Be the Change: Saving the World with Citizen Science by Chandra Clarke
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A short read due to the majority of the book being links to various Citizen Science projects, Be the Change still manages to be chock full of helpful and interesting background information and explanations of the field.

Written in a style that is appropriately user-friendly, sans high tech jargon and acronyms, Clarke shares her enthusiasm for a growing field of scientific research called “Citizen Science”. To quote her first paragraph in the chapter entitled “All About Citizen Science” Clarke explains it as: “Roughly speaking, citizen science is research that is conducted by nonprofessionals, or “amateurs”—ordinary people like you and me. It is known by a few different names; you might hear it referred to as participatory science, networked science, or crowdsourced science.”

After a few short sections explaining how citizen science has developed and what makes it both unique and appealing, Clarke provides a substantial list of projects, classified by level of involvement, in which anyone can become involved.

I was duly impressed by the amount of research that went into compiling and creating this book. Clarke’s text is well resourced and annotated. The text appearance was perfect; nary a misspelling or editing miss was found.

I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in science, some spare time or cash, and a desire to do something to contribute to the greater good. I had never heard of citizen science before reading this text and am now most interested in finding ways to participate. From computer games designed to map the brain or design new RNA strings and allowing a portion of your computer’s processing power to be used for super-computations, citizen science has it all.

I give it a maximum rating of 5 stars.


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