Scientific American is collaborating with marine scientists on a project to crowd-source analysis of whale songs and calls. Having gathered thousands of sound files from many species of whales, scientists now need to classify each call and song to get an understanding of each specie's repertoire. Once the calls and songs are sorted and classified, scientists can pursue interesting questions like, is a whale's song repertoire related to its intelligence? To classify the vocalizations, scientists are asking the public for help. On whale.fm, anyone (no expertise required) can sift through some spectrograms and embedded sound files, and match them to a template. It's easy, fun and cool. Something that would take one person months or years to do, can now by accomplished much faster by the public in a fun format.
Some previous efforts in scientific crowd-sourcing like FoldIt, a game in which people fold proteins based on simple rules (computers can't do this), or the search for new galaxies by amateur astronomers from images taken by the Hubble telescope. Perhaps this type of effort could help the Connectome efforts to map out the brain down to each synapse using electron microscopy, where every neurite in a cross-sectional image must be strung to itself in adjacent images. Tracing axons across thousands of EM images could actually make a fun and productive game.