ANONYMOUS - OUR VOICE

Facebook plans to go after Clubhouse — and podcasts — with a suite of new audio products

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Facebook wants you to start talking, and listening, on Facebook.
Sources say the social network is planning to announce a series of products — some of which won’t appear for some time — under the umbrella of “social audio” on Monday. They include Facebook’s take on Clubhouse, the audio-only social network that grew rapidly last year, as well a push into podcast discovery and distribution, aided by Spotify.
Facebook’s audio plans include:
<ul>
<li>An audio-only version of Rooms, <a href="https://www.messenger.com/rooms">a videoconferencing product it launched a year ago</a>, when the pandemic spurred massive adoption of Zoom.</li>
<li>A Clubhouse-like product that will let groups of people listen to and interact with speakers on a virtual “stage.”</li>
<li>A product that will let Facebook users record brief voice messages and post them in their newsfeeds, like they currently can do with text, pictures, and videos.</li>
<li>A podcast discovery product that will be connected with <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22296132/spotify-strategy-dawn-ostroff-joe-rogan-interview">Spotify, which has invested heavily in podcasting over the last couple years</a>. It’s unclear to me if Facebook intends to do more beyond flagging podcasts for its users and sending them to Spotify. (Worth noting: Spotify and Facebook first linked up 10 years ago, when <a href="http://allthingsd.com/20110922/the-big-picture-of-facebook-f8-prepare-for-the-sharing-explosion/">Facebook was pushing the idea of</a> “<a href="http://allthingsd.com/20110922/the-big-picture-of-facebook-f8-prepare-for-the-sharing-explosion/">frictionless sharing</a>,” which was supposed to mean that your Facebook friends could see what you were reading, or listening to, or watching. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/facebook-realizes-nobody-wants-share-everything-all-time/323377/">That fizzled out</a> pretty fast.)</li>
</ul>
It’s also unclear to me what the timeline is for the products Facebook will announce tomorrow. My sense is that the Rooms product — which, again, is a version of videoconferencing without video — is the most likely candidate to go live right away. Sources said other products may not show up, even in beta form, until later this spring.
All told, the announcements are meant to signal CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s belief that his users are ready to use voice and audio as a way to connect with each other. He’s not the only Big Tech executive who’s gotten interested in that idea recently: Twitter has already launched Spaces, its own take on Clubhouse. And Apple is preparing a new subscription podcast service it may announce as early as Tuesday, as part of its own <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.apple.com%2Fapple-events%2F&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Frecode%2F2021%2F4%2F18%2F22390742%2Ffacebook-podcasts-clubhouse-audio-launch-spotify-zuckerberg-apple" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_query_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://www.apple.com/apple-events/","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/4/18/22390742/facebook-podcasts-clubhouse-audio-launch-spotify-zuckerberg-apple","xcust":"___vx__p_22154783__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>product rollout</a>.
