Asteroid Zoo Talk

leaving this project

  • hightower73 by hightower73

    im seriously thinking of leaving, started with real interst that my work may make a differnce, but it hasnt, so i may well leave

    Posted

  • djsimister by djsimister

    I totally understand why you're frustrated. I too am loosing interest. Personaly, The most important element for me/us, The "Recognition" for our efforts I can see, has been completely overlooked and probably not by accident, Someone somewhere high up in the Asteroidzoo should take their science hat off for a moment and think about what life would be like without the many thousands of image sets that we've taken hundreds of hours to analyse, to mark up and send back? Without this input, Projects solely reliant on citizen participation would not exist at all. This is how important we are and what we give. This project should have had, as it's main attraction, a dedicated link to a page that enables Asteroidzoo scientists to post up and publicly acknowledge any /all of our new potential discoveries, adding the names of all those who have highlighted these objects as such.
    As this is an entirely "Citizen led" project! the very least we should have been afforded was a simple tangible notice board that is accessible to the world that acknowledges what we may have possibly found with a disclaimer such as: 'Pending official confirmation' in the small print. Our individual profiles should include the same.

    Planethunters and Ice hunters both had this very basic but very important announcement board for its participants. I used to check every single day, anticipating and hoping that my name would come up. Of course, it was was the place where all its citizen participants could check and would be acknowledged accordingly, Sadly, My very first and much loved project Planethunters, appears to have conveniently forgotten to include this vital feature as part of the new Planethunters, They, at PH's obviously dont understand at all how important it was or what it positively meant to the millions like me. Well, It compelled me to complete over 97,000 Zoonivers classifications in over four years! I dont understand why it is no longer featured over there! and not created for its citizens over here? Some one upon high needs to think about this very seriously and get it sorted. Its way too one sided for it to be a fair deal, We are just constantly providing the cream for the cats and we are given very little or nothing back! Eventually and quite naturally we will all loose interest simply because it represents a partnership not dissimilar to that which exists between a parasite and its host! A harsh comparison it may be! But the analogy is correct.

    @hightower73
    You've brought such a lot to this table. Most of which has been of great benefit and help to many others including myself, So you're work does make a difference. and selfishly, I think Asteroid Z would really be a better place if you didn't quit but stayed on :~}

    Posted

  • hightower73 by hightower73 in response to djsimister's comment.

    Yes i totally agree with you, there should be something that says we have found somthing but has yet to be confirmed, and who first found it, it wouldnt be difficult to set up i would have thought. but things here ar very one sided, quite a few of the other projects surrounding zoo, seem to have thier act together and can post new discoveries, new this and that but for this project, its very one sided. I was looking at the cataina sky survey updates and discoveries here http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/css/css_sss_newdisc.html and there are thousands of them, and this is what were supposd to be helping, but as you can see, our work is so far back down the chain, i doubt very much any of our work is even valid anymore due to the hold ups in this algorytham problem that seems to exist, and the longr it goes on, other projects will gt th same images and well lose all our work due to somon else putting in more effort to this problem and marking the same entries, and our firest marks will become a dispute and make things very ugly over claims as to who found it first.

    so what do we do?

    @djmister, thank you for the kind words sir, i will stay but like you im feeling as though my work is of little value here, we have not seen Matt for ages, and dmz is here on a very random basis and he cant do much, i just feel like a mushroom!

    Posted

  • DZM by DZM admin

    Hey guys... I'm trying extremely, extremely, extremely hard to impart upon the science teams the importance of regular communication and recognition for their volunteers. I wish I could do more, but I've been trying with this project in particular for months...

    There's actually going to be a workshop coming up where we are going to be developing a document that all new science/research teams receive upon starting their project. It's going to be entirely, 100% about user engagement. I hope to drill home the lessons we have learned from watching communities shrivel and die for lack of feedback.

    May I ask... if you folks do decide to take a break from AZ for a bit, perhaps there's another Zooniverse project you might find appealing? The Cyclone Center folks, for instance, are great at responding, but their project really needs more love. Chimp & See also has a highly engaged science team, and if discovery acknowledgement is what you're looking for, they're great at providing it (and naming rights) for newly-found chimps. Just a thought... !

    Posted

  • nicro46 by nicro46

    Personally. as interested in all 'astronomy I started years ago with GalaxyZoo, viewing more than 10,000 sets, for the sheer pleasure do see great images, which in many cases no human eye had allegedly never seen before. This without any expectation of some recognition. Later, two years ago, parts of the project Spacewarps, which I have followed from day one until the end, viewing more than 90,000 sets. The results are still being processed, they just published a list of all project participants (more than 36,000 and not in alphabetical order, to find my signature does not tell you how much I sweat) and a list of fifty candidates lenses Gravitational least two of which are reported to me are heading for primo.Nel Asteroidzoo project, compared to the previous, in my opinion lacks the support of one or more moderators, who can interact in (almost) real time with volunteers and a clear and precise reference point between the team and the MPC, recipient and judge of our work; it is clear these people should be responsible and motivated by those the project has created, and still not neglecting the 'commitment of those currently seeking help voluntarily.
    Arriving awards for our work? Not short I think, however, I go for fun, like every time I go back on Galaxy Zoo to make me a bellyful of galaxies ... and expect to resume Spacewarps!

