What are the benefits of studying actuarial science?

Aside from benefits to science, what good comes out of citizen science?

• Usually the benefits of citizen science are enumerated in terms of the benefits to science (data collection, simple processing, funding, etc). Are there any good articles or papers concerned with the benefits to citizenry? Those might include increased awareness of scientific methods and projects, and possibly increased rationality in general.

• Answer:

  There are plenty of benefits to the citizens, not just the scientists. To begin with, people participating in citizen science learn about science. They learn what it's like to do science, what sorts of questions scientists want, and where the answers come from. For example, volunteer bird watchers might learn a lot more about their favorite subject, and rather than just admire the birds in their area, and perhaps identify them and check them off a list, they can contribute to tracking their populations and their motions. That, in turn, might lead to a more engaged group of bird watchers. When the time comes to speak out about a proposal which might protect or destroy bird habitats, those citizen scientists can certainly have a voice, and claim an active role in helping to identify the birds and the habitats. Public Lab ( http://publiclab.org/ ) is distributing open-source tools to measure basics of air and water quality, and to take aerial photos of regions using inexpensive cameras mounted on kites and balloons. Here again, the outcome is not just a pile of data in a paper somewhere. It is rather an engaged citizenry helping to characterize the environment and ecosystems in which they live. If you don't think that's important or valuable, consider that one of the regions they're working to map is the coastline affected by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.  In a case like that, citizen science could go a long way toward giving citizens a voice, rather than forcing them to rely on the news reports about findings by courts and people who don't live on the affected coastline. Citizen science can also help get past "not invented here" mentality, or the idea that a scientific result is simply the pronouncement of some distant, disconnected group of outsiders. I am forgetting where I read it, or what the population in question was, but aid workers went into an impoverished, rural community to try to improve upon the malnutrition that was prevalent there. The community grew and ate mostly rice, but there were edible greens that grew wild. The trouble was, the wild greens were not popular.  Eating them was considered a sign of poverty or desperation, that sort of thing. Rather than make a decree, the aid workers equipped the mothers with simple scales and tape measures, and got everyone involved in weighing and measuring the children. They spotted a clear trend: the children who ate greens grew taller and weighed more than those who didn't.  As you might imagine, attitudes and behaviors around the eating of these greens changed dramatically.