(From the University College London’s website.) Hosted by the University College London and the Royal Geographical Society, the London Citizen Cyberscience Summit is a great chance for scientists and citizens to learn about the latest breakthroughs in citizen cyberscience. It will be a unique opportunity to brainstorm about how new technologies can enhance citizen cyberscience. A bold ambition of the summit is to draft a citizen cyberscience manifesto, involving all the stakeholders in the field.
Who should come?
• Scientists, aspiring and established, amateur and professional, online or in the field.
• Citizens who care about the impact of science on society, and of society on science.

Book a ticket for the event now!
Don’t miss this chance to meet many of the pioneers of volunteer computing and volunteer thinking in person as well as inspiring stories from citizen cyberscientists who have made significant contributions to science via the Web.
A limited number of tickets are left – book now to avoid disappointment!
Who is speaking?
· Jonathan Silvertown -Professor of ecology at the Open University who is behind several of the major ecological citizen science projects in the UK. His latest project is iSpot .

· Eric Paulos, Associate Professor at Canegie Mellon University, and leading the Living Environment Lab with a range of sensors and participatory sensing activities

· Francois Taddei, founder of the CRI (Center for Research and Interdisciplinary) at Paris Descartes University and explore how citizen scientists can help in synthetic biology research, and will cover creativity through science

· Andrea Wiggins, from Syracuse University, who specializes in participation in citizen science projects.

· Tina Phillips is the Evaluation Program Manager at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (CLO), and Project Leader for DEVISE, a project on developing and implementing contextually appropriate evaluation designs and strategies for citizen science projects.

· Ofer Arazy, from University of Alberta who research patterns of contributions and participation in citizen cyberscience projects.

· Lilian Pintea, from the Jane Goodall Institute, vice president for conservation science, who is involved in community based monitoring of chimpanzee/forest habitats using ODK and Android based smartphones and tablets in Tanzania and Uganda.

· Jerome Lewis, lecturer in social anthropology at UCL who is working with Pygmy groups in the Congo-basin area.

· Jon Parsons, Global Canopy Programme who will talk about the development of software and hardware to support community measuring, reporting and verification (MRV).

· Wenjing Wu, from the Institute of High Energy Physics and the Chinese Academy of Science, who is working responsible to the CAS@home project, with tens of thousands of volunteers.

· Simon Tokumine, senior developer at Vizzuality, who are the designers of many Citizen Cyberscience projects.

· Darlene Cavalier who reports on citizen science in her blog Science Cheerleader and for Discover Magazine. She also founded SciStarter to connect the public to citizen science activities.

· Shannon Dosemagen and Sarah Wylie from the Public Laboratory where she directs community engagement. The Public Laboratory creates bottom up methods for people to collect and understand environmental information.

· Tom Igoe, Associate Arts Professor at ITP, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU and co-founder of Arduino, the open source hardware platform

· Ed Borden Head of Developer and User Engagement, Pachube who will talk about the Air Quality Egg.

· Lisa Haskel is a researcher at the Arctic Perspective Initiative (API) with an aim is to work with, learn from, and empower the North and Arctic Peoples through open source technologies and applied education and training.

· Ellie D’Hondt is a researcher at VUB in Belgium, and heading the BrusSense lab that focus on sustainability and urban areas, who will cover Participatory noise mapping of the local environment.

I’d like to thank Muki Haklay (Professor of GIScience and the director of the Extreme Citizen Science (ExCiteS) research group, at the University College London) for inviting me to participate. Check out Muki’s work:
Personal blog: povesham.wordpress.com
Mapping for Change – http://www.mappingforchange.org.uk

Darlene Cavalier will be a participant and featured speaker at this workshop designed to create a roadmap for a useful citizen science programs related to the microbiology of the built environment.
Hosted by MicroBEnet, the online destination for resources related to the microbiology of the built environment. Funded by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to Jonathan Eisen at the University of California, Davis it is collaboration between the Eisen Lab and Hal Levin at the Building Ecology Research Group.
Outcomes will be posted here on Science Cheerleader.

