Become a citizen scientist!

August 20, 2014 1:05 AM

It's Science Week in Australia and the crowdsourcing call has gone out for Weather Detectives to look through old ships' log books and track weather observations from the 1890s and 1900s. It's a good project for older kids, and aims to improve weather forecasting and track climate change. Do try this at home, kids.
posted by superfish (3 comments total)

Very cool! As someone who has done handwritten weather records that get submitted to the government and, as far as we can tell, get roundly ignored (they have satellites that are better than my eye-balling the barometer), it makes me happy to see somebody's old weather records helping the way I imagine ours might.
posted by ldthomps at 10:59 AM on August 20, 2014

From the same site, there is also a project called Neural Knitworks. Although aimed at locals (Australians) and some of it is only accessible locally (ie in Austrialia), the webpage for it includes podcasts on neural stuff and patterns for knitted or crocheted items. It looks pretty interesting.
posted by Michele in California at 1:15 PM on August 20, 2014

I love citizen science projects! If you like this sort of thing you might also want to check out whale.fm - where people can categorise whale songs.. or any number of the projects on Zooniverse, epsecially galaxy zoo.
posted by hanachronism at 12:41 AM on August 21, 2014 [1 favorite]