Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

You Can Help Net a Fluttering of Data Points

fenders-butterfly

If you’re looking for a good measuring stick for change in the world—whether in climate, land use, pollution—consider the butterfly. Not only are they sensitive to temperature changes, hot and cold, many of them will only lay eggs on specific plants which in turn are affected by things like temperature, urbanization, and land use. Butterflies are easy to recognize, do their flying in the open, and are charismatic as heck. (Sorry frogs!) Plus, they don’t live for long, which means problems or successes can be spotted as soon as next summer. With those pluses in mind, a new citizen ... Read More

Extraordinary Popular Enthusiasms and Funding from Crowds

Think Tank model

On the Good.is website right now is an appeal from Tyler Alterman, a matriculating neuroscientist and self-described scientific detective, seeking cash support for The Think Tank, his lab-on-wheels. This rolling experimentation station will travel the New York metro area to both teach the masses about cognition and to draw them into studies about brain function. Here’s “the plan,” as taken from Alterman’s appeal page at IndieGoGo: TTT will be an art+science team-up between artists and scientists from Tyler Alterman's lab. Together we will transform a recycled box truck into a ... Read More

Talmud, Internet Unlock James Madison

James Madison’s Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 has never been a bestseller. Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, randomly flips open his own copy of a published edition to page 129 and starts reading aloud to illustrate why. “Mr. Randolph's plan,” Madison wrote, “as reported from the Committee June 13 being before the house, the 1. propos: ‘that a Natl. Govt. ought to be established consisting &c.’ being taken up.” For one, this stuff doesn’t translate out loud very well. The book continues like this for some 600 ... Read More

Crowdfunding Puts Money with Public Interest

After losing their London-based publisher, co-editors Ruby Russell and Katherine Hunt of the grassroots art magazine Teller were forced to look in a new direction for their second issue. Self-funding was out of the question, so the editors launched a campaign on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter to ask the public for help. "It allowed us to pre-sell copies of our magazine and put the full cover price toward production costs, with some people donating larger sums," says Russell. "It's very easy to set up and use, and people responded very generously." With an original funding goal of ... Read More

The Next Apollo Project in 140 Characters

Anil Dash sums up the power of crowdsourcing with a simple question he put to his Twitter feed a few months back. It was time for a new cell phone, he announced. What should he get? "Somebody I don't even really know said, 'Here's a list of the most popular handsets in America ranked by how much radiation they put out,'" Dash recalled. Now he had an info stream he hadn't even thought to consider. And if social media could better inform his relatively small cell phone conundrum, imagine what it could do for the big-picture questions we really want to get right — the questions government ... Read More