Zuckerberg is scheduled to talk to technology journalist (and Vox Media contributor) Casey Newton on Monday at 1 pm Eastern; this weekend Newton <a href="https://www.platformer.news/p/mark-zuckerberg-is-coming-to-sidechannel?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo1NTc5NCwicG9zdF9pZCI6MzUyNjY2NjksIl8iOiJwRE90MCIsImlhdCI6MTYxODc3MzY0NSwiZXhwIjoxNjE4Nzc3MjQ1LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItNzk3NiIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.GFIsRBsH-g5KMxry0sWENTrZm7pwKN8sgPBaZxp3-WE">wrote</a> that he and Zuckerberg would talk about “this wild transitional moment in tech and media,” noting that Facebook is “increasingly interested in newsletters, live audio, and other technologies.”
Facebook offered this non-comment in response to a query from Recode: “We’ve been connecting people through audio and video technologies for many years and are always exploring new ways to improve that experience for people.” Reps for Spotify and Apple declined to comment.
Zuckerberg has made his interest in <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22311703/clubhouse-influencer-andreessen">Clubhouse, which launched at the beginning of the pandemic</a> and enjoyed rapid growth throughout the last year, quite clear. He’s shown up for multiple chats on the service, including one with Spotify CEO Daniel Ek. Clubhouse, meanwhile, has <a href="https://www.joinclubhouse.com/blog/growing-a-global-community">just announced a new funding round</a> that values the company at $4 billion — just months after announcing a funding round that valued it at $1 billion.
At the same time, observers have speculated that Clubhouse, which features ephemeral, real-time chats in front of audiences as big as 5,000 people, may have a hard time recapturing the buzz it had in 2020 and earlier this year, when much of the world was locked down and looking for distractions. The app’s pace of downloads appears to have slowed along with its novelty, and Clubhouse hasn’t updated its user totals from February, when it said it had 10 million users.
And if you want a thoughtful critique of Clubhouse’s product challenges, I suggest you read this Twitter thread from tech investor Shaan Puri. Tl;dr: It’s hard to consistently create live, audio-only content that will engage current users and bring in new ones.
<div>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
So... everyone seems to think clubhouse is the "next big thing" - but I think it's going to fail.
Here's how I think it all goes down..
— Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) <a href="https://twitter.com/ShaanVP/status/1371972261004070913?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 16, 2021</a></blockquote>
</div>
On the other hand, Clubhouse is still limited to Apple iPhone users, and when it opens up to the world of Android users, its numbers will most definitely shoot up again. It’s certainly too early to assess whether the format Clubhouse pioneered — a mix of live podcasting and virtual conference-schmoozing — is going to stick around.
It’s also, obviously, way too early to figure out if Facebook’s massive scale will help it dethrone Clubhouse. But Zuckerberg hasn’t been shy about copying services or features built by competitors or would-be competitors, with mixed results: It successfully aped the “Stories” feature pioneered by Snapchat, for instance, but Rooms, its would-be Zoom competitor, never caught on. And Reels, its attempt to clone TikTok’s short-form video service, is a work in progress that is stocked in large part with... videos that first appeared on TikTok. Still to come: A Facebook-branded version of Substack’s successful write-your-own-newsletter service.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/4/18/22390742/facebook-podcasts-clubhouse-audio-launch-spotify-zuckerberg-apple">https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/4/18/22390742/facebook-podcasts-clubhouse-audio-launch-spotify-zuckerberg-apple</a>

