Wisdom of Crowds: get involved in real research (yes you can!)

In today's issue of SEED magazine there is a great article about how ordinary citizens can become scientists active in real research projects. They call it "Citizen Science".

http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/creating_citizen_scientists/

The projects rely on many people around the world all contributing their opinions to the classification of elements of large datasets ... for example, describing the characteristics of previously unknown galaxies. It doesn't matter that you aren't an expert or that you haven't done this before for two reasons: 1) you'll get better at it with practice and 2) the results will be averaged over lots of people's opinions.

The wonderful thing is that it seems that the combined opinions of many people beats the expert every time.

This reminds me of one of our selections for the Prism Bookclub in the Science Gallery earlier this year, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. ... We're always so on trend here at the Science Gallery!