What do you know about galaxy formation?
18th February 2009
What does the average Joe on the street know about how galaxies are formed? Well, apparently we know more than we think: www.GalaxyZoo.org allows anyone to help researchers at Oxford University identify the shapes of one million galaxies photographed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope.
This is the latest example of how computers and humans can not only co-exist, but can combine their strengths in new and innovative ways to achieve things that neither could achieve alone.Amazon’s ‘The Mechanical Turk’ is named after an eighteenth century world-beating mechanical chess-player that turned out to have a man inside. In its modern incarnation, the Mechanical Turk is a website that allows people to earn money by completing tasks. ‘Yahoo! Answers’ is a portal for getting answers to just about any question you care to ask. What these and GalaxyZoo all have in common is that they exploit technology whilst recognising its limits, thus allowing human effort to be harnessed in the most effective way.
Humans need not worry that we are obsolete yet, and neither are our favourite old-fashioned ways of receiving information: a one-line wall post from a friend on Facebook led me to have an hour-long telephone conversation that probably wouldn’t have happened; the reason we upload our photos to Bebo, Flickr, Facebook and the rest is that we want social networking websites to keep us up with what is going on in real life.
What better illustration of the importance of the complementary relationship between conventional and new media than the fact that I read about Mechanical Turk in a good old-fashioned, hard copy of the Economist, heard about Galaxy Zoo on Radio 4 (albeit on a digital radio), read the BBC News story to get the facts straight and am now telling you about it on a blog?