Credit: Alma Radocaj

Here’s an audio interview conducted by Michael Doornbos, founder of Evadot (a collaborative site exploring promising opportunities for the future). Explains how SciCheer and its sister site, Science For Citizens, got started and where we’re going.

And now a word from a scientist we worked with at the World’s Maker Faire this past weekend. SciCheers Rachel (recent Redskins cheerleader and Navy officer currently earning her nurse anesthetist degree), Amanda (recent St. Louis Rams cheerleader in her fourth year of medical school at Columbia University) and Christine (former LA Rams cheerleader, Ph.D., Geologist, post-doc research scientist) volunteered to help get thousands of people engaged in citizen science activities. Read more about them, and the event, here.

The scientists we worked with, like many people, raised their eyebrows at the mere thought of Science Cheerleaders. We’re used to that. We’ve also grown accustomed to the evolution in opinions once people see the SciCheers in action. We thought we’d share one recent testimonial with you:

(See pix of the SciCheers at the Maker Faire here.)

Carlyn S. Buckler, Ph.D.
Education and Outreach Associate
Paleontological Research Institution
and its Museum of the Earth
Adj. Asst. Professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
State University New York, Oneonta
1259 Trumansburg Road, Ithaca, NY 14850
www.MuseumoftheEarth.org

Hot off the heels of our appearances in Vegas , the Science Cheerleaders are heading to NY this weekend for NY’s World Maker Faire. Then, we’re off to Texas.

If you’re planning to be at the Maker Faire, please stop by our booth #6808! We’ve partnered up with Discover Magazine and our sister site, Science For Citizens, to help encourage people to get involved in citizen science projects.

Or, for all you Texans, we’d love to see you on Saturday, October 1st, from 4:30pm-8:30pm, deep in the south of Texas at the University of Texas, PanAmerican’s Hispanic Science and Engineering festival! With support from the National Science Foundation, we’ll be there to shake up stereotypes, inspire kids to consider science careers, and to get everyone involved in citizen science projects to help researchers do things like keep tabs on invasive self-cloning crayfish on their way to streams and lakes near you! Check this site for details, as they are posted.

The Science Cheerleaders will also perform science-themed routines and talk about their double lives as scientists AND professional cheerleaders for the Baltimore Ravens, Houston Texans, Kansas City Chiefs, Tennessee Titans and Atlanta Falcons. Swing over and say hi! SciCheer’s creative director, Laura Eilers, the reigning Ms. United States will be there, too!

Here’s a look at the Science Cheerleaders who will be performing in Texas:

Sammi Jo	Ada
Sandra	Heidi
Melissa	Laura Eilers, Ms. United States

Use bubbles to measuring wind

Looking for valuable, summertime activities to do with your family? Have I got ideas for you! ScienceForCitizens.net has hundreds of awesome opportunities for you and your family to do something fun while contributing to scientific research.

Don’t just take my word for it (after all, I’m incredibly biased…I founded Science For Citizens). Here’s an excerpt from  a very recent post, giving two thumbs up to SciCheer’s sister site, ScienceForCitizens.net.

Science for Citizens cofounder, Darlene Cavalier, understands that not everyone who is interested in science was good at it in school. However, she believes that shouldn’t matter. Science should still be accessible to anyone who is interested, and it’s never too late to take an interest or revisit the subject  — especially with one’s kids. One of the core concepts of citizen science is that even people, who are not formally trained in science, should still be able to participate and possibly make a meaningful contribution. Through her organization, families of all experience levels can find fun, recreational and learning-based projects and, if they choose, even pursue those that are of a more serious scientific undertaking.

To get started, just head over to the project finder at:  http://scienceforcitizens.net/finder/ where you can search by area or interest. For examples, projects range from Craywatch — wading in streams to tracking invasive crayfish — to NoiseTube. NoiseTube participants install an app on their phones that allows them to track noise pollution. For those in colder climates, IceWatch USA asks families to record how much ice they see on lakes and rivers to help scientists understand climate change. Regardless of how you’d like to support and encourage your kids to take an interest in nature and science, you’re sure to find something fun to do together. To learn more about Science for Citizens, click here!

