First of all, a big thanks to Jonathan Eisen for reaching out to us. We are grateful for the invitation to introduce our project to the microBEnet community. And we’d love to talk if you are doing citizen science work using metagenomic tools. Citizen science comes in many different shapes and sizes. It can be …
This is definitely worth checking out – a Citizen Microbiology project on the Built Environment From the Good Germs project. More on the project: There is a growing popular and policy interest in the microbiome, and the possibilities of more nuanced or ‘probiotic’ ways of living with germs. To date however there has been limited …
Interesting short new paper in arXiv: [1609.05763] Integrating citizen science with online learning to ask better questions Vineet Pandey, Scott Klemmer, Amnon Amir, Justine Debelius, Embriette R. Hyde, Tomasz Kosciolek, Rob Knight Abstract: Online learners spend millions of hours per year testing their new skills on assignments with known answers. This paper explores whether framing research questions …
Rob Dunn is one of the true pioneers of Citizen Science and in Citizen Science projects involving microbes. And here is another fascinating project from Dunn and colleagues. The Wild Life of Showerheads Photo by Lea Shell- Rob Dunn Lab When Anton Von Leeuwenhoek, the first microbiologist, began to study microscopic life, he did so …
The Biology & Built Environment Center hosted a Microbiome Science Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon on May 27th, 2016 at the University of Oregon. You can view the MeetUp page for this event here. The objective of this event was to facilitate the contribution of microbiome science edits & topics to a globally-used, public knowledge resource (Wikipedia). We …
This is a story of my first involvement pushing a publication that wanted to be University owned “all rights reserved” to becoming one released under a Creative Commons license. I’m not sure that the arcane details will be of interest to many people, but I think there’s an important lesson here about sticking to your …
Back in September 2014 I was invited to write a book chapter on citizen science in microbiology. After several iterations of the book, the chapter, and the licensing agreement here is the final version. The book came out yesterday, here’s a link to the entire book on Amazon (“The Rightful Place of Science: Citizen Science“) …
I always looks forward to spending a chunk of my Friday listening to Science Friday. This segment is too good not to share… Science Club is back! Ariel Zych and Charles Bergquist, the awesome Science Club hosts, are celebrating National Citizen Science Day (April 16) with a new Science Club they are calling #TakeASample. This is awesome challenge …
What is better than Open Access?! Citizen Science AND Open Access! The March issue of JMBE was all that. You have probably already heard of Kittybiome and/or The Koala Project, 2 ongoing projects in the Eisen Lab. Both projects were featured in the paper, “Crowdfunding Campaigns Help Researchers Launch Projects and Generate Outreach”, published in …
This really made my day / week / month. Marc Edwards has been selected as one of Fortune Magazine’s “World’s Greatest Leaders”. Source: Marc Edwards Here’s what they wrote about him Edwards, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient, is one of the nation’s top experts on water contamination–and nowhere has his impact been bigger than in …