{"id":3068,"date":"2008-10-21T10:32:13","date_gmt":"2008-10-21T10:32:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/10\/21\/cheaper-than-graduate-students\/"},"modified":"2008-10-21T10:32:13","modified_gmt":"2008-10-21T10:32:13","slug":"cheaper-than-graduate-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/10\/21\/cheaper-than-graduate-students\/","title":{"rendered":"Cheaper Than Graduate Students"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lots of people talk about “Science 2.0” and “crowdsourcing” and the like. EurekAlert provides a story about taking it to the next level<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Nalini Nadkarni of Evergreen State College currently advises a team of researchers who sport shaved heads, tattooed biceps and prison-issued garb rather than the lab coats and khakis typically worn by researchers. Why is Nadkarni’s team composed of such apparently iconoclastic researchers? Because all of her researchers are inmates at Cedar Creek Corrections Center, a medium security prison in Littlerock, Washington.<\/p>\n

With partial funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Nadkarni has guided her unlikely but productive team of researchers since 2004, as they conduct experiments to identify the best ways to cultivate slow-growing mosses. Nadkarni’s so-called Moss-in-Prisons project is designed to help ecologists replace large quantities of ecologically important mosses that are regularly illegally stripped from Pacific Northwest forests by horticulturalists.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I guess this would be… “gang-sourcing?”<\/p>\n

Kidding aside, I think this is a great idea.You can get more details from Nadkarni’s website<\/a>, and Evergreen’s Research Ambassadors page<\/a>. We’ve got millions of people in prison, many of them for silly reasons, and any program that gives them something to do to better themselves and provide benefit to larger society is a Good Thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lots of people talk about “Science 2.0” and “crowdsourcing” and the like. EurekAlert provides a story about taking it to the next level: Nalini Nadkarni of Evergreen State College currently advises a team of researchers who sport shaved heads, tattooed biceps and prison-issued garb rather than the lab coats and khakis typically worn by researchers.… Continue reading Cheaper Than Graduate Students<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,48,72,11,75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-environment","category-life_science","category-science","category-society","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3068\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}