Really pleased to make my Milkman app available for all MWP users 🙂
Combining Your Clicks with Milkman
A Daily Dose of Zooniverse
'Something awesome from the Zooniverse every day' was the tagline that we came up with, almost a year ago, for a new Zooniverse blog: Daily Zooniverse. Grant Miller had recently arrived to work at Zooniverse HQ in Oxford and I had a todo list of things I'd always wanted to try but hadn't found the time... Continue Reading →
The Zooniverse (and Me!) in Wired UK this Month
This Month's edition of Wired (UK) includes a feature article about citizen science and crowdsourcing research. It has interviews with yours truly, as well as many lovely people from the citizen science crowd, including buddies Chris Lintott, Kevin Schawinski, and Amy Robinson. It also has notes about my new collaboration with fellow TED Fellow Andrew Bastawrous and our... Continue Reading →
Coding Comes to the National Astronomy Meeting 2014
The latest issue of Astronomy & Geophysics includes an article by your truly about the GitHub/.Astronomy Hack Day at the UK's National Astronomy Meeting in Portsmouth earlier this year. The projects resulting from hack days are often prototypes, or proof-of-concept ideas that are meant to grow and expand later. Often they are simply written up... Continue Reading →
8 Images That Can Totally Change Your Perspective
I got into a conversation recently about how some astronomical photos can totally change your whole perspective of yourself and your place in the Universe. There's several images that come to mind right away - here are my own favourites: 1. The Milky Way (from a very dark location) Seeing the night sky from a... Continue Reading →
Executable Publications as Sensors for Science
Executable papers are a cool idea in research [1]. You take a study, write it up as a paper and bundle together all your code, scripts and analysis in such a way that other people can take the ‘paper’ and run in themselves. This has three main attractive features, as I see it: It provides transparency... Continue Reading →
Star Trek: The Rewatch
Warning: 400 words of geekery ahead! I’ve embarked on an extremely nerdy and wonderful new project: a podcast about rewatching Star Trek. Each week we encourage listeners to watch the same episode we have, and then we’ll dissect and discuss it in deliciously geeky detail. My cohost in this trek beyond the podcasting frontier is friend and fellow... Continue Reading →
The littleBits Exoplanet Detector: A NAM 2014 Hack Day Project
Yesterday was the Hack Day at the UK National Astronomy Meeting 2014 in Portsmouth. I organised it with my good friend Arfon Smith of GitHub, formerly Zooniverse. We wanted to try and start a new NAM tradition - it went well so maybe we did. I'm psyched that .Astronomy got to help make it happen... Continue Reading →
LSST, Public Data, and NAM Hack Day 2014
Today is the start of the UK National Meeting in Portsmouth. I’ll be there tomorrow, and running the NAM Hack Day on Wednesday with Arfon Smith - which is going to be awesome. Today at NAM, the nation's astronomers will discuss the case for UK involvement in the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope project - the LSST. The... Continue Reading →
Crowdsourcing the First World War: A Lovely Social Machine
Working at the Zooniverse means that I get to indulge many of my interests beyond astronomy, like history. In January we launched a project in partnership with the Imperial War Museum and the National Archives called Operation War Diary. It's a 'citizen history' site that asks the public to tag and transcribe more than one million war diaries, and other handwritten notes, produced on the... Continue Reading →