As record levels of snow blanket much of the United States this year, Science Cheerleader’s sister site, Science For Citizens, is collaborating with an important climate research project at the University of Waterloo called Snow Tweets. We’re pleased that this is the first of many scientific projects that you’ll be able to do on ScienceforCitizens.net. To help researchers track climate change, we’re requesting that you find a ruler, put on a warm coat, go outside, and measure the depth of snow wherever you happen to be. And then report the depth to us right here. That’s all there is to it! Your simple action will help the planet. Your data will advance climate science, and you’ll get to see your depth report appear on our world map of snow tweets.

This project is part of the Changing Planet series on NBC; a collaboration between the National Science Foundation, NBC News, Discover Magazine and ScienceforCitizens.net. Learn more about Changing Planet!

Today, for people living in the Northern Hemisphere (most of you), the Sun will reach its highest point in the sky…until the next June 21st cycles around. Science blogger, Ethan Siegel, tells us how we can measure the tilt of the Earth today. Check it out!

Moon Zoo: Crater Survey from The Zooniverse on Vimeo.

Today, NASA and the Citizen Science Alliance presented Moon Zoo to the world!

ANYONE with internet access can sign up and start identifying craters and other features of the moon courtesy of images of NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

“We need Web users around the world to help us interpret these stunning new images of the lunar surface,” said Chris Lintott of Oxford University and chair of the Citizen Science Alliance, according to a NASA news release. “If you only spend five minutes on the site counting craters you’ll be making a valuable contribution to science and, who knows, you might run across a Russian spacecraft.”

I had the pleasure of chatting with Chris last week. We’re looking at ways ScienceForCitizens.net and the Citizen Science Alliance (as well as other groups with our shared mission of advancing opportunities for citizen scientists) might collaborate. I guess the sky really is the limit!

Studying gravestones to track changes in Earth’s chemistry. Call for volunteers! EarthTrek presents a global Gravestone Project.

This project aims to map the location of a graveyards around the globe and then use marble gravestones in those graveyards to measure the weathering rate of marble at that location.The weathering rates of gravestones are an indication of changes in the acidity of rainfall between locations and over time. The acidity is affected by air pollution and other factors, and could be used as a measure of changes in climate and pollution levels.

From Dr. John: To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internets, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role of social networking in communication, team building, and group mobilization. The challenge is to be the first person to submit the locations of 10 8-foot, red, weather balloons at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States.

Here’s how it works: The red balloons will be deployed on Saturday, December 5, in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads. Teams and collaborators will have approximately 9 days, until 12:00 PM (ET) on December 14, to collect the locations of the balloons and submit their entries.  All locations must be submitted in latitude and longitude coordinates. The event is open to individuals of all ages irrespective of nationality or residency (except Federal employees and their spouses and dependents), but first you must register your team on  the DARPA Network Challenge website.

Find the red balloons. Win $40,000. Do you have what it takes to be the next Balloon Boy/Girl?

While we most commonly associate Google with its ability to search the Intertubes for our favorite science FAILs, the tech giant is also opening new doors for citizen science. A recent article in the Public Library of Science (PloS) ONE highlights a new mobile phone application, powered by Google Maps and Google’s Android operating system, that allows professional and citizen scientists to gather, submit, and access research data from the field.

The application, called EpiCollect, was initially designed for epedimiological and ecological studies but has potential for a number of other fields, including economics, public health, and resource allocation. Individual users can input data records (variables, photos, GPS location, etc) into EpiCollect from their mobile phone, which is synchronized to a central database. An accompanying web application, located at www.spatialepidemiology.net, provides a common location for mapping, visualization, and analysis of the data by everyone involved in the study. The two-way connectivity between the EpiCollect mobile application and the central database could increase the collection and collation of data for community projects, particular in resource-limited areas.

