Rush Hour Tips ~ Dutch Train Platform Display!

Dutch trainco's demonstrate cool Rush Hour Tips display...

"Where will the train stop? Where can I find an empty seat? Where can I board with my bike? NS and ProRail wanted to improve the transfer process at station platforms: more comfortable, faster and safer. The result of an extensive research and ideation process was a 180 meter long LED strip suspended above the platform showing travellers everything they need to prepare for the next incoming train. Most importantly: using red, orange and green color bands it indicates the occupancy of the different parts of the train. A 3 month pilot at Den Bosch train station proved to be very successful: customers gave NS a significantly higher valuation at the end of the trial period than before. Plans for a nation-wide rollout of the system are at an advanced stage."

Birdsourcing ~ Citizen Scientist Ornithology!

Jim Robbins in his NYTimes pieces spotlights Birdsourcing...

"Tens of thousands of birders are now what the [Cornell Lab of Ornithology] calls “biological sensors,” turning their sightings into digital data by reporting where, when and how many of which species they see. [...] sighting of a dozen herons is a tiny bit of information, but such bits, gathered in the millions, provide scientists with a very big picture: perhaps the first crowdsourced, real-time view of bird populations around the world."

Check out BirdCast forecasts!

Shine ~ Misfit's Simple Essential Activity Tracker

Check out MIT alum Sonny Vu's latest venture Misfit and their Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for Shine, a simple minimalist wireless activity tracker...

San Antonio++ ~ Crowdsourcing Placemaking

Great placemaking design tool from PPS -- the Project for Public Spaces -- engaging San Antonio's citizens in re-thinking downtown...

"Home to countless attractions, our city has prospered since its beginnings. It is a crossroads for commerce, a haven for tourists, and a source of pride for its residents. Downtown San Antonio has the potential to be so much more. Help us build off of San Antonio 2020 and previous planning efforts to inform the strategic plan for improving the downtown area by mapping your ideas about how to make downtown a great place. This evolving plan will consolidate the visions put forth by previous plans and identify specific projects which can be implemented to reinvigorate downtown San Antonio and consequently, the city as a whole. Together, we can make a good downtown, a great one!"

This effort builds on their Power of Ten concept that...

"A great place typically has at least 10 things to do in it; a great downtown has at least 10 great places."

Crowdsourcing Science ~ Cook on Discovery++

Gareth Cook in Globe Ideas writes How crowdsourcing is changing science...

"Science is driven forward by discovery, and we appear to stand at the beginning of a democratization of discovery. An ordinary person can be the one who realizes that a long arm of a protein probably tucks itself just so; a woman who never went to college can provide the crucial transcription that reveals a spidery script to be a love poem from 2,000 years in the past. Nobody can say where the movement will go, but among the new pioneers of crowd science, there is a palpable sense that they have just happened upon a powerful, poorly understood new resource."

Lots of interesting examples mentioned, including iSpot, NOAH, SETI@home, Galaxy Zoo, Zooniverse, and others!