Read the full post here.
Be sure to sign up to receive free updates from Science For Citizens when new projects are added!

From the Associated Press, this morning. It’s been printed in the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Times, USA Today and many other media outlets:

Once restricted mainly to counting birds – most famously, in Audubon’s 111-year-old Christmas Bird Count – citizen science has expanded rapidly in recent years, both in number and variety of projects. Some projects count things – fireflies, ladybugs, frogs, herring. Others record data on water quality, weather, flower budding and other phenomena. Still others already have the data but need a lot of people to sort through it.

Darlene Cavalier, whose ScienceForCitizens website brings together volunteers and research projects, said she started the site when she was a graduate student writing a thesis on promoting citizen science. The site’s growth from a blog listing about 40 projects in 2006 to a busy portal with more than 400 projects in its database today mirrors the expansion of citizen science in the US, Cavalier said.

“My goal is to get as many people as possible involved in citizen science projects,” said Cavalier.
Read the full story.

Mon, 09 May 2011 8:58a.m.

By Mary Esch

Environmental scientist Chris Bowser pulled a tiny shrimp-like creature from the muck in an eel trap as teenagers in chest waders surrounded him in the rushing Fall Kill, where they were collecting transparent baby eels.

“This is called a scud, or amphipod,” Bowser said, launching into a riff on the food chain and pollution.

“Are you going to eat it?” a girl interrupted.

“What? No!” Bowser snapped, then reconsidered and popped it in his mouth. “Tastes like shrimp seasoned with mud.”

Besides being a researcher in the state’s Hudson River Estuary Program, Bowser leads citizen projects that collect reams of data for scientists and resource management agencies while engaging volunteers in hands-on science and teaching them something about the world around them. His Steve Irwin-style exuberance and enthusiasm for his subject matter make Bowser an ideal leader in the rapidly expanding world of citizen science.

Once restricted mainly to counting birds – most famously, in Audubon’s 111-year-old Christmas Bird Count – citizen science has expanded rapidly in recent years, both in number and variety of projects. Some projects count things – fireflies, ladybugs, frogs, herring. Others record data on water quality, weather, flower budding and other phenomena. Still others already have the data but need a lot of people to sort through it.

Darlene Cavalier, whose ScienceForCitizens website brings together volunteers and research projects, said she started the site when she was a graduate student writing a thesis on promoting citizen science. The site’s growth from a blog listing about 40 projects in 2006 to a busy portal with more than 400 projects in its database today mirrors the expansion of citizen science in the US, Cavalier said.

“My goal is to get as many people as possible involved in citizen science projects,” said Cavalier. The more people learn about science and build a personal connection to research, the better they will be able to participate in policy decisions related to science and the environment, she said.

For researchers, volunteers provide free labour and are able to complete a great deal of work in a short time if there are a lot of them. Galaxy Zoo was launched in 2007 to enlist volunteers to classify photographs of a million galaxies. More than 250,000 people have participated so far, providing information used in numerous peer-reviewed journal articles.

“Professional science communities were a little wary of involving the public in the past because of trust issues and concerns about bad data,” Cavalier said. Better design of projects and new methods of weeding out bad data have overcome much of that concern, she said.

Janis Dickinson, director of citizen science at Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is co-author of a book soon to be published about the lab’s highly regarded citizen science projects, which include Project FeederWatch, the Great Backyard Bird Count, and eBird, a global online tool where birders enter sightings into a massive database.

“The book is about how we can harness the internet to create conservation communities that are actually practicing data collection over huge and relevant geographic scales that really encompass the distributions of the organisms that we’re concerned about,” Dickinson said. “The internet allowed us suddenly to be able to take in data from a broad public, now globally with eBird, and then process that data and provide tools to the public so they can visualise and manipulate the data.”

As citizen science has become more sophisticated, the scientific community has embraced it, Dickinson said.

“Ten years ago when our researchers tried to publish they’d usually get a peer reviewer who was sceptical of the data,” Dickinson said. “We don’t see that any more. The research associate working in my group, who did his Ph.D. working from citizen science data, submitted a paper last August that was one of the fastest accepted I’ve ever seen.”