vox Facebook plans to go after Clubhouse — and podcasts — with a suite of new audio products

Facebook wants you to start talking, and listening, on Facebook. Sources say the social network is planning to announce a series of produc...

Pelosi renews call for Congress to investigate the Capitol insurrection

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) renewed her call for a congressional commission to investigate <a href="https://www.vox.com/22217039/capitol-attack-trump-rally-election-biden-explained">the January 6 Capitol insurrection</a> in a “Dear Colleague” letter sent to her Democratic House colleagues Friday.
The letter, sent to mark 100 days since the attempted revolt, indicated that Pelosi recently sent another proposal to Republican House leadership seeking to create a formal group in the vein of the 9/11 Commission.
“Compromise has been necessary; now, we must agree on the scope, composition and resources necessary to seek and find the truth,” Pelosi wrote. “It is my hope that we can reach agreement very soon. At the same time, committees in the House and Senate have been holding and planning hearings, which will be a resource to the commission.”
Thousands of <a href="https://www.vox.com/first-person/22232660/trump-capitol-extremism-insurrection-riot-inauguration">supporters</a> of former President Donald Trump <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/1/6/22217657/us-capitol-breach-trump-rally-presidential-election">stormed the Capitol</a> on January 6 while both the House and Senate were in the process of certifying the Electoral College votes. Six people, including one Capitol Police Department officer, died as a result of the day’s events.
Pelosi commemorated Brian Sicknick, the CPD officer who <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/01/brian-sicknick-capitol-police-officer-dies-after-riot.html">died during the insurrection</a>, in her letter, as well as Billy Evans, a CPD officer who died <a href="https://kfdm.com/news/local/drivers-tries-to-breach-barricade-outside-capitol-strikes-two-police-officers">when a car attempted to overrun</a> a Capitol barricade earlier this month. Both officers were <a href="https://www.aoc.gov/what-we-do/programs-ceremonies/lying-in-state-honor">lain in honor</a> in the Capitol for their bravery in giving their lives to protect the Capitol and members of Congress.
Calls for a congressional commission began almost immediately following the insurrection, and Trump was impeached over his role in inciting the violence in late January. He escaped conviction in the Republican-controlled Senate <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/2/13/22280838/senate-acquits-donald-trump-impeachment-vote">despite seven of his party’s senators crossing over to vote for his conviction</a>.
Democratic lawmakers would like to bring to light more facts surrounding the events of that day — who contributed to the organizing, whether the White House had a direct hand in organizing the riot, and law enforcement’s planning and response to the threat posed by the far-right mob.
Pelosi, however, hasn’t done herself any favors in attempting to form the commission. In early February, the speaker proposed a commission consisting of seven Democrats and four Republicans to “conduct an investigation of the relevant facts and circumstances relating to the domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol.”
Republican leadership responded by objecting to the partisan imbalance in the initial proposal, and attempting to broaden the commission’s scope to include all political violence within the United States. Republicans have also sought subpoena power for conservative members of the commission.
“If Congress is going to attempt some broader analysis of toxic political violence across this country, then in that case, we cannot have artificial cherry-picking of which terrible behavior does and does not deserve scrutiny,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/capitol-riot-commission-pelosi-2021-04-16/">said in February</a>.
As for the newest call to action, Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) denied that he’d received a fresh proposal from Pelosi’s office, <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/capitol-riot-commission-pelosi-2021-04-16/">according to a CBS News report</a>.
“Neither the Republican leader nor his staff have been provided Speaker Pelosi’s latest proposal, but hopefully the speaker has addressed our basic concerns of equal representation and subpoena authority,” a spokesperson for McCarthy told CBS News.
The Republican strategy throughout appears to be an attempt to distract from their party’s responsibility in driving the social and political dynamics which led to the insurrection, by pointing to random examples of left-wing violence. What-about-ism has become a common GOP tactic over recent years.
But it remains to be seen whether the actions — and words — of several Republican lawmakers who promoted the “<a href="https://www.wamc.org/post/can-forces-unleashed-trumps-big-election-lie-be-undone">big lie</a>” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump will be within the scope of the commission’s investigation.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/4/18/22390623/pelosi-renews-call-congress-investigate-the-capitol-insurrection-commission">https://www.vox.com/2021/4/18/22390623/pelosi-renews-call-congress-investigate-the-capitol-insurrection-commission</a>

vox Pelosi renews call for Congress to investigate the Capitol insurrection

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) renewed her call for a congressional commission to investigate the January 6 Capitol insurrection in a “...

