Eglė here, reporting straight from the Sunrise Valley in Vilnius, Lithuania, where I had the pleasure to meet one of local catchers here in Vilnius - Asta (Astrocitija) !

We got in touch with Asta during the #RedeemLoot competition in Stall Catchers - she was the very first participant to submit her loot, and therefore got a special bonus from us - Stall Catchers & EyesOnALZ laptop stickers, which I delivered during our meeting .. 😄

Asta has found out about Stall Catchers from our abstract in the recent conference here in Vilnius - Open Readings 2017. Here I presented our poster From Stardust to Blood Stalls: How Interdisciplinary Citizen Science is Changing the Way We Do Research (see it here).

Asta is a researcher here, in the Genetics department of the Joint Life Science Centre of Vilnius University.

The Sunrise Valley in Vilnius - this is where the Life Sciences, Physics, Communication, Technology departments of Vilnius University and many other great things reside!

Asta said she has been drawn into the game & really likes it!! Woohoo!!

My best way to relax is to catch some very tricky stalls - that's why I ADORE STALL CATCHERS so much 👍 said Asta when she first got in touch!

Most importantly, Asta has agreed to lead the team in Vilnius during the upcoming #Catchathon !!! Yay! I hope they win 😛 (not biased at all...)

Awesome to meet catchers in person! ❤ Best from sunny Lithuania..!

If you have already signed up to host a local meet-up in your city for the upcoming catchathon, we're here to bring you all the information that you will need to plan & run it!

Not signed up yet? Sign up NOW!

What's a "catchathon"? All the answers in this post.

You can always email us at info@eyesonalz.com if you have any additional questions or suggestions!

Date: July 22
Start: 16:00 UTC (check local time)
Finish: 18:00 UTC (2 hours)

Planning checklist

• Sign up here (if you haven't yet) . You will need to come up with a name for your team!

• Register your team on Stall Catchers. Here's the instructions. Tip: grab the invite link from your team page to share with everyone you'd like to invite.

• Book the venue (depending on expected number of people). You could try a local pub, library, hackerspace or similar

• Invite all your friends, family & neighbors! The more the merrier! Consider setting up a registration form on Eventbrite (or similar) to better keep track of registered participants & estimate the turn-out (relevant for the pizza budget - see below!)

• Order pizza! (Or a different snack of choice.) Send us your estimated pizza budget ahead of the event & we will cover the costs!

If you use social media:

• Create an event on Facebook & invite your friends (you can make EyesOnALZ co-organizer if you wish!)

Alternatively:

• Create an event on Meetup.com (you could use an existing group you're part of, or create one! E.g. "Citizen Science NYC")

• Consider reaching out to existing groups with similar interests in your area, e.g. via Meetup.com

• Start sharing your event on Facebook, Twitter or any other media that you use!

Before the event:

• Remember to email or contact your participants via social media with a reminder, including the address, time & schedule of the event; include links to Stall Catchers & the game tutorial

• Consider translating some of materials (e.g. tutorial subtitles, getting started guide) to your language - contact us if you need help!

Running the meet-up on the day

The catchathon will be a live synchronized event and all sites will be connected via the live hangout hosted by The Crowd & The Cloud. The event will officially begin at 16:00 UTC (check what time that is in your locale here).

Meet-up organizers should follow the schedule below:

15:45 UTC: video conference testing (for Crowd&Cloud coverage)
16:00 UTC: meet & greet catchers
16:15 UTC: introduce Stall Catchers, catchers register and log in
16:30 UTC: Crowd&Cloud coverage begins
16:45 UTC: competition officially starts
17:45 UTC: competition officially ends, winners are announced
18:00 UTC: Crowd&Cloud coverage ends

Step-by-step:

