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Over 6,000 Volunteers Celebrated Earth Day by Cleaning Up San Diego from Creek to Bay

This past weekend, we celebrated Earth Day by hosting our 16th Annual Creek to Bay Cleanup where we empowered an estimated 6,000 volunteers to give back at 113 cleanup sites around San Diego County! Volunteers including residents, corporate groups, and civic organizations transformed their appreciation for San Diego’s environment into action for Mother Earth by putting in the time and effort to give back in their local communities. During this three-hour cleanup, volunteers enhanced the overall health and beauty of San Diego’s natural environment by removing more than 175,000 pounds of trash and debris from San Diego County.

Volunteers joined site captain, Brittany Novick (Miss Scuba International), to help celebrate her birthday and Earth Day by protecting the environment at the Mission Beach Belmont Park cleanup site!
Among the debris, there were several notable odd items collected during the cleanup including: 19 shoes at one site, a giant teddy bear, and a bathrobe.

Volunteers also restored the local environment through beautification projects such as painting park structures, planting native plants and trees, mulching, and weeding. Thanks to thousands of volunteers, 113 parks, beaches and community spaces received special care to keep the area healthy and beautiful for the community.

Painting was just one of many beautification projects that volunteers could take part in on top of litter removal at Creek to Bay!

Creek to Bay was an opportunity for the community to go green in more ways than one. With a push toward zero waste practices, we encouraged all youth and adult volunteers to be more sustainable by choosing to bring at least one reusable item for the cleanup like a water bottle, work bucket, or gloves. Many stepped up to the challenge! Volunteers could showcase their zero waste commitments in the Sony Photo Contest with the 2018 theme of “Rocking Reusables” or by entering the Bling Your Bucket Contest. Both contests offer prizes to the winners to celebrate their sustainability and creativity.

Gabriel used recycled items to decorate his bucket for the Bling Your Bucket Contest helping cut back on the waste created at the cleanup!

Creek to Bay also received attention from several of San Diego’s elected officials who visited cleanup sites in their respective districts including:

  • San Diego City Councilmembers Barbara Bry, Myrtle Cole, Mark Kersey, David Alvarez, and Georgette Gomez
  • Assemblymembers Todd Gloria and Shirley Weber
Councilmember Bry helps kick off the Creek to Bay at the Scripps Pier site!

The entire I Love A Clean San Diego team could not be more thrilled and inspired by the results from the Creek to Bay Cleanup. Joining the team this year as Community Events Coordinator, Nik Kennedy reflected on his first Creek to Bay Cleanup experience:

This was my first year planning Creek to Bay, and after months of preparing it was amazing to be a part of the event! From recruiting volunteers to organizing activities, I was excited to see so many neighborhood volunteers come out and beautify Azalea Park and all of San Diego County! This was such an undertaking, and it was incredible to watch all of our work pay off for a cleaner environment.

Major thanks go out to all of our sponsors for the Creek to Bay Cleanup!

Creek to Bay would not be possible without the generous support of our sponsors and partners! Thank you all for your commitment to a clean, green, and beautiful San Diego!

Thank you to all of our Creek to Bay sponsors for investing in a cleaner San Diego!

City of San Diego, Think Blue
Wells Fargo
CBS 8/CW San Diego
Republic Services
EDCO
Walmart
Cox Communications
County of San Diego
County of San Diego Watershed Protection Program
Project Clean Water
Anheuser Busch
City of San Marcos
General Dynamics/ NASSCO
Dart Container
Sony
Bank of America
Dudek
Teledyne Instruments, Inc
San Diego Regional Airport Authority
City of La Mesa
Port of San Diego
City of Imperial Beach
City of Chula Vista
Michael Baker International
U.S. Bank
BAE Shipyard
Brown and Caldwell
Mitchell Financial
City of Escondido (Utilities Department)
City of Escondido (Recycling Division)
Dog Beach Dog Wash
Power Crunch

From the entire ILACSD team, THANK YOU to every volunteer, partner, sponsor, and community member who made Creek to Bay such an incredible success! We couldn’t do it without you!

The post Over 6,000 Volunteers Celebrated Earth Day by Cleaning Up San Diego from Creek to Bay appeared first on I Love A Clean San Diego.

