{"id":3349,"date":"2009-11-27T07:04:24","date_gmt":"2009-11-27T11:04:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=3349"},"modified":"2009-11-24T14:14:05","modified_gmt":"2009-11-24T18:14:05","slug":"be-a-martian-crowdsourcing-data-analysis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=3349","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Be a Martian:&#8221; Crowdsourcing Data Analysis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Following the theory that humans will happily grind through boring tasks for the chance to win virtual &#8220;prizes,&#8221; NASA has teamed with Microsoft to create the <a href=\"http:\/\/beamartian.jpl.nasa.gov\/welcome\">Be a Martian<\/a> program.  (It&#8217;s unfortunate that Microsoft Silverlight is required for anything on the site to work, but whatever.)<\/p>\n<p>Users play &#8220;games&#8221; that require them to sift through the hundreds of thousands of photos of Mars that have been sent back by rovers and orbiters, helping to classify them and giving researchers a leg up on understanding the data that&#8217;s been collected.  In return, they earn points that go toward badges.  They ought to slap a &#8220;John Carter&#8221; theme on the games and go after the WoW demographic.<\/p>\n<p>There are articles about the program <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.seattlepi.com\/microsoft\/archives\/185559.asp?from=blog_last3\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/science\/nature\/8364865.stm\">here<\/a>, and if you have a compatible browser you can visit the <a href=\"http:\/\/beamartian.jpl.nasa.gov\/welcome\">Be a Martian site<\/a> and help count craters.  Whee.<\/p>\n<p><i>(via <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/80beats\/\">80beats<\/a>)<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Following the theory that humans will happily grind through boring tasks for the chance to win virtual &#8220;prizes,&#8221; NASA has teamed with Microsoft to create the Be a Martian program. (It&#8217;s unfortunate that Microsoft Silverlight is required for anything on the site to work, but whatever.) Users play &#8220;games&#8221; that require them to sift through [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3349"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3349"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3358,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3349\/revisions\/3358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}