Bowser said researchers are becoming more accepting of volunteer-based data collection, but only if the protocols are straightforward enough and the citizens participating are trained and able to follow those protocols carefully.

“This eel project is a great model for citizen science,” Bowser said after wading ashore and leaving the students to their eel counting and water sampling. “For one thing, the species has a real demonstrated conservation need. We’ve seen a decline in American eels – in some populations 80 to 90 percent – since the 1970s, and we’re not sure why. The data we collect goes to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which wants this information.”

Volunteers like to know they’re doing something with real value, he said. They also like the fact that it requires a time commitment of just two months in the spring.

“Also, the eel has this very compelling story,” Bowser said. “They’re born in the ocean in the Sargasso Sea, then travel thousands of kilometres as baby glass eels to swim up rivers and populate the watersheds. And they’re charismatic in an underdog, Humphrey Bogart kind of way.”

“It’s good for kids to get outdoors and see what’s out there,” said 20-year-old Jorge Reyes-Bravo, who started working on the eel project when he was in high school and continues to volunteer now that he’s in community college majoring in environmental studies. “We don’t want to see species disappear. We want to figure out why they’re disappearing and help them.”

AP

Heading to Baltimore, MD where I’ll be speaking at the annual meeting of the Council of Science Editors, tomorrow morning. The Council is “a dynamic community of editorial professionals dedicated to the responsible and effective communication of science.”
Looking forward to this! If you’re planning to attend, let me know so we can try to meet up.
Here’s a description of my upcoming talk, taken from the CSE website where you can find lots of good information about the Council and this particular conference, titled “Make Science Matter.”

Plenary Address: Darlene Cavalier, The Science Cheerleader

While scientists, educators, and policymakers wring their hands over the perceived lack of public interest in and understanding of science, millions of “average” citizens are actively involved in formal research efforts, and, in the process, these so-called citizen scientists are: contributing to real science; enabling professional researchers to significantly increase data collection and sorting; creating a shared space for scientists and citizens to collaborate and build trust; and forcing the science community to rethink what it means to communicate with this new generation of DIYers. What is citizen science? How is it shaping science and what does the future hold? How are scientists and policymakers adapting? Cavalier will explore all of this and more, including a brief (entertaining) overview of some unorthodox methods she uses to attract more “average” citizens to science.

Darlene Cavalier is the founder of Science Cheerleader.com, a blog that promotes the involvement of citizens in science and science-related policy. She is also the cofounder of ScienceForCitizens.net, a major multi-functional Web site, named one of Philadelphia’s Top Ten Tech Start Ups with a Social Good*, that encourages and enables lay people to learn about, participate in, and contribute to science through recreational activities as well as formal research. Cavalier held executive positions at Walt Disney Publishing and worked at Discover Magazine for more than a decade. She was the principal investigator of a $1.5 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant applied to promote basic research through partnerships with Disney and ABC TV and more recently collaborated with the NSF, NBC Sports and the NFL to produce the Science of NFL Football series. Cavalier is a former Philadelphia 76ers cheerleader and holds a Masters degree from the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied the role of the citizen in science. She is a writer and senior advisor to Discover Magazine, serves on the Steering Committee for Science Debate and organized an effort to launch the first-of-its-kind network to support citizen engagement in technology assessments. In addition to Science Cheerleader, founding partners of that effort include the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, Boston Museum of Science, and Arizona State University. Her dedication, impact, and innovative approaches have been featured in Science, The Scientist, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Newsweek.com, Discover Magazine, Fox National Headline News, CNN, NPR and even ESPN, and many other national media outlets in the U.S. and internationally. She and her husband live in Philadelphia with their four young children.

Date: 5/2/2011

Time: 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM

Changing Planet is a series of three, televised Town Hall meetings, hosted by Tom Brokaw and Anne Thompson of NBC News, on what climate change means. The first event was held at Yale on 1/25 and the just-broadcast video of that program is posted above. It first aired on the Weather Channel, this weekend. A feature article appears in the June issue of Discover Magazine (available on newsstands in mid-May).

