For many years now, volunteers working from home —people like
you— have been able to help scientists with important problems.
In the first wave of these “citizen science” projects, people
simply lent their computers to help solve problems that could be
farmed out in pieces to thousands of machines. Among the first
of these was searching incoming radio signals for evidence of
extraterrestrial intelligence, although my favorite involved
analyzing the folding of proteins to help study diseases and
treatments. More recently, people with spare time have been able
to go beyond just lending their computers to take a much more
active role. Sitting at home in your pajamas, you can perform
tasks like transcribing data from antiquated written records. As
I pointed out last year, anybody who cares about climate science
can get in on the act, helping to digitize paper records from
old ships’ logs and weather balloons. The Old Weather project
might be the most interesting of these schemes, but in its
initial incarnations,