UCL Sustainability week – a global university that is also Sommers Town local university

UCL is marking its sustainability week between 29th October and 4th November. As part of the activities to mark the Green UCL initiative. I was interviewed to this video, together with other researchers and professional staff who are committed to integrating sustainability into their work. The video was shot around UCL and the nearby area. …

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Nature article on citizen science: mixing typologies

About a week ago, the journal Nature published a feature article about Citizen Science No "PhDs needed: how citizen science is transforming research", with the subtitle: "Projects that recruit the public are getting more ambitious and diverse, but the field faces some growing pains." The report was written by the science journalist Aisling Irwin who contacted me, among …

Barbara Hoenig’s “Europe’s New Scientific Elite”

I never knew that with respect to the European Research Council (ERC), I belong to a (small) group called "Dual role incumbents". Not until I've read "Europe's New Scientific Elite: Social Mechanisms of Science in the European Research Area" - A book by Barbara Hoenig which came out in 2017. The way I heard about …

Securing funding and balancing efforts: a tale of 21 research applications

The last 3 months were a gradual sigh of relief for the Extreme Citizen Science group (ExCites), Mapping for Change (MfC), and for me. As the UCL engineering website announced, the ExCiteS group, which I co-direct, secured funding through 3 research grants from the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme (H2020), with enough funding to continue …

Giving time – randomised experiments on volunteering and citizen social science

As the event blurb explained  "the Giving Time experiments were led by a team from four UK universities, who wanted to know whether sharing information about how others have volunteered could help to improve volunteering... this was about giving time – and whether volunteers can be nudged. The methodology was randomised control trial (RCTs) in real-life …

UCL Fossil Fuel Divestment debate

UCL organised a debate about fossil fuel divestment, with 7 knowledgeable speakers (all professors), raising argument for and against the suggestion that UCL should divest from fossil fuels and sell its £21million invested in the industry. In the room and on the panel there were more people who supported the motion than those who opposed it. …

nQuire-it/Sense-it – discovering sensors in your phone

The Open University, with support from Nominet Trust and UTC Sheffield have launched  the nQuire-it.org website, which seem to have a great potential for running citizen science activities. The nQuire platform allows participants to create science inquiry ‘missions’. It is accompanied by an Android app called Sense-it that exposed all the sensors that are integrated in a smartphone and let …

The value of “analog” user experience

I've been using 37Signals' Basecamp now for over 5 years. I'm involved in many projects with people from multiple departments and organisations. In the first large project that I run in 2007 - Mapping Change for Sustainable Communities - Basecamp was recommended to us by Nick Black (just before he co-founded CloudMade), so we've started …

Geographical Citizen Science

The London Citizen Cyberscience Summit in early September was a stimulating event, which brought together a group of people with an interest in this area. A report from the event, with a very good description of the presentations, including a reflection piece, is available on the ‘Strange Attractor’ blog. During the summit, I discussed the …

Computers and the Renaissance of Cartography (1976)

While sorting out our departmental GIS library, I came across a small booklet titled Computers and the Renaissance of Cartography from 1976. It was written by Dr Tom Margerison, the first editor of New Scientist, and describes the activities of the Experimental Cartography Unit (ECU), which pioneered the use of computers for geographical and cartographical …