The second event was held at George Washington University on 4/12 (thanks to all of you who came to the event!). The final, televised Town Hall meeting will be held at AZ State University on 8/25.
The series can be followed on Twitter #ChangingPlanet

This series is produced by Discover Magazine and NBC Learn in conjunction with the National Science Foundation, Planet Forward and Science For Citizens (a sister site of SciCheer).
For more videos about climate change, please go to www.nbclearn.com/climate

There are many ways you can get involved in climate-related research to help the planet. Here’s one example currently featured on Science For Citizens.
Researchers need YOUR help tracking the presence of American robins (Turdus migratorius) so they can compare your observations with other environmental data, including climate and weather changes.

American robins are arriving in the Colorado Rockies 14 days earlier than they did 30 years ago and have been spotted in parts of Alaska for the first time. Because robins consume a wide variety of foods, an increase or decrease in their population may indicate (or impact) changes in other animal and plant species. It’s time for you to get involved and help the planet!

1. Spot a robin
2. Record the date and location
3. Take note of its activity (what is it doing? what is it eating? is it near other birds?)
Now, share your observations here, and, in the process, help researchers at Nature’s Notebook, a project of the USA National Phenology Network. The scientists will report back to you regularly!

Some of you may recall this fun video we did with school kids, Science Cheerleaders, bar patrons, Chemical Heritage Foundation President Tom Tritton and Nobel Laureate Dr. Baruch Blumberg.

Well, as reported, “Dr. Blumberg, a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist and medical anthropologist who discovered the hepatitis B virus, showed that it could cause liver cancer and then helped develop a powerful vaccine to fight it, saving millions of lives, died Tuesday. He was 85 and lived in Philadelphia.”

I has the very good fortune of occasionally meeting up with Dr. Blumberg at our local coffee shop where this highly unlikely duo would shoot the breeze about citizen science, science policy, outreach methods (boy was he amused by the science cheerleaders!), and lots of things that almost always circled back to various iterations of “public engagement in science” or…kids. He and his wife, Jean, have four kids and nine grandkids.

THIS was a man who believed in the power of people. Not just formally trained scientists, but citizen scientists as well. He was very involved with SETI and Galaxy Zoo, to name but two citizen science projects. Read more about his work at NASA’s astrobiology lab here.

Dr. Blumberg was such a devotee that he decided to use his social capital, in part, to reach out to the heads of the major science institutions in Philly to put together a team to launch Philadelphia’s first, large-scale citizen science effort. Pictured here is the team his assembled: (left to right: Babak Ashrafi (PACHS), Andrew Baker (Sr. VP, Phila Zoo), Dr. George Wohlreich (President, College of Physicians/Phila); Dr. Ted Daeschler (Fmr Pres, Acad of Natural Science/Phila); Dr. Mary Patterson McPherson (President, American Philosophical Society); Dr. Baruch Blumberg, (Nobel Laureate); Tom Tritton (President, Chemical Heritage Foundation); me; and hiding behind me is Allison McCook (former executive editor, The Scientist). I’ll keep you posted on this activity.

At one of his last public appearances, he spoke at a local (Philly) public school. So glad Larry Bock of the USA Science and Engineering Festival invited Dr. Blumberg (and dozens of other Nobel Laureates across the nation) to go into local schools to meet the kids. In this case, when I asked Dr. Blumberg where he’d like to speak, he said, “where my kids went to school, McCall.”

He recited many fond memories his family had at the neighborhood school. He also provided one of the most authentic talks I’ve seen. He told kids that science isn’t always fun; it’s hard work and “you need to know that or you’ll be disappointed sooner or later and you might quit.” He also told the kids that while it wouldn’t be likely one of them would win a Nobel Prize, “it’s not impossible….why not?” He explained how he and his team knew they were onto something (discovering Hep B) and felt an obligation to do something about it (the vaccine).
After all, as this NYTimes obituary reports:

Saving lives, he said, was the whole point of his career. “Well, it is something I always wanted to do,” he said. “This is what drew me to medicine. There is, in Jewish thought, this idea that if you save a single life, you save the whole world, and that affected me.”