Over 6,000 Volunteers Celebrated Earth Day by Cleaning Up San Diego from Creek to Bay

This past weekend, we celebrated Earth Day by hosting our 16th Annual Creek to Bay Cleanup where we empowered an estimated 6,000 volunteers to give back at 113 cleanup sites around San Diego County! Volunteers including residents, corporate groups, and civic organizations transformed their appreciation for San Diego’s environment into action for Mother Earth by putting in the time and effort to give back in their local communities. During this three-hour cleanup, volunteers enhanced the overall health and beauty of San Diego’s natural environment by removing more than 175,000 pounds of trash and debris from San Diego County.

Volunteers joined site captain, Brittany Novick (Miss Scuba International), to help celebrate her birthday and Earth Day by protecting the environment at the Mission Beach Belmont Park cleanup site!
Among the debris, there were several notable odd items collected during the cleanup including: 19 shoes at one site, a giant teddy bear, and a bathrobe.

Volunteers also restored the local environment through beautification projects such as painting park structures, planting native plants and trees, mulching, and weeding. Thanks to thousands of volunteers, 113 parks, beaches and community spaces received special care to keep the area healthy and beautiful for the community.

Painting was just one of many beautification projects that volunteers could take part in on top of litter removal at Creek to Bay!

Creek to Bay was an opportunity for the community to go green in more ways than one. With a push toward zero waste practices, we encouraged all youth and adult volunteers to be more sustainable by choosing to bring at least one reusable item for the cleanup like a water bottle, work bucket, or gloves. Many stepped up to the challenge! Volunteers could showcase their zero waste commitments in the Sony Photo Contest with the 2018 theme of “Rocking Reusables” or by entering the Bling Your Bucket Contest. Both contests offer prizes to the winners to celebrate their sustainability and creativity.

Gabriel used recycled items to decorate his bucket for the Bling Your Bucket Contest helping cut back on the waste created at the cleanup!

Creek to Bay also received attention from several of San Diego’s elected officials who visited cleanup sites in their respective districts including:

  • San Diego City Councilmembers Barbara Bry, Myrtle Cole, Mark Kersey, David Alvarez, and Georgette Gomez
  • Assemblymembers Todd Gloria and Shirley Weber
Councilmember Bry helps kick off the Creek to Bay at the Scripps Pier site!

The entire I Love A Clean San Diego team could not be more thrilled and inspired by the results from the Creek to Bay Cleanup. Joining the team this year as Community Events Coordinator, Nik Kennedy reflected on his first Creek to Bay Cleanup experience:

This was my first year planning Creek to Bay, and after months of preparing it was amazing to be a part of the event! From recruiting volunteers to organizing activities, I was excited to see so many neighborhood volunteers come out and beautify Azalea Park and all of San Diego County! This was such an undertaking, and it was incredible to watch all of our work pay off for a cleaner environment.

Major thanks go out to all of our sponsors for the Creek to Bay Cleanup!

Creek to Bay would not be possible without the generous support of our sponsors and partners! Thank you all for your commitment to a clean, green, and beautiful San Diego!

Thank you to all of our Creek to Bay sponsors for investing in a cleaner San Diego!

City of San Diego, Think Blue
Wells Fargo
CBS 8/CW San Diego
Republic Services
EDCO
Walmart
Cox Communications
County of San Diego
County of San Diego Watershed Protection Program
Project Clean Water
Anheuser Busch
City of San Marcos
General Dynamics/ NASSCO
Dart Container
Sony
Bank of America
Dudek
Teledyne Instruments, Inc
San Diego Regional Airport Authority
City of La Mesa
Port of San Diego
City of Imperial Beach
City of Chula Vista
Michael Baker International
U.S. Bank
BAE Shipyard
Brown and Caldwell
Mitchell Financial
City of Escondido (Utilities Department)
City of Escondido (Recycling Division)
Dog Beach Dog Wash
Power Crunch

From the entire ILACSD team, THANK YOU to every volunteer, partner, sponsor, and community member who made Creek to Bay such an incredible success! We couldn’t do it without you!