    Posted

  • hightower73 by hightower73 in response to DZM's comment.

    ill have a look at those, thanks dmz

    Posted

  • Barbalbero by Barbalbero in response to hightower73's comment.

    Hi
    I agree with your statements. I am afraid that as time passes, there are less opportunities to have recognized our work since other people can have made the discovery of the asteroids we observed here. I also sometimes have a look at the website of the CSS project, and there are often upgrades of new discoveries, so I can still do not understand why the images of Asteroid Zoo still have problems to be accepted. If they can make the images for the asteroids they have discovered good for the MPC, why our ones have so many problems? I can understand all the problems explained in the section related to the objects position errors, but now it is one year we are working on images for this project and I think in one year it was not so impossible to make the images studied here suitable for the MPC. We are able to send missions on comets with exterme precision, and it is not possible to have detailed information for a set of 4 images?
    In the recent update about the object position errors, there was one thing I found strange, maybe I am too stupid to understand the explanation. There is a comparison between the centers of the objects marked by the people here in the project and the true centers of the objects. It is reasonable to understand and to assume that people involved in the Asteroid Zoo project can not have the 100% precision when they need to find the centers of the object, and to be honest at the beginning of the Project no one emphasized that it was required extremely accuracy when finding the centers of the objects. I ask just this: if many people indicates an object as possible asteroid, isn't it easier for the Asteroid Zoo team to find directly the center of the object, without spending time doing the mean of the centers indicated by the people here and then make comparisons with real centers? If we will wait to solve this problem related to the center of marked object, I think MPC will never accept our images, or it will be too late since years will pass and other people will make the same discoveries, so our efforts here will be totally useless.
    Moreover, the only few upgrades we had were obtained mainly thanks to DZM (thanks very much for your effort!!!), other people involved in the Project totally disappeared. At least, the people of the CSS could give some basic information about the work we did. I have marked hundreds of possible asteroids and already known ones, at least we could be informed about which set of images has been taken into account for analysis until now, we still do not know exactly how many times need an object to be marked before it can be taken into consideration.
    I wish there will be good news soon, but my wishes become less and less with passing of the time, mainly because I feel totally indifference from some of the people involved in the Project.
    I do not know if it possible to do one thing, I ask to DZM in order to have more information. Maybe it is possible to give to the people of CSS a kind of condition: or they give regular upgrades and recognize the effort of the people involved here (without playing with statistics about out images but trying seriously to make them suitable for MPC) or it is better to close this Project. I think it is useless to ask people for their contributions if the people of CSS are not able to give even an upgrade in several months.

    Posted

  • hightower73 by hightower73 in response to Barbalbero's comment.

    I totally agree 100% with you, ive not not been her as long as others and this was a start for me to be intrested in this type of thing, ys i have the tlscope at home and i have the iss tracker on my phone, yes iv sen the basic night sky stuff, the moon, saturn ect and this sort of thing has always held a draw for me, but this is beginning to put me off, i mean the time its taken to sort out these problems is really not fun anymore.

    When you start the project you assum they have all these problems sorted out, and that the project is up and running fully, like other projects on zoo. i would assume with other projcts, they dont release the project till everything is working perfectly ? so why has this project not done the same? i know we were making the detection easier, but surely they would have had something in place to at least make a start? as i understand it, they didnt have anything in place?????

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  • nicro46 by nicro46 in response to hightower73's comment.

    Of course I fully agree

    Posted

  • DZM by DZM admin

    On a better note, you incredible guys are closing in on 2 million classifications; WOW. (Less than 7,000 to go.)

    No matter what, I'm fairly sure that all the data eventually gets open-sourced, so even if for some reason the team never ends up following through on it, it will be available for someone else to make good use out of!

    Obviously, I hope it doesn't come to that; I hope the team comes back really soon with good news. Just putting it out there... I'm really impressed, myself. 😃

    Posted

  • Barbalbero by Barbalbero in response to DZM's comment.

    Thanks for your reply.
    Did you have any other news from the Team? I wish there will be an update soon, just to know if somethings is going on.

    Posted

  • AstroTinker by AstroTinker in response to DZM's comment.

    DZM,
    If nothing else, how about a basic stats page that would include this type of info... number of: image sets classified, participants that have classified any images, active participants in the last period (month or rolling 4 weeks), images sets classified in the last period, already identified asteroids possible in the last period(out of sets viewed), already identified asteroids re-identified in the last period(coarse id, just someone marking an asteroid in that set), possible new asteroids with multiple hits by participants, possible new asteroids selected to forward for review... Most of these should be relatively simple to automate, depending on how obtuse or available the database might be for read-only queries. Even if a page could be just set up for Asteroid Zoo as a whole, with one or two of these stats for starters, then new stats added as the programmer can get to them, it would at least be a START. Later, some of these stats could be selected for individual efforts, badge programs, etc.
    Thanks!

    Posted