Citizens help to discover 2 new Class M planets!
It’s actually pretty amazing when you think about it… The folks at NASA provided data from the Kepler Space Telescope and transformed it into an interface that’s not overly evil to use for the general public. What they did was ask the global community to help sift through the data (visually) and point out patterns that indicate the existence of planets around stars. (Long story short, they look for blips in the reading of stars caused by, you guessed it, planets!) This has led to the discovery of 2 new planets that are “similar” to Earth (in what I assume are distance from the star and size of the planet).
All I can say is that this strategy is absolutely remarkable! Taking regular data and presenting it in a way that’s appetizing to the user is a great idea in “gamifying” ordinarily mundane, tedious, and expensive operations. And, in theory, you could do this with just about anything! Heck, they even did one where you fold proteins to help scientists understand how to combat AIDS-like viruses! I mean, it’s incredible! Using the ingenuity and power of the collective Human mind! It’s a lot like stringing a bunch of computers together to do network processing (or whatever its called). I can see a lot more of this in the years to come (if done right) where you might think you’re playing a harmless game of BeJeweled and it turns out you’ve just sequenced the cure for cancer.
Check out the Planet Hunters site to join the cause! Or help battle disease at Foldit and fold you some proteins!
Source: iO9, The Escapist
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FIRST!
oh? then how do you explain THIS comment?! look at the date!
(dangit… it moved it up! lol! on second thought… I wonder if this is going to break stuff…)
Umm, grats?
hmm… don’t I technically get first automatically? XD
Not if you don’t comment :P
Protein folding? That sounds like fun! Immana go try that out.
now if they could only combine the re-sequencing of the genome to improve the immune system with raiding Dragon Soul…
It’s a marvellous idea that I hope we can use to benefit society. I was part of some of the older ideas where you lent your unused computer time (i.e. when your computer is idle) for background calculations. I don’t remember exactly what it was for, I think it was to help process some of all the data NASA had found from telescopes. Problem back then was that it was so poorly programmed so it rarely started when my computer was idle and it often clogged my computer at other times. With better programming and newer computers, that shouldn’t be a problem nowadays and if we integrate it into something else (like a game) we might be able to get more computer power to find cures for diseases. Just imagine if WoW alone would do minor cloud computing in the background for all users; even if it only used 0.1% of the processor power available, it would in total be over 20 THz available for disease curing (assuming an average of 2GHz processors for 11 million users). It would of course be limitations in bandwidth etc., but still….
Now, to look at it from the other side (I’ve become highly cynical over the years; a trait I developed after realizing that there are a couple of billion people who live in extreme poverty solely so we can get cheaply manufactured stuff to consume here in the west. In India alone, roughly 455 million people (41.6% of the population) lived on $1.25 or less per day in 2005 according to the world bank). If we are to use this method to solve problems, we really really need to either rid ourselves from greed in society or make it written in law that all such discoveries we make must be free and gratis for everyone (since we’ll use unpaid volunteers). If we don’t do that, I fear that it will become so that companies have a minimal staff to create the program, then have volunteers to use it on their free time and when a discovery is made, it will only be available for the rich people in the world. And as a “pre-emptive strike” for those who don’t think this will be the case - just ask yourself why the medical companies prioritize to develop medicines for rich people instead of poor people. We currently do research to find a cure against malaria, but we could have started decades earlier than we did. Instead we’ve prioritized medicine like viagra simply because malaria medicine will cost slightly more to develop and will not bring even nearly as much money as viagra when it’s sold (not that there is anything wrong with viagra per se, but how many lives have viagra saved so far?).
O_O (translation: Quite alot of words, ain’t it?)
hmm, so you assume… could be a networked processing of ways to blow up the planet… >)
well, it’s a huge problem we’ve got here and it’s not going to get better unless something is done (other than funnel more money to the wealthy).
my plan, if elected president, would be to impose duties (like tariffs) on labor. we have duties when importing and exporting to help manage the prices of goods (especially when talking about anti-dumping (which is better worded anti-flooding the market with crap) laws which prevent too much foreign goods putting domestic companies out of business). wow, horrible sentence, but you get my gist.
anyways, putting duties on labor would force 1 of 2 things… companies would have to increase the pay to foreign workers to MATCH our own minimums, or would force them to produce goods/services here, which would be good for everyone.
as for the more macro global problems, I think it’s a lack of attacking the root problems and only offering bandages (and then not even doing that). what I mean is, instead of sending out just malaria meds, find a way of just obliterating it at the source; like pesticide the hell out of the waters, introducing mitigating species, create aggressive insect diseases to kill off the bugs, etc… and all that stuff exists and is waiting… just gotta do it.
maybe we’re not there yet, but at some point we’re going to have to start working a bit more collectively to fix problems that span boarders.