India is dealing with a vaccine shortage during a new wave of Covid-19

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India is the second most populous nation and the largest producer of Covid-19 vaccines worldwide, thanks to being home to the Serum Institute of India (SII) — a biotech and pharmaceuticals company responsible for 60 percent of the globe’s entire vaccine supply, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/17/india/covid-vaccine-shortage-covishield-covaxin-intl-hnk-dst/index.html">according to a CNN report</a>.
But recent US and European limits on the exportation of critical Covid-19 vaccine production materials have resulted in a severe vaccine shortage throughout the country. Many of its nearly 1.4 billion residents are now finding themselves having to wait for shots during a deadly second wave of the coronavirus.
India reported a record high of 261,500 new cases on Sunday, the highest recorded figure since the onset of the pandemic. The country also added a million new cases in less than a week, reaching a total of more than 14 million cases.
The surge has forced India back into lockdown, with Delhi, the country’s capital region, imposing night and weekend curfews in order to limit the spread of the virus.
India is also a major manufacturer supplying <a href="https://www.who.int/initiatives/act-accelerator/covax">COVAX</a>, the international Covid-19 manufacturing and distribution agreement. SII had originally committed to manufacture up to 200 million doses for 92 countries. Those plans are on hold for now.
“Deliveries of doses from the Serum Institute of India will be delayed in March and April,” said a <a href="https://www.who.int/news/item/25-03-2021-covax-updates-participants-on-delivery-delays-for-vaccines-from-serum-institute-of-india-(sii)-and-astrazeneca">March 25 statement by COVAX</a>, which is run by a coalition including the World Health Organization. “Delays in securing supplies of SII-produced Covid-19 vaccine doses are due to the increased demand for Covid-19 vaccines in India.”
SII has an agreement to manufacture the AstraZeneca vaccine, as well as a homegrown vaccine called Covaxin. It had already provided 28 million doses for COVAX distribution and was scheduled to deliver another 40 million doses in April and 50 million in May, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/17/india/covid-vaccine-shortage-covishield-covaxin-intl-hnk-dst/index.html">according to a CNN report</a>.
In January, however, the Indian government restricted the export of their AstraZeneca doses, a decision which John Nkengasong, director of the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/india-astrazeneca-shot-delay-could-be-catastrophic-africa-health-official-2021-04-01/">called “catastrophic” for Africa in early April</a>. The continent was set to get much of its vaccine supply through COVAX.
When India started its vaccination program in January, it set a goal of fully vaccinating 300 million people by the end of August, but to date, <a href="https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/region/india">only 16 million people</a> have been given full doses, just over 1 percent of the country’s population, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
In early February, President Joe Biden invoked the US Defense Production Act to limit the export of manufacturing supplies needed for Covid-19 vaccine production. At the time, the White House <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-india-usa/indian-vaccine-giant-sii-warns-of-supply-hit-from-u-s-raw-materials-export-ban-idUSKCN2AX1DS">said it used the act</a> to help pharmaceutical giant Merck ramp up its production of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the US distribution of which was recently <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/4/13/22381844/johnson-vaccine-pause-covid-19-clot-cerebral-venous-thrombosis">put on hold</a> to examine a very limited number of possibly harmful side effects in rare cases.
In late March, the European Union put similar export limits in place in order to help ramp up European vaccine production. Together, the two export bans have hit SII especially hard.
“There are a lot of bags, filters, and critical items that manufacturers need,” Adar Poonawalla, CEO of SII, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-india-usa/indian-vaccine-giant-sii-warns-of-supply-hit-from-u-s-raw-materials-export-ban-idUSKCN2AX1DS">told Reuters in early March</a>. “The Novavax vaccine, which we are a major manufacturer of, needs these items from the US.”
The export bans are having a knock-on effect to global vaccine production just as the world has begun dealing with an especially deadly wave of new Covid-19 variants. On Saturday, the world <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/4/17/22389333/global-deaths-covid-19-pass-3-million">passed 3 million deaths from the virus</a>.
But not everyone in the Indian government is placing the blame solely on the export limits. Both India’s Health Minister Harsh Vardhan and Home Minister Amit Shah have claimed that the country has the vaccines it needs, and that the deficiencies have come from poor planning within individual states. In an <a href="https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1710190">April 7 statement</a>, Vardhan singled out Maharashtra — one of the most severely affected Indian states in the pandemic — as being especially disorganized.
Even with its accusations leveled at states, the federal government may be starting to feel some blame, or at least some responsibility. On Tuesday, India <a href="https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/india-covid-19-fast-track-approval-vaccine-surge-new-cases-14613602">announced its plans</a> to fast-track emergency approvals for vaccines that have been approved elsewhere by WHO, but aren’t currently being administered in the country. These include Pfizer/BioNTech, Johnson & Johnson, Novavax, and Moderna.
But there’s still a long way to go, and despite the mudslinging between the state and federal government branches in India, it’s clear that the main cause of the shortage is likely coming from the export limits. As wealthier EU and North American countries are beginning to look past the virus and their vaccination programs ramp up delivery of needed doses — the US <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-global-distribution/">has delivered over 209 million vaccine doses</a> as of Sunday — the rest of the world seems to be getting left behind.
Vaccination centers across India have been <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/04/09/985670468/is-india-running-out-of-vaccine-doses">forced to close</a> due to lack of doses, and the global supply chain will seemingly remain strained until material exports begin flowing from the West.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/4/18/22390493/india-vaccine-shortage-export-ban-covid-19">https://www.vox.com/2021/4/18/22390493/india-vaccine-shortage-export-ban-covid-19</a>

vox India is dealing with a vaccine shortage during a new wave of Covid-19

India is the second most populous nation and the largest producer of Covid-19 vaccines worldwide, thanks to being home to the Serum Institu...