1. Introduce Stall Catchers. You can use these bullet points to help you:

   • Stall Catchers is an online game that allows everyone to contribute to Alzheimer's research
   • Anyone can play Stall Catchers - from kids to their grandparents, no specific knowledge or scientific background is required
   • In Stall Catchers players are helping researchers at Cornell University to analyze Alzheimer's research data - players themselves are not studied
   • By viewing microscope-acquired movies of a live mouse brain, players are helping to find stalls - blocked blood vessels in the brain where blood is not flowing
   • Don’t be afraid to make mistakes! We have methods in place to extract value from all your answers, right or wrong, so there is no way you can mess up the research
   • Every contribution, large or small, helps researchers get closer to understanding the relationship between stalls and Alzheimer's disease. This fundamental understanding could lead to a potential - and first ever - treatment for Alzheimer’s disease
   • But to get to a treatment, many more research questions need to be answered. They cannot be answered fast enough if the researchers work on it alone, so need YOUR help!
   • Stall Catchers is a chance for friends, families, caregivers & people living with Alzheimer's themselves to directly fight the disease that affects them and their loved ones

2. Show intro video (http://tinyurl.com/SC-GetStarted) to everyone at the same time. Answer questions if there are any.

3. Have everyone register and make sure they join your team! If you set up your Stall Catchers team in advance (recommended), share the invite link with the participants to make it easier.

4. Start catching! Remember to keep encouraging the participants, and checking in with them to see if everyone is doing OK.

Email us at info@eyesonalz.com if you need any additional guidance or support!

What is this crazy sounding, never-heard-of event we've been talking about ?!

Catchathon is a catching marathon in Stall Catchers, and we're about to hold the very first one!

What do you need to do if you want to participate?

First - sign up your team here!

Second - host a live meetup in your city on July 22nd, 16:00 UTC! (Check your timezone)

Invite participants, order pizza (it's on us!), meet & start catching ! We will send you all the materials & guidance that you'll need. Here's the step-by-step guide to help!

Who else is participating? We have a goal neither big nor small for the first Stall Catchers catchathon... at least 20 different countries across the globe! 😈

Here is a list of teams already registered. Don't worry if there's a team in your country already - you can run another one in your city anyway!

The event will be streamed & the winners crowned during a LIVE hangout by The Crowd & The Cloud!

P.S. Fun fact! The "catchathon" idea came from the OpenStreetMap community, who commonly hold mapathons (with pizza & other good things!) to fill in the gaps in the World map, for humanitarian, disaster relief & development purposes !! We thank them for the inspiration !! Now off to map the brain!

And we won't stop until Alzheimer's is just a memory. Judy Johanson, Alzheimer's caregiver

Last month we participated in The Longest Day & helped to turn Watertown (MA) purple with a Stall Catchers challenge!

In case you happen to miss that, here's the amazing coverage by The Crowd & The Cloud:

In one day alone, the Watertown community were able to analyze more data than scientists could do alone!

If you haven't heard yet about the upcoming International Stall Catchers #Catchathon, read all about it here!

Want to participate? Sign up here!

Help us reach (or exceed!) our goal of 20 countries!

If your country is already listed, no worries - we can have multiple teams from each country!

Teams:

• C&C Australia (Gold Coast, Australia) | Team
• CitSciOz (Brisbane, Australia) | Event
• Not catching pokemon tonight (Brighton, UK) | Event
• IthacaBasecamp (Ithaca, NY, USA)
• This is our life (Watertown, MA, USA) | Team
• Science Soup (Vilnius, Lithuania) | Event
• Sopaipa (Santiago, Chile) | Team
• UniqueMappersTeam(UMT) (Port Harcourt, Nigeria)
• Kaunas Makerspace (Kaunas, Lithuania) | Event | Team

(...or baklava, falafels, empanadas, whatever!)

As you may know, especially if you are already part of our "Catchers" community, StallCatchers from EyesOnALZ is an online puzzle-game – similar to Foldit, EyeWire, EteRNA, etc. – designed to speed up research related to Alzheimer’s disease. In its startup phase it’s been proven to deliver data as valid as that from lab scientists, and – using crowdsourcing – to do one year’s worth of high quality analysis in one short month!

We are about to get serious about going GLOBAL, and we think Pizza is the answer. Would you like to organize a local Stall Catchers pizza party? If so, keep reading (or sign up HERE right now!) ...

What: Join the first ever “International Catchathon" – organize a local meetup to play an online game that helps speed up Alzheimer's research!

SIGN UP HERE.

When: July 22, 2017 at 16:00 UTC (use this link to find your local time)
Why: Accelerate Alzheimer's treatment research
How: The game is super easy to play (but tough to master). No specific scientific knowledge or skills are needed – just bring a smart phone, tablet (my favorite!), or laptop.
Where: You choose the location of your meetup, and then invite friends, family, neighbors – the more the merrier!

