Play Digital Fishers Now

Digital Fishers was featured in a brief news report on CBC Radio World Report on December 30 2011. The edited audio clip can be found here:

Later that same day, there was a longer version of a report on NEPTUNE Canada, again with a brief mention of Digital Fishers. That edited audio clip can be found here:

The easy way to think about the Digital Fishers project is a system that enlists volunteers (you the crowd) to come to the project website, watch a short 15 second segment of video, and click on a simple response box (something like: “nothing here”, or “wow – creepy green fish!”) – that “annotation” then gets attached to that segment.   The cool part is you get to play a game, see interesting videos (okay there are some videos more interesting than others) of our ocean all while contributing to the scientific community.  In other words, your annotation adds value to the raw video data and provides assistance to scientific users of the database.  With a lot of visitors, each of the segments can be viewed more than once to make sure multiple people see the same thing, nothing gets missed, and researchers have a pretty good idea of what is found in that video.

Right now you are still better than a machine at being able to see what is in the video, and with the help of the tutorials, you can identify and “tag” or “annotate” what is in the 15 seconds of video.  So, what are you waiting for? Click PLAY  and see what is in our ocean and help a scientist along the way.  If you get lucky, you might even see an octopus with her babies, a ray flying through the water,  or the black smokers off the west coast of Vancouver Island.  Look what I just found…

At the end of the 19th century, a team of British archeologists happened upon what is now one of the world’s most treasured trash dumps.

The site, situated west of the main course of the Nile, about five days journey south of Memphis, lay near the city of Oxyrhynchus. Garbage mounds are always a sweet target for those interested in the past, but what made the Oxyrhynchus dump special was its exceptional dryness. The water table lay deep; it never rained. And this meant that the 2,000-year-old papyrus in the mounds, and the text inscribed on it, were remarkably well preserved.

Eventually some half a million pieces of papyrus were drawn from the desert and shipped back to Oxford University, where generations of scholars have been painstakingly transcribing and translating them. The manuscripts are rich, fascinating, and varied. The texts include lost comedies by the great Athenian playwright Menander, and the controversial Gospel of Thomas, along with glimpses of daily life — personal notes, receipts for the purchase of donkeys and dates — and the occasional scrap of sex magic.

The pace, however, has been glacial. After a hundred-plus years, scholars have been able to work through only about 15 percent of the collection. The finish line appeared to lie centuries in the future.

But a few months ago, the papyrologists tried something bold. They put up a website, called Ancient Lives, with a game that allowed members of the public to help transcribe the ancient Greek at home by identifying images from the papyrus. Help began pouring in. In the short time the site has been running, people have contributed 4 million transcriptions. They have helped identify Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plutarch’s “On the Cleverness of Animals,” and more.

Ancient Lives is part of a new approach to the conduct of modern scholarship, called crowd science or citizen science. The idea is to unlock thorny research projects by tapping the time and enthusiasm of the general public. In just the last few years, crowd science projects have generated notable contributions to fields as disparate as ecology, AIDS research, and astronomy. The approach has already accelerated research in a handful of specialized fields. And it may also accomplish something else: breaking down some of the old divisions between the highly educated mandarins of the academy and the curious amateurs out in the world.

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Here’s your chance to run with the cool kids and be one of the first people to play the Digital Fishers game.

Head on over to http://dmas.uvic.ca/DigitalFishers and give it a try (you’ll just need to quickly register on the Oceans2.0 platform first).

The instructions are kinda complicated, so pay attention:

1. Watch a short video clip.
2. If you see anything, click on the screen.
3. Select one or more items to describe what you see.
4. Save.
5. Watch another video.

PARIS — Online gamers have achieved a feat beyond the realm of Second Life or Dungeons and Dragons: they have deciphered the structure of an enzyme of an AIDS-like virus that had thwarted scientists for a decade. The exploit is published on Sunday in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, where — exceptionally in scientific publishing — both gamers and researchers are honoured as co-authors.

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Eugene Bardach’s Practical Guide for Policy Analysis (2000) is a handbook for public policy practitioners that I use in my executive and professional development courses (see “Better Briefings Workshops“). Bardach uses a test, “New York Taxi Driver Pitch” to argue that your policy explanation needs to be clear, succinct and simple. This test, in which the analyst imagines trying to explain the problem and recommended solution to a taxi driver during a trip through city streets, is similar to my “grandmother test” (which some of my older colleagues call the “mother test”). I’ll attempt to make my Digital Fishers Taxi Driver Pitch here (good thing it’s a trip out to the airport, and traffic is moving slow):

The Neptune Canada project involves the construction of the world’s largest fibre optic cabled seafloor observation system off the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. This 800 kilometre long network of cables will be connected to a number of nodes on the seafloor. At each of these nodes, instrument clusters will gather live data from the ocean environment and that data will be transmitted to a database at the University of Victoria. The system will then provide free access to this data via the Internet to anyone interested.

A group at the University of Victoria recently received funding from CANARIE Inc. (Canada’s Advanced Research and Innovation Network) for a project called “Data from the Deep, Judgment from the Crowd” to look at new ways to collect and analyze data from the Neptune project. One part of this project is called the “Digital Fishers” crowdsourcing component. Read the rest of this entry »

The Neptune Canada project at the University of Victoria recently received a $1M funding award from CANARIE Inc., Canada’s Advanced Research and Innovation Network, in response to its “Data from the Deep, Judgment from the Crowd” proposal. eBriefings.ca is a partner in this project, leading the “Digital Fishers” crowdsourcing component under the direction of UVic’s Centre for Global Studies Senior Associate Dr. Rod Dobell. eBriefings.ca (a division of Whitehall Policy Inc.) brings leading-edge depth of experience in deploying Web2.0 principles and technologies in corporate, academic, civil society and civic society environments to facilitate social networking, data capture and collaborative knowledge creation. Read the rest of this entry »

Neptune Canada Profile – CBC News