Tag Archive | press
September 5, 2012  

A Bit More on the Chinese News about Galaxy Zoo

I’m back in the UK, so I thought it would be nice to give an update on the Chinese coverage of Galaxy Zoo resulting from the big talk I gave in Beijing at the  28th General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union. As you know, I was invited to give one of four “Invited Discourses” at that meeting, on the topic of “A Zoo of Galaxies”. The powerpoint slides of my talk are available online. I still don’t know where/if the video of the talk has appeared online, so will update more on that soon.

As I mentioned before, an abstract of my talk (and a picture of me and one of my favourite galaxies) appeared on the front page of the first edition of “Inquiries of Heaven” (the IAU Daily Newspaper for the meeting).

(PS. The image caption should say “Former winner of IAU Fellowship” since I won it in 2008, and there have been 4 more winners since me!).

The talk also attracted a small amount of interest from Chinese press.

Kevin already posted the information that Xinhua (sort of the Chinese version of Reuters) covered it here: Astronomy Project Hunts for Chinese Helpers, (or the Chinese version); since this a news feed it got picked up by a variety of Chinese newspapers.

I was also interviewed for “Amateur Astronomer” (a Chinese astronomy magazine). Here’s the first page of the article they sent me.

And a photo they took of me right after giving my talk when they gave me the previous edition of the magazine.
I also talked with someone from Southern Weekly (a Chinese newspaper with a readership of 8 million), who published this article (in Chinese).
Finally I talked with people from China Radio International, who said they planned to run the story, but I’m not sure what came of that yet. They recorded me saying “Xin Xi Zong Dong Yuan” (our Chinese translation of “Galaxy Zoo”), and explaining (in English) what Galaxy Zoo is.
November 9, 2011  

Bars in Spain!

Dear all,

Recently the Spanish media has described the Google funded GZ bar drawing project. The article, which can be seen here and was based on this MNRAS paper , was written by members of the Spanish Public Agency for the Dissemination of Scientific Knowledge, (see here), which is a leading news agency in Spain.

Thanks again for making the bar drawing project so successful.

Ben (on behalf of Bob, Karen, and the GZ bar drawing team)

July 7, 2011  

Great Review of Galaxy Zoo in this week's Science

There’s a great review of Galaxy Zoo and its achievements in this week’s Science Magazine. The link to the article is here and the summary reads:

Galaxy Zoo Volunteers Share Pain and Glory of Research

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has compiled a list of more than 1 million galaxies. To glean information about galaxy evolution, astronomers need to know what type of galaxy each one is: spiral, barred spiral, elliptical, or something else. The only reliable way to classify galaxies is to look at each one, but all the world’s astronomers working together couldn’t muster enough eyeballs for the task. A volunteer online effort called Galaxy Zoo, launched in 2007, has classified the entire catalog years ahead of schedule, bringing real statistical rigor to a field used to samples too small to support firm conclusions. The Galaxy Zoo team went on to ask more-complicated classification questions that led to studies they hadn’t thought possible. And in a discussion forum on the Galaxy Zoo Web site, volunteers have pointed to anomalies that on closer inspection have turned out to be genuinely new astronomical objects.

Unfortunately accessing the full article requires a subscription.