Online Gamers as Scientists

16 Replies Jonny Hankins

If you thought that online gamers were just a load of geeks, incapable of socializing with the outside world, and living within the confines of their own in their bedrooms, you might like to have a look this website called Foldit. Foldit is a game, but its aim is to solve puzzles for science, and players have recently made some remarkable inroads into the world of protein modelling. Below is a model of an Amino Acid, and it is this type of thing that gamers manipulate.
An Amino Acid Protein MoleculeThis article that explains the process is in the online journal Nature, Structure and Molecular Biology, and begins with the following statement:

“Following the failure of a wide range of attempts to solve the crystal structure of M-PMV retroviral protease by molecular replacement, we challenged players of the protein folding game Foldit to produce accurate models of the protein. Remarkably, Foldit players were able to generate models of sufficient quality for successful molecular replacement and subsequent structure determination. The refined structure provides new insights for the design of antiretroviral drugs.”

The fold it game has existed for a couple of years now. Players create protein structures, with the most stable and low energy structures scoring the most points.

The gamers in general are not scientists and they manually manipulate the model from a base form that is provided to them at the start of the operation. They have a variety of tools but the most important thing is that they have better spatial reasoning skills than computers. Computer models had tried to solve the problem cited above for 10 years without success, gamers produced an adequate model that was then refined by scientists in just 3 weeks.

We could draw similarities to citizen science, having seen posts on this blog discussing loaning out some of your computer’s spare hard disk space and memory to solve scientific problems, and the now common use of similar set ups in astronomy.

Just this week the Astronomy and Telescope journal is entitled Citizen Science, and addresses the issue of amateurs classifying high definition photos of far off galaxies. They say that it is the future of astronomic discovery. See my post on The Bassetti Foundation website for a lay explanation.

The gaming process is an interesting innovation though, as it uses skills that may not be particularly associated with science, but reveal themselves to be extremely important.

Conference calling has never been so easy!

5 Replies Christopher Roberts

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When you think of conference calling, you think (of I do) of complicated systems where big businesses get in contact with each other, or where employees within big businesses contact each other.

Then along came the likes of Skype and Google Talk introduced VoIP, and the whole thing became much simpler, opening it up to a much bigger market, not just big businesses.

Recently I came across a site called Powwownow, which is a voice conferencing site. Powwownow uses both VoIP (for its web and video conferencing) and telephone conferencing.Powwownow LogoThis means that you can use its conference call services via the phone, rather than having to do it over the internet. Now many people prefer the internet, I understand that, however telephone conference calling also has its merits.

With VoIP you are subject to drop-out if you don’t have a very stable internet connection. Say you are calling across time zones, meaning that you are calling someone at 8:30pm, then half an hour into your call, when peak time internet usage starts, you could experience slower internet speeds and ultimately drop-out – a logistical nightmare! Telephones don’t really experience this issue.

Furthermore, with VoIP it can often be hard to understand people due to poor microphones being used by whoever you are calling, now telephones don’t offer the clearest quality possible, but it’s usually pretty easy to understand someone using one!

Powwownow’s system is dead easy, all you need do is enter your email address and you will be given a pin. You then contact whoever you want to be in the call and tell them when you want the call to be, what the pin is and the dial in number. Finally, ring up their dial in number, enter your pin and start conferencing!

This all makes conferencing easy, quick, secure, and thanks to low international rates, cheap too!

Do you conference call others as part of your job, or do you do conference style calls to get in contact with friends or relatives? Why not try a free conference call courtesy of Powwownow and let us know how you get on!