Environmental issues are continually coming to the forefront of the attention of the public and government. Awareness of the challenges facing biodiversity and its potential to compromise the future of humankind have meant an ever-increasing demand on scientists to produce reliable analysis. However, obtaining data for sound analysis over a large geographic scale is intensive work and requires a large amount of time and effort. One solution is to draft in even more people to help scientists' work in the field. And this is where citizen scientists come in, to act as a bridge between scientists and data in the field.

Broadly used, "citizen scientist" refers to a lay person, normally resident in the vicinity of research sites and involved in scientific research. Often, the citizen scientists will not have received formal academic training in the discipline concerned but are trained on the job. They are also often involved in such projects because they are actively interested. Their role is to monitor collected data and to transfer it to managing scientists. This can be done in person or by post, and often was in the past; but with advances in technology it is increasingly being done over the internet.

The participation of citizen scientists in biodiversity monitoring approaches is important for two main reasons. Foremost, it often allows scientists to accomplish research objectives more feasibly, that is in terms of labour and time cost, than would otherwise be possible. In addition, citizen science projects promote public engagement with the particular research, as well as with science in general. This engagement will help people to be more aware and to take ownership of the results and it will empower them to understand global changes in their environment.

Citizen Science projects

There are several examples of citizen scientist projects in the world. Some of the oldest ones dealt with birds for example, a Christmas bird count by the Audubon Society which has been going on for over a century. There also is Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s work (University of Cornell) as well as that of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) here in the UK. More recently, the scope and scale has expanded. For example, localised monitoring of insects in Papua New Guinea (Parataxonomist Training Centre); the global water quality survey by the World Water Monitoring Day project and wild flowers in South Africa (Custodians of Rare and Endangered Wildflowers).

There are always new projects coming up with the progress of time, research focus and availability of technology. 

Citizen Scientists monitoring Snakes-head Fritillary (Fritillaria meleagris), Cricklade North Meadow, Wilts.
[image Yoseph Araya © copyright Yoseph Araya]

Does this work?

The answer is a resounding "Yes".  A number of scientific publications have been, and still are, dependent on data collected by citizen scientists. Some often make it to prestigious journals like Science (a classic case is that of the peppered moth, Cooke et al., 1986, 231: 611-613) and Nature (eg Novotny et al. Nature, 2007, 448: 692-695). On a practical level, citizen scientists have helped discover new species, and update the range and conservation status of other species (eg CREW in South Africa). Even when data is not used right now, it is very likely to be of importance in the future (for example, for long term trend monitoring). There is often a legitimate concern about the quality of data, but this can be minimised by taking all precautionary measures and post-collection vetting.

Involving researchers in raising awareness among the public also pays dividends in the form of appreciation and ownership of research. For example, work by paraecologists in Namibia has given researchers feedback on local community research needs and concerns (BIOTA-Africa).

Can you become a citizen scientist?

Definitively yes. The key thing is to find what you are passionate about and then link up with researchers in that field. Often there are projects aimed at involving citizens, and this is by far the easiest way to get involved. For example, the Open University is currently running a project on the evolution of the garden snail (Evolution Megalab). Other useful links are the Open Air Laboratories consortium, based at the Natural History Museum and the Phenology Network of the Woodlands Trust.

Overall, citizen science is gaining increased interest and credibility from both the public and the scientific community. So it is high time to go out and get involved.

Useful links:

Citizen Science at the Open University

Floodplain Meadows Partnership

BBC Citizen Science

* Please note, I am only discussing citizen science from the view point of ecology, my main discipline. However citizen science is applicable to others and has been used in fields as diverse as astronomy and computing!

About the author

Dr Yoseph Araya is a plant ecologist and associate lecturer at the Open University. He works on the biology and conservation of South African fynbos vegetation. Environmental education and the role of the public in research is one of his key interests.

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Sort of.

In Sweden.

For now.

Friday saw the long-awaited verdict in the trial of the founders of the Pirate Bay, one of the most famous (or indeed, infamous) sites on the Internet. A Stockholm tingsrätt (district court) had accused the Pirate Bay of aiding copyright infringements of materials such as movies, music and books. The four defendants, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström, were each sentenced to one year in prison and ordered to pay 30 million kronor (£2.4 million) in damages. The case will now go to appeal and may be overturned, but it does mark a significant point in the battle against Internet piracy.

The Pirate Bay was set up by the four Swedes in 2003 as part of Piratbyrån (The Piracy Bureau), an organisation opposed to the current implementation of intellectual property rights. The Pirate Bay became a stand-alone organisation in 2004 and quickly became one of the most important centres for pirated material. By late 2008 it was servicing over 25 million unique computers, and had more than 3.5 million registered users (and many more unregistered users).

