I’m starting out and I often come across hard to tell situations where I just end up taking a guess and figuring out if I was right or wrong at the end (and so far, I’m more often wrong than right). Trial and error is obviously a standard process of learning in this case (and I realize there are other ways to be learning here), but I think it would be a much faster process if I could ask an experienced individual why it’s option B instead of A. I think that could be done fairly quickly if I could just share with someone else the cube I have with the current state of coloring I’ve done.
Hi Paps, we do actually have a new feature that allows us to see what you’re working on in a given cube. The only thing is you’ve got to catch one of us while you’re on that cube. Next time you’ve got an issue try asking if there’s an admin in the forum who can help you figure out what’s going wrong or right. (Admins have yellow names)
So…if the feature is already here, why not share it with non-admin users?
We may bring that feature out for general use eventually, but it’s very new and we’re still making sure it works correctly. Also there’d be a potential for abuse when used by non admins, so we need to work out how to avoid that. You can also post screen shots of pieces you have questions about here and other users along with the admins can help you figure out what’s going on.
The first time I lent my computer for science was to sign up for SETI@Home, it was fun and I could contribute something for a good cause. A Huffpost announcement of J-Day lead me here and I was hooked. I’ve abandoned hidden object games to take my puzzle solving desires and put them to this useful task of contributing to Eyewire. Eyewire has superbly minimalist instructions so I could just jump in and do it. I knew it was a ‘blind’ contribution, I have no idea what the shapes are we are looking for, let alone their function to discriminate when to let an object be what it is and not try to add more to it. We users are in the dark and I don’t mind that, let the MIT team figure out the accuracy problem. Perhaps we could circle questionable areas and just move on with the game. Later on, when examining the full cell as a graphic, the flagged cubes could lead the Eyewire quality assurance to look at the areas where users had the most problems and determine if the group created a ‘false positive’ connection. I would certainly enjoy a section in the WIKI that shows the results of what we have done, an image of each feature of the cell like the bulbous parts and the semicircle parts and the finger ends and the disk ends and variations in width of the ‘wires’ and examples of connections. I would go to those pictures to see what 3D object I am working on and how it is supposed to look. The current WIKI is too dense with text and the images are too small and not ‘real’ to be usable. A WIKI page as simple as the instructions, very minimalist, could be very instructive to someone like me who is hopelessly ignorant of biology but willing to learn something new every day. I think each person in this game wants to do a good job and make the correct links through coloring images, perhaps the next step is to go from ‘blind’ help to a ‘self help’ page of visual examples of what we are looking for.
Yes, self-help is important, but we know they are already working on this. Although many neuroscientists (of course, with varying degrees of experience) are tracing and are not part of the MIT team. These people know what they are doing and I don’t see any reason why their knowledge should not be more easily distributed.
Great points everyone. Disseminating knowledge is one of the big things that we want to work on in the near future. We would still like to keep things simple and approachable for new players, but we also want to make available the vast wealth of knowledge about the subject and the game itself which is contained in research articles, the brains of the staff itself, and dedicated users like you!
I think the first place where we will start sprucing up these attempts is through the wiki. As you point out, it’s very dense and not very approachable. We are looking for volunteers to help us clean up the wiki, and anyone with experience with editing Wikipedia or similar would be very appreciated.
As always, feedback appreciated!
Suggestions: provide access to well done cubes of different sorts of structures so that non-neuroscientists can learn what the different structures look like. I like the wiki links to pages with an image or two of the different types of cells, but I'm looking for many examples at the same scale as we work of the different parts of each one.
Thanks rafe, that’s a great idea. One of the things that we’ve discussed in the past is being able to embed a cube in another page, sort of like you can do with a youtube video. I think this would be a great way to do what you are describing, and would let people share the cool stuff that they do with their friends. Unfortunately, we’re a little crunched for developer resources at the moment, so this is a ways down the todo list. Hopefully we’ll be able to get to it at some point.