Importantly, EpiCollect was developed as a free software using Google’s open-source Android operating system. Anyone interested in using the software is encouraged to contact David Aanensen in the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Imperial College London.  The EpiCollect website also provides three sample epidemological datasets and a facility to geocode your own spatial data.

Do you know where your Congressional representatives and Senators stand on the health reform issue? Research!America (the nation’s largest not-for-profit public education and advocacy alliance), makes it easy to find out, through the “Your Congress, Your Health” constituent education initiative. Now, it’s as simple as visiting the website and typing in your zip code to learn more about your reps’ positions. And YOU get to weigh in with your opinions on this and other health-related legislative matters.

Thanks, subscriber Marilyn (who happens to work at Research!America) for calling attention to this terrific project! Here’s an excerpt from an email Marilyn sent us a little while back:

As President Obama and Congress proceed to revamp the American health care system, health reform will continue to dominate the national dialogue. Securing funding for medical, health and scientific research must be a critical piece of that discussion.

Your Congress-Your Health asks all members of Congress their positions and priorities on health reform, as well as health-related research. An initiative of Research!America and more than 20 partner organizations, the 2009 Your Congress-Your Health questionnaire is now online along with some initial responses from Congress. Knowing where Congress stands on these issues should be top of mind for your readers and all Americans.

There is important work to be done for health reform, but it does not mean that we should stop working on the future of health. Research is the only way to transform U.S. health care from a “sick-care” system to a system that prevents disease. Moreover, committing to a strategic investment in research will help lift America out of its current economic crisis by creating jobs and ensuring that we decrease the disease burden that hurts our health and our economy.

On the site, your readers can see if their members of Congress have responded to the survey and, if not, use links on the site to let Congress know that their views on these issues are important to their constituents. We also have public opinion poll data available featuring questions similar to those we are asking Congress.

Let me know if you have any questions about Your Congress-Your Health. Thanks for all you do for science and science advocacy. Regards, Marilyn J. Walker, Research!America

Here’s Sarah with a fascinating update to one of her previous posts.

You may recall one of my posts from a few months ago where I encouraged everyone to become involved in CureTogether.  (To summarize, CureTogether is a collaboration of people from around the world volunteering to solve real problems by reporting information about their chronic conditions. Patients self-report and rate symptoms and treatments for over 360 conditions. The top conditions at CureTogether are depression, anxiety, migraine, back pain, and vulvodynia.)  I am pleased to report that I just received an e-mail from Alex Carmichael, one of the co-founders of CureTogether, with some fabulous news about the success of their citizen science projects.

According to Alex, after an analysis of data reported by 324 patients at CureTogether, patients who report infertility are 1.9x more likely to report having asthma than patients who don’t report infertility.  Within the 34 people reporting infertility, 13 (38%) reported having asthma (the remaining 21 out of 34 specifically said they did NOT have asthma). Within the 290 people reporting “no infertility”, 58 (20%) reported having asthma (the remaining 232 specifically reported NOT having asthma).  This 38% vs. 20% relative risk is statistically significant, with a 95% confidence interval of 1.4 – 2.6.

This finding is really important because using only user-reported data, CureTogether has confirmed the infertility-asthma association that has only been explored previously in clinical studies such as the ones I have listed below:

1. Asthma was found to be associated with irregular menstruation.

2. Asthma is higher in women with endometriosis (which also has a high correlation to infertility) than in the general population.

3. The more siblings you have, the less likely you are to have asthma.

4. A big cohort study in the UK found no link between fertility and allergy-related diseases but also said that with asthma in particular there was a different relationship to fertility than with eczema and hay fever.

Obviously, this is a big step for citizen science – REAL disease correlations being confirmed just by people answering a few health questions.  I encourage you all to log on to the CureTogether website and take a few moments to report data of your own!  In the meantime, I have no doubts that they will continue to have more success to share with us in the coming months…

World Water Monitoring Day™ (WWMD) is an international education and outreach program that builds public awareness and involvement in protecting water resources around the world by engaging citizens to conduct basic monitoring of their local water bodies.

