I heard on NPR this morning that there’s a shout out to everyone to help with an interesting scientific project. It is crowd-sourcing in order to achieve certain objectives in science, which is an excellent idea. I wish I could do certain research projects I’m working on in this way – would be fun and quite novel indeed… Crowd-sourcing crowds of processors is maybe the closest I’d get to that. Anyway, it is all about identifying different types of whale song, and as a citizen scientist you’ll be helping them sort through different “dialects” of it. The idea is that lots of individuals doing comparative listening and expressing their opinions will be of value, allowing a sort of “average over auditory systems”, so the more people who participate the better… The story is at this link, and there are links to the site where you can do the listening will be found there too.
Enjoy!
-cvj
Image credit: Marcel Mochet /AFP/Getty Images
I share the appreciation of the superb ‘Frozen Planet’and it’s wonderful footage of the whales. (Interesting thought about what they were saying to other when being filmed!!) I really like the idea of the ‘citizen scientist’.
I dread to think what those killer whales are singing – recently saw two programmes showing how these intelligent animals operate – totally fascinating and horrifying!!! One of the programmes was the BBC’s frozen planet where they showed how the cameras were able to capture so much of the wonderful shots and how the killer whales took an interest in the men in the boat capturing the footage!! What were they singing to each other at that point? cmj+