The internet – smartphone combination has
“democratized” many activities. The publishing of music, books, and news are
the examples that come immediately to mind. With fewer filters provided for us
by the great and the good, we now have to be able to make our own judgments as
to quality.
Scientific research has also seen the democratizing
effects, but not in quite the same way. However, things may be about to change.
Some research endeavors require large pools of data if the results are to be
reliable and that can be difficult to organize, and data mining of old records can be somewhat limiting.
A new idea has popped up. Defau, with an
international team of 16 collaborators has piloted the smartphone as a
scientific tool with a very long reach (1). They work in the area of cognitive science
and are now able to work with human “lab-rats” from a huge population worldwide.
Their proof-of-principle experiment was in hearing
spoken words, some at high sound frequency and some at a low, with the recognition
of real words or fake words at short time periods. This is a multi-language
project with 4157 participants to date. The participants were initially
self-selecting by down loading an App for their iPhones or iPads from the
iTunes App Store.
The results tallied with previous data from
controlled experiments. The challenge comes in designing the statistical analysis
for large numbers of participants that need to be grouped by their characteristic
details entered into the app. With the numbers being very large and increasing
with time, it should be possible to watch the data distributions grow, change,
and finally stabilize as the stats get reliable.
The real tool, of course is the App as opposed to
the smartphone. It will be interesting to see if someone starts an enterprise
to build custom apps for individual projects.
