SETI@home Screen Saver
I played around with SETI@home and LHC@home , which really just means that I downloaded BOINC and ran these programs on my computer. The interface and website are pretty dry. I was definitely surprised by the statistics and how varied the reports were. Wikipedia (as of Feb 2012) shows a list of 65 BOINC based projects with around 650, 635 active units. The site also has 6 grid computing BOINC based projects with around 253,610 active units. This site tracks BOINC users of the world at 2,455,613. SETI@home alone has 1,322,092 users. This data, according to the site, is a little over 4 hours old.
The program causes my computer to put out some serious heat, so Ive relegated processing time when I am sleeping.
Playing around with Zooniverse was a lot more fun. Its a web based application that is more dynamic and user friendly.
I also found the instructions more useful and digestible considering my short attention span as well as time restraints. The design is just more engaging and interesting. I played around with planethunters, whale.fm, and solar stormwatch. The user is actively engaged in the computation, and the designers have done a pretty good job in dressing up tedious tasks. Zooniverse lists 674,522 actively taking part in its project worldwide.
My Citizen Science Superpowers:
My background is sculpture and philosophy so Im good at concept development, fabrication, project management, and drawing (illustrator, photoshop, some Processing, and computer vision)