Eglė, our resident blog master, had this crazy idea to conduct a global "Catchathon" – a bunch of synchronized local meetups around the world where people gather to have pizza (or whatever) and play our online StallCatchers game, which accelerates Alzheimer's disease research. And since we LOVE crazy ideas – that's just what we intend to do.

Because I hate to be out-crazied, I decided we need at least 20 countries to participate (multiple teams in each country is ok!). Keeping in mind that this is going to be a synchronized event, please check this time zone calendar to find out when the event would take place in your locale.

Geoff Haines-Stiles, one of the original producers of Carl Sagan’s original Cosmos, the most-watched science documentary series of all time, will be hosting the Catchathon live (via Zoom and Facebook Live) with video links to all the meet-ups around the world. Working with the EyesOnALZ team, he’ll be tracking team progress and reporting results live. At the end of the 2-hour event we will announce the top three teams (gold, silver, and bronze – just like the Olympics). And if you'd like to see the 4-part TV series that brought the team together, please check out crowdandcloud.org, if you haven't yet. Stall Catchers (part of the EyesOnALZ project) is featured in this segment.

To make this work, we NEED YOUR HELP. We need a volunteer in each locale (there can be more than one meetup in the same country!) to organize the meetup. If you’ve experience with OpenStreetMap’s “Mapathons” so much the better.

We will give you everything you need – basic instructions on how to create your online team (you can even create a cool team logo that will show up on your team page!), a meetup checklist, quick instructions to share with your players, and a pizza (or doughnut – depending on your time zone) budget to feed yourself and the catchers!

The first step is to SIGN UP HERE!
Don't wait! We will be collecting our list of teams over the next week or two and sending out more information to help you prepare.

List of current meetups

Come help us make history as we compete as countries but band together as a species to defeat this horrible disease that knows no geographic boundaries.

Exuberantly,
Pietro Michelucci
Founder, EyesOnALZ

On June 17, our dear friends Steve and Judy Johanson (featured in the public television documentary The Crowd and The Cloud) invited us to bring Stall Catchers their #LongestDay block party. Judy, who takes care of her husband, Steve, explained that when you are dealing with Alzheimer's disease, every day is the longest day.

With this idea in minds, we have decided to double Stall Catchers points on Longest Day of the year, which is Wednesday, June 21. This will go from midnight tonight until 8pm U.S. Eastern Time tomorrow (June 21).

Charlene Bemis, of the Mass/NH Alzheimer's Association chapter is going to be running a Stall Catchers event with her staff tomorrow for the #LongestDay. If you want to support their efforts, please feel free to join team "MA/NH Staff to END ALZ" for the day! Or if you are feeling competitive, then crank up the people on your own team for some double points!

At the end of the day we will announce the individual and team overall winners! Happy Catching!

Leaderboard Enhancements!

You might have noticed some subtle changes to the Stall Catchers leaderboard! There are two new things to be aware of:
1) There is now a little green dot next to a user's name if they are currently playing #StallCatchers
2) If someone moves up in the rankings, a little blue arrow shows up next to their score.

We hope you like these features. Whether or not you do, please let us know by either posting to the forum or sending an email to info@eyesonalz.com. We love to hear from our catchers!

-Pietro (filling in for Eglė)

We've been collecting #RedeemLoot entries all this week & we are ready to announce the winners who will receive our very special Stall Catchers mugs!

We separated entries into 4 tiers according to player level in the game:

Most redeemed points, the winners are:

• Levels 1-15 - Kirschre with 95,364 points

• Levels 16-20 - Michael Landau‏ with 531,072 points

• Levels 21-25 - Ababbie with 13,133,294 points

• Levels 26+ - caprarom with record 78,895,105 points !!

Most redeemed movies, the winners are:

• Levels 1-15 - Coloradojed with 95 movies

• Levels 16-20 - justacea with 372 movies

• Levels 21-25 - MaisyMoo92 with 4,354 movies

• Levels 26+ - gcalkins with 21,907 movies !!

Most reactions to #RedeemLoot on social media, the winner is - Tom Adams

Congrats to all winners! We will be reaching out to you separately about delivering your new mugs !

