of the most exciting science projects on the Web. Matt Flannery and Jessica Jackley launched Kiva.org while still in their twenties. Steve Ressler

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you follow the design principles described in the previous chapter. Quite the opposite is often the case. When Kevin Schawinski (one of the astronomers behind Galaxy Zoo) enlisted 250,000 citizen scientists in a quest to categorize galaxies across the universe, he didn’t sacrifice his capacity to think independently or compromise

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.” James J. O’Donnell, “To Youth Camp: A Long Farewell,” EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 36, no. 6 (November/December 2001). Chapter 9 1. A project like Galaxy Zoo requires using actual people instead of a computer algorithm, Schawinski explains, because computers aren’t very good at pattern recognition. Humans, on the other hand

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shared sense of identity, shared goals and accomplishments, and a social fabric that binds them. On top of all that, broad participation in projects like Galaxy Zoo helps boost the public’s general understanding of science, a nice side effect at a time when some degree of scientific literacy is required just

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interim is that machines won’t necessarily spot the unusual or the unexpected, the kind of one-offs that can lead to game-changing breakthroughs. Galaxy Zoo cofounder Chris Lintott claims citizen science data sets naturally provide large and powerful training sets for machine learning approaches to classification problems. By doing citizen

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Manifesto (Knopf Doubleday, 2010). 4. Joshua Topolsky, “Live from Apple’s iPhone OS 4 event!”, Engadget (April 8, 2010). 5. Jean Tate, “Click on Hubble: Galaxy Zoo Now Includes HST Images,” Universe Today (April 22, 2010). 6. David Morgan, “Nearly 20 percent of U.S. workers underemployed,” Thomson Reuters (February 23, 2010

A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering

by Ann K. Finkbeiner · 16 Aug 2010 · 225pp · 65,922 words

survey with current spectrographs would take several thousand years—and the images of tens of millions of galaxies. It would specify and track the whole galaxy zoo. It would be digital: images and spectra of wide fields of the sky, debugged and cleaned up and analyzed and dumped into your computer. Jim

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stories with data under the images. If you want to tour the universe with musical accompaniment, you can download recordings from Alex’s Panta Rhei. Galaxy Zoo is altogether different—no zooms, pans, pop-ups, or narratives. In 2007, at Oxford University, a postdoc named Chris Lintott and a graduate student named

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the research. Then you’re shown a galaxy and you click on a classification, spiral or elliptical; next galaxy, next classification. They called the website Galaxy Zoo. So far, it hadn’t cost a penny; in about three years, they hoped, they would have ten classifications per galaxy, enough to be statistically

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website that calls itself “News for Nerds.” Around noon, Lintott opened his laptop to see how the Galaxy Zoo website was doing, but he couldn’t get through to it. So he opened the Galaxy Zoo e-mail and found more than ten thousand e-mails, mostly from people complaining that they couldn’t

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of the computers was woken by an alarm that went off when computers died. He went to campus to investigate and found that the computer Galaxy Zoo was using had overheated, its wires melted and fuses blown. He assigned another computer to the website, and by the end of the day, 22

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week to do—the unit of classification became the Kevin-week. By the end of the week, Galaxy Zoo had done what its founders thought would take three years. By the end of the first year, Galaxy Zoo had 150,000 people, “zooites,” who had done 50 million classifications, each galaxy classified for certainty

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sheep, gets a cup of coffee, checks the news, and classifies a couple hundred galaxies. A zooite got home from work one night, fired up Galaxy Zoo, and let his five-year-old watch him classify galaxies. The five-year-old asked if he could play the galaxy game again tomorrow. The

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irregulars. Then the undergraduate, as undergraduates do, gave up, and since none of the zookeepers were particularly interested in irregulars, the zooites took over. Before Galaxy Zoo, astronomers knew of 161 irregulars; since then, the zooites had collected 15,000 more. Lintott and Schawinski taught the zooites some astronomical analysis techniques. In

