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Do not look directly at the sun with your naked eye

I recall that as a kid, my parents were very careful to advise me of the dangers associated with looking at the sun with the naked eye.

Indeed, during my younger days, there were several solar eclipses which interested me intensely (as a young science geek) and as each occasion drew near, the words "don't look at it or you'll go blind" would be repeated, as my excitement of the pending spectacle grew greater.

Well now we're are being encouraged to look at the sun, but once again, not with our naked eyes.

This time, we have a website to help and the goal of all this sun-watching is to spot the early signs of a solar storm.

The Solar Storm Watch website explains exactly how public participation is so important in keeping a (suitably protected) eye on our nearest star.

It also allows you to sign up and join the sun-spotting team whose feedback appears to be very important.

The observation and analysis process seems very simple, simply requiring you to view/review a couple of videos taken by two solar observatory satellites.

In order to determine the time and speed of a solar storm, you just click at the appropriate places on the video footage and drag a little line around to demarcate the edge of the storm.

You might ask why, if it's that simple, the scientists are soliciting the help of the world's internet users.

Well the answer lies in the sheer bulk of data that has already been returned from the satellites and the amount that continues to arrive on a daily basis.

The scientists claim they have in excess of 100,000 images and 25 terabytes of data to wade through. Clearly these boffins believe that "many hands make light work" and are more than happy to share the workload with eager Net users.

Another reason why "more is better" when it comes to eyes, is that many of the observations and measurements are fairly subjective in nature. Determining exactly when a solar storm starts or when it crosses a particular point in space is not as simple as it sounds.

Such discharges tend to be very fuzzy with ill-defined boundaries so by accumulating a large number of "opinions" and performing some statistical analysis on those results, a more consistent and (hopefully) more accurate set of measurements will be the final outcome.

Okay, this probably isn't as sexy as being part of Seti@Home and simply being one of thousands who make some observations on a solar storm won't bring the same fame and fortune that discovering the first signs of intelligent life outside of Earth -- but it's still a fun thing to do and helps contribute to our knowledge of the universe around us.

As the internet continues to grow in population and sophistication, it's only a matter of time before this kind of crowdsourcing becomes an even more important tool for scientific analysis of large datasets.

What's more, crowdsourcing is opening the door to the kinds of analysis that was previously unimaginable.

While we have massive arrays of supercomputers that can crunch numbers with astonishing speed and accuracy, our ability to automate processes that involve subjective decisions, a high degree of visual processing and interpretation, and the flexibility that only the human mind can bring to bear on a problem is something that can't be satisfactorily automated.

Although the human mind is not exactly blessed with an overabundance of MIPs or FLOPs, it is still the most flexible and dynamic processor at our disposal. Multiply that power by a thousand or a million, or more and you have the kind of potent bio-processor we'll probably need to solve some of our future problems.

While scientists have been working for decades on the prospect of integrating computers and the human brain, perhaps this kind of crowdsourcing achieves an even more interesting merge of the two technologies -- and in a far simpler way.

How many applications can you think of for this kind of crowdsourcing?

Will crowdsourcing eventually become such a valuable resource that those involved might earn some kind of payment or credit for their time?

What other scientific crowdsourcing initiatives have you come across on the Net?

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