Worm Watch Lab Talk

Sooo... How far are we from done?

  • geckzilla by geckzilla

    There aren't any statistics listed anywhere. How many clips are there total? How many are done being looked at? Inquiring minds want to know.

    Posted

  • aexbrown by aexbrown scientist

    We have a bit over 10 000 15 minute videos of the worms, so once they're cut into 30 second clips, there should be around 300 000 of them! Thanks for your help so far!

    Posted

  • plmodel by plmodel

    i agree, it would be a nice touch to be able to "report" a bit more, and see more; even if not vital to your outcome, it'd satisfy a lot of curiosity, for example "x videos watched in the last hour" , "x eggs laid in past day" or additional info like "worm speed checker", with options for "normal, slow or fast, non moving; i think it'd help hold people's interest and get a lot more people on? 😃

    Posted

  • acather96 by acather96

    bump - please could you add a percentage counter to the front page, like Notes from Nature so we can actually see how many have been done and how many are left to do? This would be a very good motivator for what is (unfortunately) a very mundane activity.

    Posted

  • JJBehr by JJBehr

    I agree with the previous two posts. A percentage counter would be great. I know you all are busy but it would also be nice if you could post something weekly. Could be status updates, fun facts about the worms, or something about your research project. Anything! A short sentence or two will greatly help in keeping the interest level up.

    Posted

  • ECarda95 by ECarda95

    A tracker of some sort would be nice, certainly to see how far we've come, if not how much is left to be done.

    Posted

  • chrisotahal by chrisotahal

    yes, feedback on progress would be great ... 3 months without a word is not very motivating ...

    Posted

  • Vergo by Vergo

    guess your up to 4 months with no word??

    Posted

  • aexbrown by aexbrown scientist

    Hi everyone,

    Please accept my sincere apologies for being out of touch for so long!

    I moved and started a new job around the time I went incommunicado. I'm still with the Medical Research Council (but now at the Clinical Sciences Centre in London) and I'm still excited about the data you've all been collecting. I'll do my best to be more responsive now.

    In terms of progress, there have been a little over 115 000 classifications so far! I'm going to have a preliminary look at the data with some people from Zooniverse, hopefully next week, and I'll report back. I'll ask about the possibility of including some kind of counter on the site, but at the very least I'll include a regular update on the blog ( http://blog.wormwatchlab.org/ ). Speaking of which, I've written some posts on worm sex, death, and aging which should appear in the coming weeks.

    Andre

    Posted

  • JJBehr by JJBehr

    Good luck with your new job. Look forward to reading your posts about worms.

    Posted

  • norbis by norbis in response to aexbrown's comment.

    Hello,
    Any updates? Unfortunately looking at worms, isn't as popular as looking at fluffy bunnies, so maybe some word of encouragement might help? Is our data still of interest? Does it look valid with all the anonymous marking 300+ eggs per video?

    Posted

  • aexbrown by aexbrown scientist

    We're now up to 148 000 videos classified (this includes the same video being viewed multiple times, which is necessary to have confidence in the results), which I think is excellent progress. I'll put in another request for the data from the Zooniverse people so we can have a look to see what the actual quality of the classifications is.

    The data is definitely still of interest! Don't worry about people making obviously bad assignments, like 300 eggs per video. They're only wasting their own time and these are easy to filter out when we're doing subsequent analysis.

    Thanks for sticking with it!

    Posted

  • chrisotahal by chrisotahal

    Any updates on how far along we are on this project - there has been no update for over a year! There has been no blog entry for over four months either ...

    Posted

  • aexbrown by aexbrown scientist

    I know, sorry! Things have actually been picking up quite a lot recently and we're now up to 255,000 classifications. 22% of the current batch of videos complete!

    Posted

  • chrisotahal by chrisotahal

    Thanks 😃

    Posted

  • DZM by DZM admin

    Thank you so much for the update, @aexbrown !! That's great to know!

    Hopefully stuff will keep picking up. Always good to see you around here!

    Posted

  • Quia by Quia moderator

    Speaking of progress, I'm curious about the number of views required for each video to be considered 'done.' Is it the same number for all videos, or is there some filtering out of the obviously eggless videos after a few people have classified them?

    Posted

  • JJBehr by JJBehr

    I have the same question as Quia. Sorry, I haven't been around for a while. Before, the number of video count would increment after watching a video then hitting the Next Worm button. Now, I don't see the count updating.

    Posted

  • Quia by Quia moderator

    Where don't you see the count updating? You have to refresh your profile to see the count update, this is normal as far as I know, and everything's working okay over here.

    Posted

  • aexbrown by aexbrown scientist

    There are two ways of deciding a video is done. Based on a preliminary analysis of videos so far, if 6 users say 'no egg', then there's almost certainly no egg. We retire those videos at that point. For videos where there is at least one egg, we get more people to classify it because people don't always agree on how many eggs there were or when they were laid. I believe that number is set to 20. As we get more data we will do some more analysis and may update those thresholds to make things more efficient.

    Posted

  • DZM by DZM admin in response to aexbrown's comment.

    Thanks for the info, @aexbrown !

    By the way numbers have been up quite a bit in December and January. It's good to see people over at this project! It's definitely one of my favorites. 😉

    Posted

  • Quia by Quia moderator in response to aexbrown's comment.

    Thank you @aexbrown! I have noticed that the false positive rate is much higher than the false negative, all the videos I've seen that had eggs laid in them were either previously unwatched, or had another person's marking at the egg time. Meanwhile there's so many videos where someone's marked a video with no new eggs in sight.

    (Of course not 20 minutes later I find a clip with an egg laying that previous watchers missed, making me eat my words about false negatives.)

    Posted

  • JJBehr by JJBehr

    Thanks Quia. Guess I have to keep updating my profile. Was worried that the watched videos were not contributing to this research.

    Posted

  • DZM by DZM admin in response to JJBehr's comment.

    They are definitely contributing to the research! 😃

    Posted