Citizen science is booming during the pandemic

On a cold night in November, I bundled up in my coat and hat and gloves, and lugged a telescope into the backyard. I’d been given a serious mission, but first I allowed myself a few minutes of fun. I used the telescope to observe the Cigar Galaxy, the Dumbbell Nebula, Orion’s Belt. There they were, gleaming brightly in gold and blue and pink, steady friends in a painfully unsteady winter.
Then I got to work. I moved the telescope across the sky until I found my target: a near-Earth asteroid. Scientists didn’t know much about it except that it would threaten life on our planet if it ever collided with us. So they’d asked amateurs like me, who happen to live somewhere with a view of the passing asteroid, to observe it and record data on it.
I was using a new smart telescope called the Unistellar eVscope, which digitally strips out light pollution to produce stunning images and allows backyard astronomers to upload their data to scientists at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute. It was SETI that had sent me an alert asking me to please go out and look at the asteroid.
It didn’t look terribly impressive — just a blob tracing a line across my eyepiece as it flew through space. But I captured the data anyway and sent it to the scientists to analyze. It was after midnight when I finally went back inside and fell asleep wondering: What were the chances I’d discovered something that would actually help science?
I’m not alone in pursuing this kind of activity nowadays. The pandemic has driven a huge increase in participation in <a href="https://www.citizenscience.gov/#">citizen science</a>, where people without specialized training collect data out in the world or perform simple analyses of data online to help out scientists.
Stuck at home with time on their hands, millions of amateurs around the world are gathering information on everything from birds to plants to Covid-19 at the request of institutional researchers. And while quarantine is mostly a nightmare for us, it’s been a great accelerant for science.
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<figcaption>A woman prepares her telescope to watch the annular solar eclipse on a promenade in Hong Kong on June 21, 2020.</figcaption>
<cite>Issac Lawrence/AFP/Getty Images</cite></figure>
Early in the pandemic, a firehose of data started gushing forth on citizen science platforms like <a href="https://www.zooniverse.org/">Zooniverse</a> and <a href="https://scistarter.org/">SciStarter</a>, where scientists ask the public to analyze their data online. It’s a form of crowdsourcing that has the added bonus of giving volunteers a real sense of community; each project has a discussion forum where participants can pose questions to each other (and often to the scientists behind the projects) and forge friendly connections.
“There’s a wonderful project called Rainfall Rescue that’s transcribing historical weather records. It’s a climate change project to understand how weather has changed over the past few centuries,” Laura Trouille, vice president of citizen science at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and co-lead of Zooniverse, told me. “They uploaded a dataset of 10,000 weather logs that needed transcribing — and that was completed in one day!”
Some Zooniverse projects, like Snapshot Safari, ask participants to classify animals in images from wildlife cameras. That project saw daily classifications go from 25,000 to 200,000 per day in the initial days of lockdown. And across all its projects, Zooniverse reported that 200,000 participants contributed more than 5 million classifications of images in one week alone — the equivalent of <a href="https://undark.org/2020/04/17/covid-19-citizen-science/">48 years of research</a>. Although participation has slowed a bit since the spring, it’s still four times what it was pre-pandemic.
Many people are particularly eager to help tackle <a href="https://www.citizenscience.org/covid-19/">Covid-19</a>, and scientists have harnessed their energy. Carnegie Mellon University’s Roni Rosenfeld set up a platform where volunteers can <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/3/19/21185686/ai-predicting-coronavirus-spread-forecasting-covid-19">help artificial intelligence predict the spread of the coronavirus</a>, even if they know nothing about AI. Researchers at the University of Washington invited people to <a href="https://www.hhmi.org/news/citizen-scientists-are-helping-researchers-design-new-drugs-to-combat-covid-19">contribute to Covid-19 drug discovery using a computer game called Foldit</a>; they experimented with designing proteins that could attach to the virus that causes Covid-19 and prevent it from entering cells.
Trouille said she’s not at all surprised to see so many people flocking to citizen science. Years back, Zooniverse surveyed participants to understand why they volunteered to spend so many hours sifting through data. Their top three reasons were wanting to contribute meaningfully to science, wanting to enjoy a pleasant distraction from everyday life, and wanting to be part of a supportive community.
