Anthony Doesburg: Idle time put to work, all in the cause of science

One of the internet's least likeable aspects is its usefulness in propagating scams of various sorts.

When we think scams, financial rip-offs are typically what comes to mind. But there is a whole range of ways in which the web is used to warp our minds: peddling miracle cures for terminal diseases, existential dilemmas, political impasses, undersize penises, economic woes and racial divides, for example.

Come to think of it, those probably all slot into the financial rip-off category too.

If you look at the internet another way, though, the same things that make it a menace to rationality can be a tremendous force for advancing the human condition. Those qualities include its vast reach (more than 1.5 billion users) and the web-like way in which it draws people together around an idea or a cause.

The other fundamental feature of the internet that people with a technical bent have been quietly exploiting for years is that, collectively, it is the world's biggest computer.

Not exactly, of course. But using open-source software BOINC, various projects are making use of the combined computing power of more than 500,000 PCs in homes and elsewhere, all connected via the internet.

All those computers working in concert are more powerful than the fastest supercomputer in the world, an IBM monster called Roadrunner installed at the US Department of Energy.

Roadrunner manages 1.105 petaflops/s, less than half the throughput of BOINC's half-million host PCs.

BOINC was developed at the University of California at Berkeley for the SETI@home project, an effort to scan radio waves reaching Earth from space for any signs of intelligence. There's been nothing doing so far.

But BOINC has other uses, too. A Massey University project last year planned to enlist the software to decode the North Island brown kiwi genome. The project fell by the wayside when the evolutionary biologist who initiated it, David Lambert, left Massey. Lambert, now at Queensland's Griffith University, still thinks BOINC has great potential.

There are numerous other examples, in a field referred to as cyberscience, a subset of what has come to be called citizen science. To Bill St Arnaud, head of research at CANARIE, a high-speed network connecting 50,000 Canadian researchers, citizen science is a way of democratising science.

It has echoes of another internet-borne phenomenon, citizen journalism, the idea of members of the public reporting news from their communities without the filters of the corporate media.

Citizen science, however, is not about second-guessing the work of scientists, but can contribute to their efforts by giving them many sets of eyes with which to make observations and measurements, and by lending them computer power.

St Arnaud writes a citizen science blog in which he refers to image-processing projects for helping with disaster risk-reduction and adaptation to climate change, and large-scale epidemiological simulations, among other BOINC-like undertakings.

As Canterbury University philosophy professor Denis Dutton points out, citizen science pre-dates the internet. "There has been a long and honourable tradition in astronomy of amateur contributions," says Dutton, who teaches a course entitled Science: Good, Bad and Bogus.

But astronomy is a field in which technology has reduced the significance of amateur endeavours, he says.

"Unfortunately, the advent of very powerful cameras that can cover much of the sky in an evening has put many comet-spotters and variable star observers out of business in so far as making any notable contribution to science goes."

As an avowed enemy of pseudo-science - Dutton is a founder and past president of New Zealand Skeptics - he's all for the internet being used as a tool for increasing participation in science.

Even if citizen science remains a minority interest, the web is just as effective at debunking scams as spreading them, Dutton believes.

"It's true the conspiracy theorists and quack medicos make use of the internet to promote their rubbish. But at the same time the internet is able to find them out, track them down and refute them faster than they could be dealt with in an earlier age.

"Classically, the quack medicine operator in the 19th century would land in a village, make wild claims of miraculous cures, collect as much as possible from the gullible and be on his way. What keeps those people in business is the lack of any general information about them.

"The wonderful thing about the internet is that it really does level the ability of everyone to obtain information, and I think that is great," Dutton says.

St Arnaud is a believer in applying research networks to issues like tackling climate change. If BOINC project participation went from today's half-million or so to a few hundred million, not only would we be ruining things for scammers, but solutions to some of the planet's pressing problems might be found more quickly.

TRY THIS AT HOME

Using BOINC software, thousands of internet-linked computers are being used to:

* Search for extraterrestrial intelligence
* Develop strategies for malaria control
* Improve climate-change models
* Identify disease-causing genes
* Create a 3D map of the Milky Way
* Detect earthquakes

http://boinc.berkeley.edu