Well, something have to be done. Our current system ain’t perfect, but it works fairly well. The problem with it is that there are people who would gladly sell their mothers if the price is right (which no one, ever, will have the right to do) and many of those people have been busy making their way up in society to leading positions. So what we need is to find a way to either teach them that what they do is completely wrong, or we need to change the system to an improved version where those people cannot continue with their current way of behaving. If the way to change our system is by new laws & taxes or if we should make a complete remake from scratch, I don’t know (it’s not really my field of expertise ~_^). All I do know that the ones currently in charge are not suited for leading the change as they are part causing the problem; and a complete overturn back to scratch will take many years during which we are extra vulnerable to attempts by immoral leaders to take over control of the leadership (and likely extra vulnerable to natural disasters as well).
Essentially what we need to do is to make it into a need before greed system as opposed to the current “ninja looting” one; saving lives is by far more important than the “need” to eat lobster and drink Dom Pérignon on a daily basis.
Thanks to the requests for freedom around the world and the aid of globalization through internet, I think we eventually will make it to the point where the sheeple will realize that they are about to be eaten and therefore revolt (hopefully via non violence), but the risk is that it still will take several decades still.
There are a few good books that touches this subject, three of them which I like in particular is 1984 by George Orwell as well as Daemon & FreedomTM (the sequel to daemon) by Daniel Suarez; if you haven’t read those I strongly recommend them.
When it comes to the malaria case - we were actually circa one year away from obliterating it at the core once. A few decades ago we discovered DDT and were happily spraying it on everything as it seemed to be a nice life improver. It was a life improver in the sense that it killed almost all infected mosquitoes, but then we realized that DDT wasn’t so harmless to humans as we first thought. So we stopped spraying and the virus survived; in retrospect it would only have costed a few more months of human suffering to take it away permanently. If they would have known the consequences at that time, things may have turned out differently; problem is that it’s incredibly hard to predict the future with any kind of accuracy. My point to bring it up in the first place is that we skipped developing a cure when malaria bloomed again and focused on medicines with a higher profit instead.
@Sk1nn4h
Sorry, but I love “wall-o-words”; it’s kinda like running over people with a truck, but without actually harming them (and who knows, they might even learn something if they care enough to read it all) ;)
bleh! lobster and champagne… two of my most hated things to consume!
unfortunately, the way the world works now is that you have to make it seem like you get some sort of profit out of it before anyone does something (not the little guy, the big corps and stuff). if someone can figure out how to show this makes it look profitable, the BAM, all world issues are solved!
yeah, that bit about DDT is kinda depressing… sometimes you gotta just drink the poison to kill the disease. ah well… maybe next time… >(
Human networking sounds a lot like the Borg.
YOU WILL ASSIMILATE!!!
Resistance is futile.
I am sensing a Deus EX plot behind all this….
Someone call JC Denton !
gosh darnit! still haven’t played that game! arg… need to fix that…
Already doing it, I’m on the MMO-Champion Folding team, we have over 100 people running the folding program on our team.
awesome!!! got a link?
I like the idea of ‘all the humanity working together in a n effort of rooting out inequalities and STDs, but I know them a bit too well to know that the game would have to be a Diablo III to catch their attention long enough to produce any results ;)
just remember kids, every time you nerf paladins, it sets back our research by another 2 years!!!!
Hey Coffinshaker here’s the post on MMO-C for the folding team it also has a link to the software to for folding.
Courtesy of Cyanotical
Okay, i went an made a folding team for the computer forums:
the team number is: 209552
the team name is: MMO-Champion.com
team statistics can be found here: http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/…teamnum=209552
to contribute, put the team number in the team field in the client configuration
you can download it here:
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Download
BTW I used to live down in Venice FL for 29 years, I really miss that area