Detached ethernet cable [image © copyright Photos.com]

The Pirate Bay had previously run foul of Swedish authorities; a police raid in 2006 temporarily took the site offline. A series of controversies not directly related to piracy followed. In one case, confidential photographs of a child murder victim were placed on the site and, despite pleas from the police and the family, were not removed; in another, one of the Pirate Bay’s original funders was revealed to have links to the Swedish far-right.

Despite these set-backs, the Pirate Bay has continued to grow until it now sits comfortably amongst the most visited sites on the Internet. It even spawned a new Swedish political party, Piratpartiet, dedicated to reforming intellectual copyright in Sweden. Although Piratpartiet has had little direct effect on Swedish politics, it can probably be credited with changing attitudes towards file sharing inside the mainstream political parties. Pirate Bay’s influence is so undeniable that its existence became something of a political embarrassment for the Swedish government, who were committed to bringing Swedish intellectual property laws into line with the rest of the EU and with the United States. Eventually, prosecutors tasked with reviewing evidence seized during the 2006 police raid filed charges against four named individuals; not for piracy, but for aiding it. Why not charge the four with piracy?

Because, believe it or not, the Pirate Bay doesn’t hold any pirated material.

The key to the Pirate Bay’s success is a method (protocol) of distributing files known as BitTorrent. Perhaps confusingly, BitTorrent is the name of the company founded by its creator, Bram Cohen, as well as the name for the protocol that is used by a large number of other programs. In this discussion we will be concerned with the workings of the general BitTorrent system.

Lady using a computer
[image © copyright Photos.com]

We’re going to need two Internet users, Alice and Bob. If Alice wishes to distribute a file through BitTorrent, she needs to create a seed file, known as a torrent. Alice uses software distributed with her BitTorrent client to break the single, large file into many smaller chunks (ranging from 64kb to 4Mb in size). The same software then uniquely labels each of the chunks, using a mathematical technique known as cryptographic hashing which allows other BitTorrent client programs to correctly recognise them.

Finally, the list of hashes, as well as other information, such as the name of the uploader, the name of the album or movie, the artists and so on, are written to a torrent file, which is itself only a few kilobytes in size and can easily be distributed using email or the Web.  Alice publishes the torrent, (she is said to "seed" it), so it can be picked up by other BitTorrent users.

When Bob wants to download Alice’s file he first obtains a copy of the torrent. This is not difficult to do. There are many sites (of which Pirate Bay is just one) dedicated to holding copies of torrent files; and most search engines will also turn up torrent files in their results. Chances are, if you look for a movie or DVD online, at least one torrent file will be listed in the results.

Man using a laptop
[image © copyright Photos.com]

Once Bob has a copy of the torrent, he loads it into his BitTorrent client program. Bob’s client extracts a complete list of all the unique identifiers for the chunks - it only needs to find the chunks themselves. Bob’s machine does this by contacting another BitTorrent client, known as the tracker. This client holds a record of the Internet addresses of all the clients currently sharing the requested file. If Bob is the first person to download the torrent, then the tracker will be on Alice’s machine along with all of the chunks. If the torrent has spread more widely, Bob’s client will receive several, even hundreds of addresses. Bob’s BitTorrent client then makes direct links to a number of these clients and begins downloading random chunks of the whole file. When it has finished downloading a chunk, Bob’s client makes a request for the addresses of further chunks and so on until it has received all the chunks; at which point it assembles the chunks back into a perfect copy of the original document.

In a BitTorrent system, Bob is not merely a downloader, his client is also uploading chunks to other users. Each time Bob downloads a chunk, his client informs the tracker of the identity of the chunk and Bob’s address and will provide it to other users in the system. As more and more users join a BitTorrent network, the average speed of sharing files increases, making it a very efficient way of sharing files. Popular files are shared more quickly, whilst even unpopular files will exist on enough computers to allow them to spread. BitTorrent is also extremely resilient. In a normal download service, if a computer fails, it can prevent anyone from accessing files. In BitTorrent, hundreds of users can go offline and the files will continue to download, albeit at a slower speed.

BitTorrent has proved to be a very controversial technology and has had a profound effect on how the internet is used. A survey, conducted in late 2007, estimated that the BitTorrent protocol consumed the largest share of internet capacity, ranging from 49 per cent of all traffic in the Middle East, to 84 per cent in Eastern Europe; rising to an astounding 95 per cent of all traffic at night! BitTorrent has become by far the most important technique for sharing pirated materials, so much so that many ISPs have started to identify BitTorrent users and to restrict their service, or terminate their connections. However, BitTorrent has many legitimate uses, including:

• software upgrades and bug fixes for online video games;
• Internet storage services that make files available to large numbers of users;
• obtaining legitimate movies and music through Bram Cohen’s BitTorrent Inc.