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, blue galaxies. The irregulars are probably Rich’s faint blues. The irregulars’ project, called Do It Ourselves, is working on a scientific paper. So far, Galaxy Zoo has resulted in sixteen scientific papers, including one with the lead authors Schawinski (who finished his PhD and went to a postdoc at Yale) and

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?currentPage=all. SkyServer is at http://cas.sdss.org. The Sloan’s website is http://www.sdss.org/. Galaxy Zoo is at http://zooniverse.org/home and http://www.galaxyzoo.org/. A nice article about Galaxy Zoo is: Devin Powell, “Amateur Hour,” Arts and Sciences Magazine 5, no. 2 (spring 2008); http://krieger.jhu

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of, 11–13 satellite, 163 spectrum of, 23–24 spiral, 182–83, 185, 191 superclusters of, see superclusters in universe, 8–9 variety of, 22 Galaxy Zoo, 170–72, 173 Forum (website), 172 GALEX (sky survey), 167 Galileo Galilei, 29, 101 gamma rays, 27, 166 Gamow, George, 110 Gemini (telescope), 83 general

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, 194 Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration (SEGUE), 177 Sloan Foundation, 41, 46–47, 52, 55, 57, 83, 120 Sloan survey archives, 154–74 Galaxy Zoo and, 170–72, 173 hosting issue and, 155 Intel grant for, 158 Johns Hopkins and, 155–56 Microsoft and, 157–59 nonastronomers and, 169 public

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World

by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler · 3 Feb 2015 · 368pp · 96,825 words

something off ahead of time. The community shapes the path and accelerates the process. It’s a shocking amount of leverage.”8 Case Study 1: Galaxy Zoo—A DIY Community In early 2007, while working toward his PhD in astrophysics at Oxford, Kevin Schawinski was hunting blue ellipticals in the Sloan Digital

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those million galaxies to be classified once.” With the help of some friends, and just two weeks after they shared that beer, this idea became Galaxy Zoo, one of the very first citizen-science websites to appear online.11 As far as telling people about the website, well, they commemorated its appearance

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do this. They wanted to contribute. In fact, we teamed up with some social scientists and found that the number one reason why people do Galaxy Zoo is the desire to contribute to actual science. They want to do something that’s useful.” A lot of people had this want. Schawinski and

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his colleagues had hit on a massively transformative purpose. The first iteration of Galaxy Zoo (they’re now up to version five) drew 150,000 participants classifying—wait for it—50 million galaxies. Subsequent versions pulled in over 250,000

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participants and pushed the total over 60 million. And then Galaxy Zoo became a smorgasbord of citizen-science projects, now hosted at Zooniverse. Want to explore the surface of the Moon? Join Planetary Resources and NASA to

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you’re passionate about something and no one else is sating that desire, then you have first-mover advantage. Don’t underestimate this power. When Galaxy Zoo first started, they were pretty sure only a handful of people would sign up to catalogue galaxies—yet within a very short time, tens of

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thousands of people were involved. Why? There was a deep, unmet need in people to participate in astronomy, and Galaxy Zoo was the only game in town. We saw something similar with Asteroid Zoo—the Zooniverse-hosted collaboration between my company, Planetary Resources, and NASA to

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to do the same at scale. This is such a specific desire that we were not certain how people would react, but just as with Galaxy Zoo, the crowd wildly exceeded our expectations. In the first six days of the project, we saw more than one million images reviewed and more than

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-of-the-heavens-aims-to-find-out.html. 10 All Kevin Schawinski quotes come from an AI conducted in 2013. 11 For a breakdown of Galaxy Zoo’s history, see http://www.galaxyzoo.org/#/story. 12 All Jay Rogers quotes come from a series of AIs conducted in 2013 and 2014. 13

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(Rose), 120 Fowler, Emily, 299n Foxconn, 62 Free (Anderson), 10–11 Freelancer.com, 149–51, 156, 158, 163, 165, 195, 207 Friedman, Thomas, 150–51 Galaxy Zoo, 220–21, 228 Gartner Hype Cycle, 25–26, 25, 26, 29 Gates, Bill, 23, 53 GEICO, 227 General Electric (GE), 43, 225 General Mills, 145

