Hoots callin' me?

In this week's issue of New Scientist (No. 2592) there is an article about researchers at MIT who have extended the functionality of the cell phone to include communication with other species. The project is yet another example of how researchers are using the internet to draw on volunteers or "citizen-scientists" to help them process the huge amount of data necessary to effectively monitor the environment. By calling on these around-the-world-logged-on citizen-scientists, researchers can create networks of sensor nodes (in this case, cell phones) at ever higher resolutions with minimal impact on the area under study. Granted there are problems inherent with relying on "non-scientists" to accurately collect and analyze experimental data, but the hope is that the researchers can create a clever user interface which is both instructive and intuitive, thus minimizing the potential for error.

I attempted to call the owl's at the website for the Owl Project, but collection was offline. You can get a feel for the interface (which unfortunately is geared towards researchers) in the scheduler section, where it appears you can schedule an experiment.