In the meantime...

Stay tuned for future competitions & happy catching!

Finally! The day is almost here... If you're a stall catcher, you will be able to redeem your well deserved points starting Monday!

What's "redeem"?

You might have noticed a curious button on Stall Catchers that has remained but a tease for a while: Redeem. If you've been playing Stall Catchers lately, it probably looks something like this:

That means you have points "lurking" somewhere within the Stall Catchers matrix: points to claim back for the real movies you've annotated!

Real movies are those that rely on the Crowd to be answered (they have never been seen by experts) & that give you a "Maybe!" after your response. These "Maybes" only score you token points, and we certainly know how frustrating that can be!

However, once a movie has accumulated enough responses for us to determine a reliable crowd answer and we know whether it is Flowing or Stalled, why not give back the points you really deserve for your real annotations?!

That's what the redeem feature does: once we can tell what the movie is & whether your answer agrees with the final crowd answer, you get your points back*!

*the amount of points per movie will be determined similarly as for the calibration movies.

However, until now, the Redeem feature has remained largely in a hibernation mode, since all redeemable movies had to be manually validated & made available to redeem. This changes next week!

From Monday (6/5) you'll be able to log in to Stall Catchers & redeem all your "lurking" points!! Who knows, you might just become a billionaire!

Just look for the button lighting up like so:

And from now on, movies will become redeemable automatically as soon as they accumulate enough crowd answers - which means that you will be able to redeem your points regularly (every day perhaps), if you keep annotating !!

Full guidance on how to use the redeem feature & what to expect from it in can be found this post.

Share a screenshot of your redeem loot & win a Stall Catchers mug!

We're running a mini social media competition until Friday next week for you to share your #RedeemLoot!

We suspect some of you will become millionaires & billionaires for sure - you might as well share it & win this super cool Stall Catchers mug in the process right?! 😛

Have I ever mentioned I have the best job ever? Having ☕ w fresh goat milk 🐐
in my sunny farm & writing a new blog post for #StallCatchers! pic.twitter.com/M9CZdMyY4v

— Egle Ramanauskaite ☣ (@Seplute) June 2, 2017

How to participate:

1.Go to Stall Catchers & redeem your points

2.Take a screenshot or a photo documenting your loot !!! It will look something like this:

3.Share it! You can post your screenshot/photo on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and including #RedeemLoot hashtag OR you can email it to us (info@eyesonalz.com) OR post it on the forum and we will share it for you!

Whichever option is easiest for you - be sure to let us know if you need any help with this step, or if we accidentally missed your screenshot/photo!

4.The competition runs until Friday night (US Eastern Time), and on Saturday (6/9) we will announce winners in these:

• Catcher with the highest amount of points redeemed in one go
• Catcher with the largest number of vessels redeemed for in one go
• Catcher who's #RedeemLoot collects the most likes, shares & retweets on social media

Catchers of lower & higher levels will be rewarded separately, so don't be spooked by some of the multimillionaire super user who might emerge! 😆

Good luck!! Redeem points from Monday & share your #RedeemLoot to win a Stall Catchers mug!!

We've been a little busy working behind the scenes during the last couple of weeks & have lots to report !

First and foremost, our team has met again at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY) to discuss short & long term goals and hang out (don't judge - this was only our second live meeting ever, as we are all spread out in different parts of the world! 😊 )

We had a chance to sit down again with our biomedical collaborators at the Schaffer-Nishimura Lab: Chris, Nozomi & Mohammad, as well as a new member joining our team - Jennifer Fee from Cornell Lab of Ornithology (an organization with a looong history of citizen science), who is to be our curriculum advisor!

Our team has met live (that doesn't happen often!) @CornellBME this weekend! Brainstorming new #StallCatchers features, curriculum & more! pic.twitter.com/wqr52l78Ow

— EyesOnALZ (@eyesonalz) May 14, 2017

And here's what we were up to ...