Quarantine has intensified those drives. Many of us have longed to feel a sense of purpose, which experts on solitude say is vital for <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/4/11/21212845/how-to-be-alone-coronavirus-quarantine-isolation-solitude">helping people get through isolation</a>. We’ve often craved a distraction from the anxiety spiral of reading news about the coronavirus (not to mention politics and the economy), and looking at beautiful pictures of stars or animals can offer that. And we’ve all missed hanging out with people.
“People are just really needing to connect in meaningful ways,” Trouille said. “Welcoming online communities provide a wonderful outlet for that.”
If you’re new to citizen science, you might wonder how amateurs can start analyzing data without fear that they’re going to get it all wrong and ruin a scientific project. I definitely had this fear when I first started dipping my toes into it.
But it works because scientists break down complex tasks into micro-tasks that people without specialized training can do. Even if people get some classifications wrong, that’s fine because scientists aggregate many people’s classifications (Zooniverse gets 25 to 45 people to classify every image), relying on “wisdom-of-the-crowd” algorithms to arrive at an accurate result. A 2018 analysis showed that data collected by volunteers and scientists <a href="https://cnr.ncsu.edu/news/2020/04/citizen-science-coronavirus/">agreed 96 percent of the time</a>.
So, for instance, when I opened the Zooniverse app on my phone and clicked on a project called Disk Detectives, it gave me a two-minute tutorial on how to identify stars with certain kinds of disks around them; these stars are more likely to have planets. Then I swiped through a bunch of images, jotting down whether I saw the disk or not. That’s all there was to it.
It’s so simple that at this point you’re probably wondering: Why don’t scientists just get computers to do this? Surely this is a task for AI?
Yes and no. Part of what people are doing when they classify data on these platforms is creating the training sets for AI — they’re teaching computers to recognize the patterns that they, the humans, can see. But, Trouille said, “Part of what the humans are doing that the AI will never be able to do is to identify the unusual or the weird.”
A delightful example of this arose on Galaxy Zoo, one of the astronomy projects on Zooniverse, soon after it launched in 2007. A participant noticed an unusual-looking bright green object and posted about it on the forum, asking if anyone had seen anything similar. Soon a whole discussion thread sprang up titled “Give peas a chance,” with participants calling themselves the “Peas Corps.” Together, they collected more than a hundred of these celestial objects.
Scientists eventually realized these were a special type of galaxy that had never been found before. They represent an important stage in galaxy evolution. In 2009, the scientists published a <a href="https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/399/3/1191/1073770">paper</a> on them in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, crediting 10 citizen scientists from Galaxy Zoo for their contribution to the research.
“Because the research team didn’t know that type of galaxy existed, there would have been no reason to train the computer to look for that,” Trouille explained. “So you would never have found that unless you had hundreds of thousands of people looking at all that data and just able to flag the unusual and bring it to the discussion forum.”
She believes AI will become increasingly integrated into citizen science platforms, but that human abilities will always remain a valuable complement to it.
Katie Cohen, who researches citizen science at the UK’s Centre for Science and Policy, is a bit more skeptical about the irreplaceability of human pattern recognition. “With these kinds of [online] crowdsourcing exercises, I don’t know if they necessarily have long-term potential because technology is improving so rapidly,” she told me. “Whereas I think the community-oriented programs might be where more of the potential lies — because lived experience can’t be programmed through AI.”
She was referring to the citizen science projects that ask volunteers to go out into the field, whether to <a href="https://www.audubon.org/conservation/about-great-backyard-bird-count">count birds</a> in their backyard, <a href="https://citizensense.net/projects/pollution-sensing/">test air quality</a> in their neighborhood, <a href="https://gsmit.org/why-we-are-changing-citizen-science-to-community-science/">tag monarch butterflies</a> migrating through their city, or <a href="https://unistellaroptics.com/asteroid-program/">observe asteroids</a> zipping across their patch of sky.
Franck Marchis, a SETI scientist and co-founder of Unistellar, explained why it’s so valuable to have multiple eyes scanning the heavens, rather than relying only on the few telescopes that NASA uses to detect asteroids.