April 30th potluck

Our April 30th, 2018 meeting is a potluck dinner. The dinner starts at 7 PM in Room 101, Casa Del Prado in Balboa Park. Please bring a cooked or cold dish and your own beverage. (Note: there will be no kitchen access) The club will provide plates, cups, napkins, and utensils, but feel free to bring your own. If your dish contains wild mushrooms, please provide identification of the type contained in your dish.
Volunteers are needed for setting up and decorating the room. Set-up will begin around 6:30pm. We need help arranging tables and chairs, placing tablecloths, and decorating. Feel free to bring greenery or decorations.

Happy Citizen Science Day Hero Badge Hunting!

Citizen Science Day was April 14th this year, and Mark2Cure partnered with the San Diego Public Library to host a local Citizen Science Expo. Of course, many of our wonderful contributors are not in San Diego and could not attend the event. For those of you who wish to get in on the Citizen Science Day excitement, we've joined the EyesOnAlz Citizen Science Day Hero challenge.

The challenge will run until 9am ET, April 21st and anyone interested in the challenge will have the opportunity to earn digital badges for just trying out (ie- registering or logging into) different citizen science projects. As Mark2Curators, you only need to log into your Mark2Cure account to earn a badge.

Learn more about this fun challenge at https://blog.eyesonalz.com/citsciday-hero/.

Citizen Science Day 2018 is just around the corner!

San Diego Citizen Science Day Expo

Citizen Science Day is on April 14th, this year and many citizen science organizations (including yours truly) are hosting citizen science events. Here in San Diego, we've teamed up with the San Diego Public Library and the Wet Lab group to put on the 3rd annual San Diego Citizen Science Day Expo. There are a lot of exciting new entrants into the San Diego citizen science scene, and we hope you will join us in learning about them at the expo. If you're in San Diego, please join us! The details are as follows:

Who: Anyone who wants to do science
What: San Diego Citizen Science Day Expo
When: Saturday, April 14, 2018. 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Where: North University Community Library (8820 Judicial Dr, San Diego, CA 92122)

Please note that the location has changed from the previous ones due to the limited availability of parking spots at the La Jolla Library. The North University Community Library has plentiful free parking, so please visit come if you're in the area! For the most up-to-date information about this event, visit SDCitSci.net.

If you're not in San Diego, there is probably an exciting Citizen Science Day event happening near you! To find a Citizen Science Day Event near you, visit Scistarter.com.

San Diego March for Science

The March for Science is also happening on April 14th in San Diego. It starts at the Waterfront park at 10:00am and ends at 1:00pm (right before our event!). If you want to show your love for science consider joining the march! If you want to DO science, be sure to join a Citizen Science Day event near you (or contribute to Mark2Cure, of course!).

Current Status of Mark2Cure

Development status and workarounds

Unfortunately, Mark2Cure no longer has a full time developer working on the project, so a lot of the issues and bugs that have been reported probably will not be fixed for a long, long time. We are very sorry for the frustration our system has caused our users and extremely grateful for the patience, graciousness, and encouragement our users have returned to us. Mark2Cure is really made up of a wonderful bunch of individuals, and we are thankful that this project has introduced us to you. Fortunately, many of you really put the science in the term citizen science and have systematically found ways to contribute productively in spite of all the issues in our system. You are all too amazing!

NER module issues: The most frustrating one has been the inability to highlight certain words, and the random highlighting/un-highlighting of words when users try to mark something. This has been reported by many users (many, many thanks to those of you who took the time to report this issue). Fortunately, one of your fellow volunpeers has found a workaround that appears to be quite robust. To get around a lot of these highlighting issues, AJ_Eckhart highlights the entire paragraph to remove the preannotations. These preannotations seem to be an important factor in this problem, and he has tested this workaround for the 'cannot-highlight-a-specific-term' bug, the 'highlighting-a-term-un-highlights-something-else', and the 'highlighting-a-term-highlights' something else' bugs.

RE module issues: A number of you have kindly taken the time to report issues with the RE module--the most common issue is the seemingly random inability to throw out an annotation. For this issue, two workarounds have been reported by our users. LadySteph has found that returning to the dashboard and then returning to the task will enable you to submit the response you wish (eg- throw out an annotation) and TAdams has reported that many of you have gravitated towards submitting 'Cannot be determined' in lieu of throwing out an annotation. We will take both workarounds into consideration when we analyze the data, so thank you all very much for contributing in spite of all these issues!