Space at the Speed of Light: The History of 14 Billion Years for People Short on Time

by Becky Smethurst · 1 Jun 2020 · 71pp · 20,766 words

of a scientific discovery originating from citizen scientists rather than “experts”—is that of Hanny’s Voorwerp. Back in 2007, astronomers launched a website called Galaxy Zoo, which called on the public to help classify the shapes of over a million images of galaxies. It was a complete success and more than

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a buzzword across most areas of science these days, but the result can be that needles go undiscovered in haystacks). One of the volunteers on Galaxy Zoo was a Dutch schoolteacher called Hanny van Arkel. While classifying the shapes of galaxies, Hanny came across one image that had a fuzzy blue smudge

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underneath the galaxy. She was curious enough about it that she flagged it on the website’s forum and asked what it was. The Galaxy Zoo team’s experts were stumped. They’d never seen anything like it before. They didn’t know if it was a real object, or whether

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because it shows us that the supermassive black hole was once active, but no more. The wonderful thing is that, as soon as volunteers on Galaxy Zoo knew they were looking for fuzzy blue smudges in images, they found about forty more in the original set of a million images. That meant

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of stars in, 4.1 spectrum of, 2.1, 2.2 supermassive black holes at centers of, 1.1, 3.1, 9.1, 10.1 Galaxy Zoo, 10.1 general relativity, theory of, 3.1, 4.1 gravitational waves, 3.1, 4.1 gravity Einstein’s theory of, 3.1, 4.1

First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time

by Emma Chapman · 23 Feb 2021 · 265pp · 79,944 words

divide them into multiple morphological groups. For example, there are the spirals, the ellipticals, the irregulars and the barred spirals. The Local Group is a ‘galaxy zoo’, containing a good few of the different types. The three largest galaxies are, in order, Andromeda, the Milky Way and the Triangulum Galaxy, and they

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room

by David Weinberger · 14 Jul 2011 · 369pp · 80,355 words

problems—how to pump oil up from the Exxon Valdez—via contests. But amateurs are contributing in yet more structured ways. For example: • Volunteers at Galaxy Zoo, a science crowdsourcing Web site, have created what it claims is “the world’s largest database of galaxy shapes.”24 Beginning in July 2007 it

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or counter-clockwise? In a year, it received 50 million classifications, including multiple classifications of the same galaxies, enabling Galaxy Zoo to error-check the reports. Having proved that the process works, Galaxy Zoo started a second project that asked more detailed questions. This information—publicly available, of course—has already changed some assumptions

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but at what networks of amateurs are contributing. For example, Arfon Smith, the technical lead of Galaxy Zoo, told me about the discovery of “green peas.” It began as a joke in the discussion area of Galaxy Zoo about the green objects that showed up in some photos. After over a hundred posts on

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the topic, the amateurs at Galaxy Zoo realized that there was a type of astronomical object that the professionals had not noticed. “In mid-2008,” said Smith, “they put together a portfolio

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life of Foodies Ford Motors Forking Forscher, Bernard K. Fortune magazine Foucault, Michel Frauenfelder, Mark FuelEconomy.gov Future Shock (Toffler) The Futurist journal Galapagos Islands Galaxy Zoo Galen of Pergamum Garfield, Eugene Gartner Group GBIF.org (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) Geek news General Electric Gentzkow, Matthew Gillmor, Dan Gladwell, Malcolm Glazer, Nathan

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance

by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna · 23 May 2016 · 437pp · 113,173 words

science” is starting to break through the analytic bottlenecks that plague a wide range of disciplines. In 2007, Chris Lintott and Kevin Schawinski co-founded Galaxy Zoo, inviting amateur stargazers to help them catalog and classify some 900,000 galaxies that had been photographed from the year 2000 onward. The task would

