A mixed methods study was used to transcend the traditional pre-, post-test approach of citizen science evaluative research by integrating adults' test scores with their perceptions. We assessed how contributory entomology citizen science affects participants' science self-efficacy, self-efficacy for environmental action, nature relatedness and attitude towards insects. Pre- and post-test score...

The Inquiring Rock Hunters project is an example of Citizen Inquiry. Adult citizens designed and ran their own investigations in geology, through the online platform called nQuire, while collaborating with scientists. Analysis of the investigations shows patterns of collaboration and mentoring between novice, intermediate and expert geologists, however further work is needed to create a self-su...

www.frontiersinecology.org © The Ecological Society of America A the above vignette illustrates, the future of citizen science will likely be inextricably linked to emerging technologies. By spanning multiple spatial, temporal, and social scales, and by being designed to achieve a number of different outcomes, citizen-science projects will need to adopt new technologies to allow participants an...

Citizen inquiry is an innovative way for non-professionals to engage in practical scientific activities, in which they take the role of self-regulated scientists in informal learning contexts. This type of activity has similarities to inquiry-based learning and to citizen science, but also important differences. To understand the challenges of supporting citizen inquiry, a prototype system and ...

Federal environmental laws encourage private citizens to act like "private attorney generals" and to sue a firm. This citizen group competes over the rewards of levels of regulation and enforcement. The firm can reduce its output to curtail the likelihood of losing the contest. This paper explores whether one can combine citizen suits with Pigovian punitive damages to equate private and social ...

The increasing importance of digital sky surveys collecting many millions of galaxy images has reinforced the need for robust methods that can perform morphological analysis of large galaxy image databases. Citizen science initiatives such as Galaxy Zoo showed that large datasets of galaxy images can be analyzed effectively by non-scientist volunteers, but since databases generated by robotic t...

Political violence is known to cause psychological distress. There is a large body of empirical studies drawing correlations between war trauma, torture, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, there are few studies on the effects of war-related trauma among Syrian refugees after events following the 'Arab Spring' uprisings between 2010 and 2012. This study examines the association ...

BACKGROUND Post-conflict reconciliation is supposed to have a positive impact on survivors of war and conflict. However, knowledge is limited as validated questionnaires to assess individual readiness to reconcile in the context of human rights violations are still missing. OBJECTIVES This study aimed to develop and pilot-test a questionnaire to assess individual readiness to reconcile in vic...

In any natural language processing project, the input text needs to undergo tokenization before morphological analysis or parsing. For Arabic script languages the tokenization process faces more problems and it plays a more crucial role in natural language processing (NLP) systems for Arabic script languages. In this work we elaborate on some of these problems and present solutions for these. T...