t00fri wrote:Andrea, I think your personal experience is based on aspects that only marginally relate to the specific task that was advertised. The answers they ask "layman-brains" to provide are comparably TRIVIAL pattern recognition tasks compared to what we do routinely "in grand style" in elementary particle physics, both experimental and theoretical.
You should e.g. see for once the amazing degree of sophistication the software for the forthcoming LHC collider at CERN/Geneva has reached meanwhile! The daily bread and butter pattern recognition tasks are many orders of magnitude harder and --of course-
solved with state of the art /computer/ methods.
Just as a small illustration: each proton proton collision at the LHC actually constitutes up to 25 individual processes with many 100's of elementary particles in the final state that need to be identified and measured.
?€¦. The required computer task is so huge that the whole scientific world is sharing the computer load via the so called GRID global network.
Here is a typical event from the RHIC heavy ion collider?€¦.
Some small research group may just not find the right pattern recognition software on the "scientific market" or lack the programming experts for doing a custom approach. But from a "big science" perspective, I can assure you that this website call looks kind of amusing.
Bye Fridger
Fridger, under many aspects my personal experience is close to the task that was advertised here, but I hardly understand what you are speaking of about your work, I?€™m not acquainted with high-energy physics.
But my long experience on astronomy (even if as amateur, not as professional astronomer) suggests me that this project?€™s budget is
enormously more relevant that those of most of the astronomy projects I know (and I suggest you not to speak loudly of this to your colleagues astronomers
).
Just three examples:
The StarDust-Home project (The Planetary Society-
http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/about.php), based on data collected by the NASA StarDust Mission to comet Wild2, whose I was speaking in my previous post, has a not so high budget, and for this reason they were compelled, from its start, to define a policy based on the use of freely working people.
Actually about twelve thousand people are scanning the images!
The Galaxy Zoo project (the University of Oxford, the University of Portsmouth and Johns Hopkins University- USA-
http://www.galaxyzoo.org/Press.aspx ), bases its project on the StarDust one, same approach, as they admit, people and not scientists make the thankless task (and this is OK, none is obliged to do it).
The MPC (Minor Planet Center, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge,
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/mpc.html), the organization that catalogues ALL the known Minor Planets, checking, comparing, computing, defining, accepting or rejecting thousands of daily measurements of MP positions, in order to identify as soon as possible potentially hazardous objects, is a two and a half people venture, with access to the Tamkin Foundation Computing high-speed computer network, but with a ridiculous budget that doesn?€™t allow for extra time, so when something goes wrong the overtime they use to solve it is always unpaid!
The Sky Morph project (NASA's AISR program-
http://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov/skymorph/skymorph.html ), that takes care, gathers, memorizes, checks practically all the film, plate and electronic astronomical images from NEAT, DSS, DSS2, HST, USNO and POSS!, obtained up to now, and makes them available to all the scientists or researchers that need them to find in the past the position of particular objects like NEOs, was about closing three years ago, due to missing funds. After a kind of popular revolution among professional and amateur astronomers like me, that sent to NASA thousands of blaming messages, they obtained funds to go on for some more time, but none knows what will happen in the next future.
In science as in life, and you surely know it, Fridger, scientists may be clever or less clever, lucky or unlucky, diplomatic or not, so IMHO (beg your pardon for the acronym, but I like it) you should not say how much your group is clever and able to buy or make all the stuff you need, compared with other people of small research groups, because may be that some or many of them had not the cleverness, or the fortune, or the ability to obtain what they need.
Or perhaps they are in the wrong place at the wrong time, or their studies are not so interesting for benefactors or sponsors, who knows.
.
Even if I?€™m sure it?€™s not so, yours looks like a boastful speech towards them.
I?€™m not a scientist, and I have no debts with any of the projects I reported here, but I highly respect who tries to make his work the best he can, even if in a ?€?scientifically incorrect?€