Data analysis and research status

Speaking of analyzing the data--we might not yet have enough abstracts annotated in order to generate ground-breaking, new hypotheses on NGLY1 deficiency, but we have enough for some initial analyses on the application of citizen science towards information extraction. We are working towards more scientific publications and look forward to sharing the results of your work and crediting you for your help. Note that many journal submission systems are not made to account for group names or a huge volume of names in the authorship; hence, we will continue to have our Mark2Cure contributors listed on a dedicated page which will be linked in the paper. As with our first paper, this will be an opt-in process because we respect your right to privacy. More details on opting-in will be sent via our mailing list.

April 2nd at 6:30pm: “Mushrooms and Fungi of Southern California and Northern Baja”

For the Monday April 2nd meeting our speaker will be Bonni Thoresen, speaking on “Mushrooms and Fungi of Southern California and Northern Baja”.

The meeting will start at 6:30 PM in Room 101, Casa Del Prado in Balboa Park. We will take Bonni to dinner before the meeting around 5:00 at the Blue Water Seafood Grill. Come along to meet Bonni over dinner.

Further details to follow.

CitSciMedBlitz Recap and Results

Hopefully, you'll all forgive us for the delay in announcing the results of #CitSciMedBlitz. Our partners at EyesOnAlz, Cochrane crowd, and ourselves were a little tired after the blitz and we gave ourselves a short break. Since the blitz, the EyesOnAlz team has generated the #CitSciMedBlitz digital badge for participants of all three challenges and has been working on creating the trophies; meanwhile, the Cochrane crowd team has contacted the overall #CitSciMedBlitz event winners.

look alive now! We're all up and active now and looking forward to sharing a recap and the results of #CitSciMedBlitz with you.

First, a Recap

On February 21st, CitSciMedBlitz was kicked off with a webinar to introduce the three platforms that would be participating in CitSciMedBlitz
You can watch the webinar here

The first challenge, the StallCatchers challenge, was launched on February 26th at 7am PST. Within minutes of the launch, StallCatchers were hammering away at StallCatchers, including Cochrane Crowd's Anna.
first 10 min

Anna managed to get on the leaderboard but wasn't able to stay on there for very long because the competition was just too tough. At least she placed, though-- I never even made it!

By the end of the challenge, StallCatchers analyzed a whopping 18,348 real videos--the equivalent of two weeks worth of laboratory analysis!
first 10 min

While the EyesOnAlz team was still cooling off from their intense challenge, we were gearing up for the Mark2Cure arm--and NOT without a huge set of worries.
i am worried

You can read more about the hiccups and snafu's that happened during the Mark2Cure 24hr challenge here. By the end of the challenge, CitSciMedBlitzers managed to submit ~300 doc annotations, and ~3000 relationship annotations--an impressive feat considering the increase in task difficulty, and the bugs and other technical issues that made the challenge--well, even more challenging!

While we were busy analyzing the results of our challenge, Cochrane crowd was preparing the last challenge of CitSciMedBlitz. This challenge started off right with 50 assessments within the first 2 minutes, and over 5000 in just the first 4 hours! This arm of the challenge would determine which of the top contenders from the previous challenges would win the trophy so the competition was intense! By the end of this challenge, over 46,000 classifications would be made--allowing our teams to determine the overall winner of #CitSciMedBlitz.

And now...the results of CitSciMedBlitz...

Of course, the biggest winner of the challenge goes to...

...biomedical and health evidence research! Everyone who has contributed (in the past) and continues to contributes to these efforts deserve a round of applause for being generous enough to donate their time towards helping with disease and health research.

Thank you for being amazing

The winner of the CitSciMedBlitz trophy is Michael Landau! Note, it was previously stated that Michael was also the top contributor to the EyesOnAlz challenge of CitSciMedBlitz. This is wrong.

Mike Capraro was the top contributor across all three measures of the EyesOnAlz challenge and the overall top contributor of that challenge for CitSciMedBlitz.

Editor's note #2: If you'd like to read more about CitSciMedBlitz from the EyesOnAlz team, check out their latest recap post here!

The top contributor to the Mark2Cure arm of CitSciMedBlitz was Kien Pong Yap, while the top contributor to the Cochrane Crowd arm of CitSciMedBlitz was Nikolaos. The top contributors to each platform will be receiving a platform-specific trophy.

Each platform will be awarding additional prizes to some of their top contributors and the notifications should be arriving via email (if they haven't already).

