MadSci Network
Encyclopedia
The Madsci Network is a website
Website
A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...

 known primarily for its Ask-A-Scientist forum
Internet forum
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...

 where users can ask questions to a panel of volunteer scientist
Scientist
A scientist in a broad sense is one engaging in a systematic activity to acquire knowledge. In a more restricted sense, a scientist is an individual who uses the scientific method. The person may be an expert in one or more areas of science. This article focuses on the more restricted use of the word...

s. Each question, submitted via a Web interface, is reviewed by a volunteer moderator. If the question is intelligible, not a homework assignment, and has not been answered previously, it may be answered directly by the moderator, or forwarded to one of hundreds of volunteers---teachers, university faculty and graduate students, engineers, medical doctors, and other professionals. The moderators match each question to a volunteer's area of expertise. After answering the question, the volunteer sends it back to the moderators who then review the answer prior to posting it on the web site. The moderator may ask the scientist to edit the answer or provide references for information. Thereafter, the majority of questions and answer are made publicly available in the extensive archives, which date back to 1996.

The Madsci Network Research site provides datasets, software, and details of The Madsci Network's active areas of research into Social Computing, Science Education, eLearning, Machine Learning, and Social Collaboration.

The Madsci Network also hosts the Edible and Inedible Experiments Archive, a unique collection of easy science demos, and a guided tour of data from the Visible Human Project
Visible Human Project
The Visible Human Project is an effort to create a detailed data set of cross-sectional photographs of the human body, in order to facilitate anatomy visualization applications. A male and a female cadaver were cut into thin slices which were then photographed and digitized. The project is run by...

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The Madsci Network gets approximately 600,000 unique visitors and roughly 3 million page views per month . It is a non-profit ask-a-scientist site with over 700 scientists distributed globally and has been cited in academic publications, web awards, sites/portals like yahoo.com, etc. . The principals are Dr. Lynn Bry and Dr. Ricky J Sethi
Ricky J Sethi
Ricky J. Sethi is a Director of The Madsci Network and has been chosen as a Computing Innovation Fellow, a highly prestigious award given by the CCC and the CRA...

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The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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