{"id":5306,"date":"2015-12-22T17:00:32","date_gmt":"2015-12-23T00:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/?p=5306"},"modified":"2015-12-22T13:52:19","modified_gmt":"2015-12-22T20:52:19","slug":"support-scientific-research-from-the-comfort-of-your-own-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/2015\/12\/support-scientific-research-from-the-comfort-of-your-own-home\/","title":{"rendered":"Support scientific research from the comfort of your own home"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of years ago, I wrote about a very cool citizen science project<\/a> called Old Weather. This project was a massively crowdsourced effort to analyze historical weather patterns, based on observations recorded in ships’ logs. At any given time, hundreds of volunteers were logged on to the website, transcribing scans of these logs and\u00a0noting data such as date, location, and temperature. This data would be sent back to the researchers for further analysis.<\/p>\n

Imagine the same concept, applied to fields of research as diverse as microbiology and astrophysics, and completely automated. All you have to do is run a program on your computer that processes data from the researchers that you support. This is the mission of BOINC, or the Berkeley Open\u00a0Infrastructure for Network Computing.
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Taking advantage of your computer’s downtime<\/h1>\n

When you’re not at your computer, chances are that it’s sitting idle, waiting perhaps for an email or an instant message. BOINC uses that idle time to contribute to scientific research. This means that you, alongside thousands of other contributors, can help researchers:<\/p>\n