TED演讲:抬头看一看平时忽视的变化(5)

One such example of this is what I’m showing here, called “Galaxy Zoo.”

类似的例子就是我现在展示的“银河动物园”项目。

Galaxy Zoo is a project where people get a 20-minute — even less than that, actually

银河动物园项目是这样的:人们经过20分钟的指导–实际上少于20分钟,

tutorial on how to interact with these images of galaxies.

学习关于如何与这些星系的图像进行交互。

They learn to annotate the images, and within a couple of minutes, they’re up and running,

他们学习为图像做注释,在几分钟内,他们就能着手开始工作,

and they’re making really useful categorizations and classifications of these galaxies.

而且真正能够对这些星系进行有用的归类和划分。

Now, it’s easy to understand why Galaxy Zoo would be an easy sell for people to be involved with:

很容易就能理解为何“银河动物园”很容易被参与其中的人所接受:

it involves pretty pictures; galaxies are, generally speaking, pretty attractive.

它包含了漂亮的图片;通常来说,星系的确很吸引人。

However, there are many other flavors of citizen science projects that people have delved into that have varying levels of abstraction,

然而,还有很多其他类型的平民科学项目,人们探究过的这些项目抽象程度各不相同,

that you wouldn’t necessarily think people would jump at.

你会觉得人们不太会立刻参与这些项目。

One such example of this is the citizen science project associated with the mission that I’m part of, called the Kepler Mission.

一个类似的例子就是与我参加的任务相关的一个平民科学项目,叫做“开普勒任务”。

Kepler is a space telescope and it looks for planets around other stars by measuring the light from those stars very precisely.

开普勒是一个太空望远镜,它通过精确测量恒星的光线(变化)来寻找恒星周围的行星。

And we’re looking for the dimmings caused by stars blocking off some of that light.

我们在寻找恒星因为光线被(围绕其运转的行星)阻挡而发生的微暗现象。

We have an associated citizen science project called “Planet Hunters.”

我们有一个与此相关的“行星猎手”平民科学项目。

Planet Hunters gives you, like Galaxy Zoo, a short tutorial, and within a couple of minutes, you’re up and running;

类似于银河动物园,这个项目也会提供给你一个短教程,几分钟之后,你就可以开始工作;

you’re looking at data from the Kepler Mission and looking for planets.

你需要观察来自开普勒任务的数据,并寻找行星。

The idea behind this is an easy sell, right?

背后的想法很容易被接受,对吗?

But the actual process of planet-hunting involves a lot of looking at graphs,

但探索行星的实际过程包含对大量图表进行观察分析,

like the one I’m showing you here, and annotating them.

就像这里我向你们展示的一样,需要去分析和注释它们。

I do this all day and that doesn’t even sound that interesting to me.

我整天都做这些工作,所以已经不觉得那么有趣了。

However, not only are people interested in doing this,

然而,人们不仅对此很感兴趣,

but the citizen scientists that work with Planet Hunters have actually found planets in the data that would have gone undiscovered otherwise.

而且参与“行星猎手”项目的平民科学家们在数据中真的发现了行星,多亏了他们,才不至于错失发现这些行星的机会。

大家可能不知道的一个事实是:人类基因研究96%是基于欧洲血统的人,也就是说基因研究成果的最终受益者绝大部分将是欧裔人,世界上其它种族的人群被严重忽视了。本次TED演讲者,基因学专家Keolu Fox先生认为这是非常危险的,因为人类不同种族的人群有着不同的基因组成,所以在基因研究上不应该存在这样的不平等,我们应该让更多种族的人群加入和参与到人类基因研究中来,真正让全人类受益。

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