There’s a new ‘smartphone’ application for scientists and others
who aspire to collect data and send it on to a database. From
the news item on Physorg.com, … researchers [at the Imperial
College of London] have developed an application for
‘smartphones’ that allows a scientist or member of the public to
collect and record data, photos and videos – for example to
document the presence of an animal or plant species – and then
send this information to a central web-based database. The
website records the user’s location, using the phone’s GPS
system, and it can then display all of the data collected on
this topic across the world, using Google Maps. You can read
more about it here. It’s interesting to contrast this
development in the UK with some comments that Rob Annan made (in
this blog’s Sept. 17, 2009 comments section) about science
communication needing to be participatory. In fact, yesterday’s
posting has motivated me to look at science communication in
Canada. There are three programmes in education inst