Galileo's Pendulum

I’ve gotten lots of good resources and comments on various social media from my citizen science post, so thanks to everyone who added their thoughts. Here are just a few; please add your own thoughts or links in the comments section.

• No discussion of citizen science is complete without mentioning the Science Cheerleaders and their community science leadership in a variety of contexts, especially the excellent (and massive!) resource site Science for Citizens. I was completely remiss in not mentioning them in my previous post, and will no doubt be used as the base of an inverted human pyramid at some point.
• A major challenge of citizen science projects is getting people to know it exists and then getting them started. Matt Shipman reminded me of his “research trailer” for The Wild Life of Your Home, perhaps the first time a movie-style trailer has been used to promote a project.
• The Scholarly Communication Project at Columbia University hosted a panel discussion covering how best to work with citizen scientists. The video is long, but there’s a lot of good stuff in it for those on the management side of citizen science projects.
• Also: are you involved in any citizen science projects? If so, let us all know in the comments!

Here are some other great things for you to read as well:

• Janet Stemwedel asks a very provocative question: Is being a good scientist a matter of what you do or of what you feel in your heart? In other words, if you follow the protocols but have a conflicting pseudoscientific agenda, are you a bad scientist, even if your work is technically correct? Her example is paleontologist Marcus Ross, who is actually a young-Earth Creationist; I think of the small number of creationist astronomers I’ve run across, including Jason Lisle.

• Emily Baldwin recently traveled to Chile on an astronomical mission; here’s part one of what promises to be a great series on the high-altitude telescopes in the Atacama.
• I was just one of many people who passed around that list of words intended to help science communicators talk about climate change. Alice Bell dumps some needed cold water on us, and reminds us that we need to be more systematic and evidence-based in our approaches.
• From Cells to Stars: Michelle Banks, science artist extraordinaire, wrote a very powerful piece about a personal loss and channeling that into art. In the process, she finds connections large and small between Carl Sagan and her friend who died.