The Pirate Bay is a giant index of torrent files and trackers. Users only connect to the Pirate Bay to download a copy of the torrent file, or to use one of its trackers. None of the copyrighted material is actually distributed by, or passes through, the Pirate Bay servers.

So has the trial changed anything? It has clarified the law in Sweden to some extent (subject to an inevitable appeal which may drag on for years), but it certainly hasn’t put the Pirate Bay out of business. At the time of writing, the site was still working as normal, and it is unlikely to close any time soon. Following the 2006 raid, the Pirate Bay moved many of its servers away from Sweden to countries with less-stringent intellectual property right laws. But, even if the Pirate Bay were to close, it seems inevitable that other sites will spring up around the world to replace it. Piracy is a huge problem for the media industry and it can’t be resolved by ever more stringent laws, such as those proposed (and rejected) in France which would have struck downloaders off the Internet. The trial has not clarified why people pirate content.

A man's hands touching a laptop
[image © copyright Photos.com]

A few people will pirate anything, no matter how cheap the original item; there's probably nothing short of legal action that can dissuade them. A good number of people pirate material that is no longer available - either because the original has been withdrawn from sale, or was never available in their part of the world. Better distribution and back catalogues would bring these people back into the legitimate realm. Some pirate because they own a version of a title on one format and resent having to buy it again when technologies change or the original wears out. This is a more complex field as it requires governments to change the law so that copying from one form to another is legalised, and it requires media companies to unlock their content to make it possible without specialist skills.

If the media industry is to survive, it must first of all accept there will always be a certain level of piracy that cannot be eliminated; but it must make its own offerings so attractive that most people will be willing to spend money for entertainment. A good example is the Apple iTunes Store. All of the music on that site can surely be found on the Internet, but those illegal copies are of variable quality, hard to find and have a certain stigma attached to them. By making the iTunes site so easy to use, relatively cheap, and unrestricted (so far as most users are concerned), Apple and the music companies have been able to convince users to pay for more than six billion songs in five years. Other online music stores, especially those that sell unrestricted content such as Amazon, are seeing similar growth in sales.

The evidence is clear – make it cheap, make it easy, don’t upset the customer and they’ll buy your product. The music industry seems to be learning - so are the movie industry and the government ready to listen?

On the same theme

Darren Waters, Technology editor for BBC News, speaks to Digital Planet about the Pirate Bay's plans to appeal.

US judge and academic, Richard A. Posner reflects on the ethics of copyright.

About the author

Mike Richards joined the Open University in 1996 to help trial teaching over the Internet. Since then he has taught courses ranging from an introduction to robots to the engineering works of Leonardo da Vinci; but has spent most of his time writing about security - everything from the Enigma machines to e-shopping. He is currently working on a new course exploring the world of ubiquitous computers; imagine a world where computers so small and cheap they can be put in everyday objects - smartphones today, smartclothes tomorrow.

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Following this post Dave wrote an excellent piece for Platform, our sister site, on preventing earthquake deaths - admin

"There has been a magnitude 6.3 earthquake to the north of Rome, but no news yet of casualties," says the BBC World Service radio news at 03:30 as I drive to Luton airport for a flight to Amsterdam. By the time I am in a Dutch taxi heading for my meeting at the European Space Agency my phone is ringing demanding a blog.

Earthquakes in Italy are not unusual. The whole region is riddled with faults as a result of the tectonic collision between Africa and Europe.

Today's quake at 01:32 GMT was moderately large but more significantly shallow - its depth is preliminarily estimated at only 10 km - so the shaking that it caused at the surface was large. I see from the news that 27 are confirmed dead, and I expect the death toll will rise.

Italian colleagues who arrived today from Rome and Padova for the same meeting as me felt the quake for themselves. My colleague from Rome was already awake, and according to him his house shook for 20 seconds. His wife was still in bed, but was awoken.
Here's a map of the location with the intensity of ground shaking.

Thousands of homes have been damaged. I wait to learn how many schools have collapsed, which is a common cause of tragedy because classrooms have large and often inadequately supported roofs. Fortunately this time the quake struck at night while the schools were empty.

About the author

Dave Rothery is a volcanologist and planetary scientist at the Open University. His current research includes studying volcanic eruptions on the Earth and characterising planetary surfaces, especially Mercury.

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