Word: wayes
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...recently in the town of Sendai, north of Tokyo. It snowed, which was a lovely treat, something I never see at home in Hong Kong. Japan is a respite from the rest of Asia in many other ways. While much of the region is still hurtling along the path of development - a blinding whirl of frenetic construction and perpetual change - Japan is a vision of stability, a nation that has everything others in Asia want, and has already had it all for decades. Money. Technology. Global brands. A seat at the table with the powerful countries of the industrialized world...
...changing the economy. The result is government debt approaching 200% of GDP. Overly protected at home, Japan Inc. has missed out on the globalization game; its companies, unable to adapt to a changing world, are losing global market share to more nimble competitors. The nation that once led the way toward prosperity in Asia is sitting by while its influence is being usurped by China. (See pictures of Japan and the world...
...might be tempting to dismiss Galaxy Zoo as just an amusing diversion - fun in an I-play-a-scientist-on-TV kind of way. But astronomers - and volunteers - have made real discoveries by mining its crowd-sourced data. Among them: red spiral galaxies (most spirals are blue), green peas (small but energy-packed, star-spewing galaxies) and Hanny's Voorwerp, an amorphous blue blob spotted by Dutch schoolteacher Hanny Van Arkel, who learned about Galaxy Zoo on the website of Brian May, the former Queen guitarist turned astrophysicist...
Galaxy Zoo discoveries have been important enough that astronomers have investigated some of them separately, using Earth-bound telescopes as well as the Hubble Space Telescope. The project's findings have led to 10 scientific articles, which appeared in peer-reviewed journals, and six more are on the way. And a few "zooites," as the volunteers refer to themselves, hope to publish their own citizen-science research projects someday, with help from professional astronomers...
This model - their data, your brain - may represent an increasingly common way to handle large data sets. Relatively cheap technology and bandwidth have made data collection almost too easy. Many scientists are now drowning in massive amounts of data, which they don't have the time, resources or brain power to analyze. "In many parts of science, we're not constrained by what data we can get," says Lintott, who is also the co-host of the long-running BBC series The Sky at Night. "We're constrained by what we can do with the data we have. Citizen science...