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over 100,000 volunteers less than six months, and each galaxy was re-checked an average of 38 times. By mid-2014, several hundred thousand Galaxy Zoo volunteers had crunched through seven giant-scale data sets, compiled a catalog of galaxies ten times larger than any previous version, and produced 44 scientific

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unexpected.28 Hanny van Arkel, a Dutch schoolteacher, got an object in the sky named after her—an honor that even professional astronomers rarely receive. Galaxy Zoo expanded into Zooniverse (zooniverse.org)—in 2015, the world’s largest citizen science portal with 1.1 million registered volunteers. Together they tackle oversized data

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27). “Managing the Deluge of ‘Big Data’ from Space.” NASA. Retrieved from www.jpl.nasa.gov/news. 27. SciTech Daily (2013, September 24). “Researchers Publish Galaxy Zoo 2 Catalog, Data on More Than 300,000 Nearby Galaxies.” SciTech Daily. Retrieved from scitechdaily.com. 28. van Arkel, Hanny (2015). “Voorwerp Discovery.” Retrieved from

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–6 Foresti, Giacomo Filippo, 29 free trade, 5, 25, 230. See also trade Free Trade Area of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 25 Galaxy Zoo, 148 Galileo Galilei, 107, 134, 237 Gates, Bill, 36 Gemma, Reinerus, 61 genetics gene therapy, 119–20, 158 genome sequencing costs, 117 history of, 114

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

by Clive Thompson · 11 Sep 2013 · 397pp · 110,130 words

, because people enjoy feeling they’re contributing to global knowledge. Many other scientists have joined Baker in crafting successful group thinking projects, such as the Galaxy Zoo, founded by the Radcliffe Observatory in Oxford, England, which puts a deluge of space imagery online and lets everyday astrophiles classify the shapes of galaxies

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Structure of a Monomeric Retroviral Protease Solved by Protein Folding Game Players,” Nature Structural & Molecular Biology 19, no. 3 (March 2012): 1175–77. the Galaxy Zoo: Tim Adams, “Galaxy Zoo and the New Dawn of Citizen Science,” The Observer (UK), March 17, 2012, accessed March 24, 2013, www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/mar

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/18/galaxy-zoo-crowdsourcing-citizen-scientists. a one-million-dollar prize: Eliot Van Buskirk, “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos Wins $1 Million Netflix Prize by Mere Minutes,” Wired, September

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app, 136 Friedel, Frederic, 17 Frye, Northrop, 132 Fuchsian functions, 132 Fujifilm Velvia film, 110 “Funes, the Memorius” (Borges), 39–40 Galaga (video game), 148 Galaxy Zoo, 169 Galileo, 59 Galton, Francis, 155–56 Gardner, Sue, 161 Gee, James Paul, 198 generation effect, 57, 75, 184 geography, learning through video games, 199

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World

by Timothy Garton Ash · 23 May 2016 · 743pp · 201,651 words

pub had the crazy idea of asking the general public to help them scan tens of thousands of photos of galaxies. With mass participation, this Galaxy Zoo not only classified numerous previously unclassified galaxies but also identified a new kind of galaxy.46 A Cambridge mathematician put an open invitation on his

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-public-library-launched/. Europeana, http://www.europeana.eu/portal/ and the Internet Archive, https://archive.org/index.php 45. see Nielsen 2012, 161–63 46. Galaxy Zoo, http://perma.cc/W5M4-PAHW 47. I take these examples from Nielsen 2012, 1–3, 133–42 48. see ‘Gottfrid Svartholm-Warg on Freedom of

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, 174, 175f, 176, 185, 210, 244, 278 Fry, Stephen, 136 Fujimori, Alberto, 190 Funes, Ireno, 305 Furedi, Frank, 90 Gaddafi, Muammar, 88 ‘Gafa, les,’ 48 Galaxy Zoo, 166 Galilei, Galileo, 152 Gandhi, Mohandas, 91, 98, 108, 148–49, 158, 251, 346, 378 Garcia, Cindy Lee, 71 Gates, Bill, 54 Gawker, 294–95