• sharing internal feedback on the recent #CrushALZ competition (everyone was really excited about how it turned out & wouldn't shut up about it 😛 !)
• discussing more ways how the research team could be engaging with our catcher community, including posting more notes on the forum & sending us text and video updates from the lab (looking forward to those!)
• planning the next big things in Stall Catchers, including a way to see how exactly your work is contributing to research, and curriculum development (I am not allowed to give out any more spoilers yet, sorry 😛)

We were also discussing some outreach activities we could do until & over the summer, which was when Chris & Nozomi shared a super cool experiment to demonstrate stalls in class (or DIY) ! Here it is:

.@CornellBME @SN_Lab @chris_schaffer @MohammadHaft @nozomi62 @Seplute Great analogy to stalls in brain in #Alzheimers: leaf vessel networks! You can experiment w "stalls" @ home! #CitSci #STEMedu #biology pic.twitter.com/eKH5z6FHvH

— EyesOnALZ (@eyesonalz) May 14, 2017

Punching a hole in leaf vein mimics a stall, and the effect of it to downstream veins can be seen by using fluorescent (or simple) die ! Pretty cool, ha ?! (Note that it works differently for different types of leaves - which one do you think resembles our brain more?!)

Following the meeting with the lab, and some more (intensive!) planning meetings with the core team, we set off to Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St Paul) in Minnesota !! There we joined the Citizen Science Association conference 2017, where many of our friends, including folks from SciStarter, The Crowd & The Cloud crew, Mark2Cure project team & many more were participating!

What can beat an opening reception w a dinosaur?! (And good food and great people)! Thanks @sciencemuseummn! #CitSci2017 pic.twitter.com/mrBfgZJYkt

— Cit Sci Association (@CitSciAssoc) May 18, 2017

We were reporting our adventures during the conference via Twitter mainly, and here is a storified version for a quick (or not so quick ... 😬) overview: https://storify.com/EyesOnALZ/stall-catchers-at-citsci2017

Most importantly, Pietro presented the new crowd science brewing at Stall Catchers, which will allow us to improve the analytic efficiency of Stall Catchers several times! Here's the recording of his talk (and YOU - yes, all of our "Team Humanity" is in there too!):

We'll be telling you more about our new dynamic methods soon too. They are going to give you catchers even more super powers! 😊 Or, to put it simply, we'll be able to determine a reliable "crowd answer" for any one vessel by collecting much fewer annotations than we do now, which will make sure we can analyse more data in the same time & speed up Alzheimer's research even further! Still quite a bit of testing to do before we fully implement them, but this is super exciting!

The conference also gaves us a chance to meet with the "extended" EyesOnALZ team, including our advisors Darlene Cavalier (SciStarter) and Anne Bowser (Wilson Center), and our forum/outreach advisor Alice (@PenguinGalaxy) ! We had a chance to dwell more into the planning of curriculum/educational feature development for Stall Catchers, as it is all we can think about it seems, ever since Middle School STEM team from Lake Hazel Middle School recently took Stall Catchers by the storm! 😛

We got loads of support for the idea from other participants at the conference too (and plenty of people volunteered to help us in one way or another, for which we are very thankful!), so we are really quite inspired now !!! Stay tuned for further developments of course 😊

At the conference, we also had a chance to hang out with some other biomedical project owners, including the crew at Mark2Cure - a citizen science project focusing on rare disease, Cochrane Crowd, focusing on categorising and summarising healthcare evidence and others. We also had a chance to chat & strategize with CitSciBio - a biomedical citizen science hub. They also took us in during the Citizen Science Public Festival at the Science Museum (part of the conference "closing" events), where we "dropped" some stickers and did an impromptu Stall Catchers demo 😊

You can find #StallCatchers & @eyesonalz stickers at our good friends @CitSciBio #CitizenScienceFestival table! Grab 'em & play! #CitSci2017 pic.twitter.com/ReX9N2nswK

— EyesOnALZ (@eyesonalz) May 20, 2017

AND there was the screening of The Crowd & The Cloud at the closing event, including the Alzheimer's segment in which EyesOnALZ & Stall Catchers are featured. Pietro was also asked to say a few words, thanking our Team Humanity - ALL YOU GUYS in it too 😊

#CitSci2017 @pmichelu showing us amazing increases in @eyesonalz participation pic.twitter.com/sXTosDOn8s

— Alice Sheppard (@PenguinGalaxy) May 19, 2017

So here's a "short" report of what we've been up to! 😊 And how have YOU been?!