Editor's note #3, the recap from the Cochrane Crowd side of things is now available

Now that all the excitement of CitSciMedBlitz is over, I'd like to thank ALL the citizen scientists who contribute to projects like ours and make these platforms great. In citizen science, the people make the platform. And, as you can see--the people contributing to these platforms, do so with:

a collaborative spirit,
sharing is caring

humor,
guilt to the rescue

humility,
struggled and won

good spirit,
positive attitude for the win

and grace,
positive attitude for the win

Thank you all! Much respect for the work that you've done and the character you've shown!

mad respects

Note this post was updated on 2018.03.12 to correct an error and on 2018.03.19 to add a link

CitSciMedBlitz Update

The results for Mark2Cure's arm of the CitSciBlitz are now available! Kien Pong Yap took the top spot in this challenge (see ranking at bottom of post).

What's exciting is that several of these names were also in the top 10 for the StallCatchers challenge so it'll be a tough competition in the Cochrane challenge to see who actually wins the CitSciMedBlitz triple challenge trophy.

Here are some random tidbits about the Mark2Cure arm of the CitSciMedBlitz triple challenge:

  • The NER module was broken for the first few hours of the challenge, and we received emails and phone calls about it within the first hour of the challenge. THANK YOU for bringing it to our attention and providing so detailed information about the bugs. Max was able to solve it while on the airplane ride to San Diego for the Future of Genomic Medicine Conference.

  • In spite of the NER module issues (a HUGE thanks to TAdams, JudyE, AJEckhart, and Itwontalwaysbelikethis for helping us troubleshoot), users doing this task still managed to climb the ranks even with the delayed start.

  • A Mark2Curator created an introductory video about the relationship extraction task for the event while we were running around trying to ensure that everything was in place for the M2C challenge. THANK YOU for doing that, TAdams!

  • One of the Mark2Curators joined the challenge as a personal challenge to raise awareness for dystonia on Rare Disease Day. Dystonia = loss of muscle control. There are many types, but you can imagine just how much more challenging that makes things! Read about her efforts here. And if you're curious how well she did--she made it to the top 5!

  • I was worried about following StallCatchers because their task is so visually appealing while ours is text based and quite difficult. Indeed we got questions and suggestions-a-plenty about Mark2Cure on the StallCatchers forum, but there are plenty of very tenacious citizen scientists in stall catchers and they managed to climb pretty high in the ranks.

  • The team behind StallCatchers is AMAZING!!!! Very generous with both support and humor! No wonder the StallCatchers are so ardent!

If you think it's all over--think again! The Cochrane crowd of the challenge has just started, and CitSciMedBlitzers who participate in all THREE challenges will get a digital badge on their StallCatchers profile. It's an awesome badge!

Now go take the cochrane challenge!

citscimedblitz mark2cure rankings

CitSciMed Blitz has started!

It's on! The CitSciMedblitz week of challenges have started!

If you missed the webinar detailing the three biomedical/health citizen science research projects, it is available for viewing on youtube.
CitSciMedblitz webinar

You are welcome to participate in as many or as few of the challenges as you'd like, but a trophy will be awarded to the highest ranking participant across all THREE challenges. Read more about CitSciMedblitz from this post at citscibio.org

With regards to the challenges, up first (and going on now!) is the EyesOnAlz 24hr Catchathon. EyesOnAlz is an Alzheimer disease-focused citizen science project investigating stalled blood in brain images. It has a lot of cool images/videos in need of review by citizen scientists and a lot of fun features. The challenge has only just started and will run to 7am PST (3pm GMT) tomorrow (Feb. 28th) so get in on it ASAP!

The Mark2Cure challenge will start at 7am PST (3pm GMT) on Wednesday, February 28th. It is a doubly-special day because the 28th is Rare Disease Day and we have had an incredibly inspirational weekend at the Sanford Burnham Presby Rare Disease Day Symposium. We look forward to sharing rare disease stories from Mark2Curators and bringing awareness about these diseases as we tackle the literature around NGLY1 during this 24hr challenge.

Speaking of literature, our old friends at Cochrane Crowd are back with a lot of new features which you can explore during the Cochrane Screening Challenge. This challenge starts at 7am PST (3pm GMT) on Friday, March 2nd and runs for 24hrs.