An easy-to-use test kit enables everyone from children to adults to sample local water bodies for a core set of water quality parameters including temperature, acidity (pH), clarity (turbidity) and dissolved oxygen (DO). Results are shared with participating communities around the globe through the WWMD Web site.

70,000 people participated in 2008. Monitor your local waterways through December. Get started here.

In this report from Dr. John Ohab, we see how public participation in government activity is but a heartbeat away…in the Executive Branch, that is. Congress still lags far behind. In the coming weeks, I will have an update on the status of our efforts to create a participatory mechanism so the public can become informed–and weigh in–on, science and technology policy issues BEFORE Congress drafts legislation. Some exciting things are underway!
Here’s Dr. John with a report on how YOU can now access government data and mash it up ’till you heart’s content….

In 2008, Vivek Kundra, then-Chief Technology Officer for Washington, D.C, was looking for innovative ways to use information technology to improve the city’s government. He looked no further than its citizens.

In 2008, Vivek Kundra, then-Chief Technology Officer for Washington, D.C, was looking for innovative ways to use information technology to improve the city’s government. He looked no further than its citizens.

Kundra created a public contest called Apps for Democracy, which challenged citizens to create their own software applications using DC government data and popular products like iPhones and Google Maps. For years, the DC Data Catalogue had provided public data on crime, construction projects, and government operations. Apps for Democracy rewarded citizens that could think one step further and develop the most cost-effective, accessible ways of re-packaging this data for use by the general public and the government.

The city invested roughly $50,000 in Apps for Democracy, and in just 30 days, produced 47 software applications with an estimated savings of $2,300,000. The effort was so successful it even spawned a follow-up, Apps for Democracy: Community Edition, which asked citizens to develop applications for submitting online requests for city services.

Through Apps for Democracy, Kundra established a new model for cross-sector collaboration by engaging citizens to meet the technology challenges of tomorrow. It was participatory government in its purest form. And, apparently, President Barack Obama was paying attention – in May 2009, he named Kundra the country’s first Federal Chief Information Officer and charged him with “directing the policy and strategic planning of federal information technology investments”.

As a critical player in President Obama’s Open Government Initiative, Kundra has focused his efforts on increasing public participation in government and improving the availability of government information. One of the first initiatives is Data.gov, a website that provides free access to over 100,000 machine-readable datasets, widgets, RSS feeds, and other data tools held by the Federal government. This collection includes valuable data on an array topics that impacts our lives, from financial numbers to transportation statistics to the FBI’s Most Wanted List. And the numbers will only grow as geographical, weather, and other scientific data is opened for public consumption.

The data by itself is not particularly useful. The real value comes when citizens evaluate and repurpose this data into “mashups” — applications that combine different data sources together to create an entirely new product. To unlock some of this potential, Sunlight Labs took a page out of Vivek Kundra’s book and held their own contest, Apps for America: The Data.gov Challenge. On Tuesday, they announced three winners: DataMasher allows users to build mashups of state information and visualize them in different ways; GovPulse allows users to filter and act on information from the Federal Registry, the government’s official daily publication for rules, proposed rules, and notices; and, ThisWeKnow combines nationwide data to provide information about your favorite city or region.

The Data.gov and Apps for Democracy efforts indicate that the government is starting to think differently about how it uses the Internets to share information and provide more opportunities for citizens to participate in their democracy. Take advantage of this new approach. If you’re a software developer with an innovative idea, check out Data.gov and let the ScienceCheerleader team know if you create your own Data.gov mashup. And, if you don’t have the necessary computer programming skills (i.e., me), you can still contribute by suggesting data sets that you would like to see, rating and commenting on existing data, and suggesting improvements to the website.

Here’s one person’s view of what Gov 2.0 means to him:

Project Snapshot:
Topics: computer, web development
Location: anywhere
Duration: anytime
Cost: free or low cost
Gear: computer
Level of Difficulty: moderate-difficult