“If you only have a telescope in Hawaii and it’s cloudy there, you’re not going to have observations,” he said. “And that’s happened already. We had an asteroid that we basically discovered at the last minute because for a week it was cloudy in Hawaii and nobody saw it. So the idea of our program is to have a worldwide network that’s coordinated … a network that’s capable of observing the sky 24/7.”
At a time when <a href="https://www.jhsph.edu/covid-19/articles/trust-in-science-and-covid-19.html">public trust in experts</a> has declined precipitously, some scientists are <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.00282/full">arguing</a> that a more collaborative research model can help counter science skepticism. And governments are increasingly realizing that it may be worth investing in citizen science — not only to accelerate scientific research, but also to boost trust in it. Both the <a href="https://www.citizenscience.gov/#">US</a> and the <a href="https://eu-citizen.science/">European Union</a> currently fund major programs in citizen science.
“I do think it has a lot of potential to really improve trust and relationships,” Cohen said. “That’s really why a lot of the policymakers that we work with are really interested in it across various UK government departments.”
The big question, she said, is what type of public involvement is most effective at improving trust. Most citizen science projects use volunteers for simple data collection or analysis aimed at helping professional researchers. But some seek to involve volunteers on a deeper level, putting them on almost equal footing with the researchers. One example of that, Cohen said, would be asking tobacco users to actually help design a study on how to minimize tobacco use.
An even more extreme example would be a “Citizens’ Assembly,” a group of randomly selected citizens that makes recommendations to their government on how to handle issues like the climate crisis. The idea of an assembly like this has gained ground in places like <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/10/citizens-panels-ready-help-macron-french-climate-policies">France</a> and the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/02/thousands-britons-invited-take-part-climate-crisis-citizens-assembly">UK</a>. But this is definitely a more labor-intensive way to engage citizens than, say, a Zooniverse project, and it remains to be seen how well it’ll work.
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In the meantime, many scientists, such as Marchis, don’t want the public to perceive them as elitists off in some ivory tower. “When science is not part of your life, it’s very easy to become against it because you don’t really understand exactly what those people called scientists are doing,” the astronomer told me. “My personal goal is that people consider science to be part of their life — not something you can do only if you have a PhD.”
I certainly don’t have a PhD in astronomy, but this winter I got to feel the thrill of participating in scientific discovery.
That night in November that I spent observing the near-Earth asteroid from the backyard? Turns out, 26 other amateurs — from America to Austria, from Finland to France — also peered through their telescopes in their backyards that night. Together, we obtained decisive data that allowed astronomers to model the asteroid’s shape. When they shared the shape with us in December — <a href="https://unistellaroptics.com/citizen-astronomers-across-the-globe-partner-for-world-record-research-on-a-near-earth-asteroid/">it looked like a potato</a> — a huge grin spread across my face.
I was happy in part because I knew that scientists need this kind of data to divert asteroids from impacting Earth. But it was more than that. During the pandemic, I’ve barely been able to travel anywhere or see anyone. Yet somehow I’ve also traveled to an asteroid as it zooms past the planet, and to the Cigar Galaxy and the Dumbbell Nebula and Orion’s Belt, and I’ve connected with scientists and strangers who are trying to understand our universe a bit better and who are, despite the suffering that Covid-19 has wrought, finding this world to be full of beauty and awe.
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source <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22177247/citizen-science-amateur-backyard-birding-astronomy-covid-pandemic">https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22177247/citizen-science-amateur-backyard-birding-astronomy-covid-pandemic</a>

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The Big Tech purge is here! Follow <a href="https://www.infowars.com/posts/the-big-tech-crackdown-is-accelerating-follow-infowars-on-these-growing-alternative-platforms/">Infowars and Alex Jones on other growing platforms</a> now to stay informed as the information blackout accelerates.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.infowars.com/posts/sunday-live-democrats-incite-riots-violence-against-police-military-to-stoke-civil-war">https://www.infowars.com/posts/sunday-live-democrats-incite-riots-violence-against-police-military-to-stoke-civil-war</a>

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