Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items tagged crowdsourcing

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Javier E

AMA: How a Weird Internet Thing Became a Mainstream Delight - Alexis C. Madrigal - The ... - 0 views

  • hundreds of people have offered themselves up to be interrogated via Reddit's crowdsourced question-and-answer sessions. They open a new thread on the social network and say, for example, "IamA nanny for a super-rich family in China AMA!"
  • Then, the assembled Redditors ask whatever they want. Questions are voted up and down, and generally speaking, the most popular ones get answered. These interviews can last for as little as an hour or go on for several days.  googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display("adIn-article3"); }); Politicians tend to play things pretty straight, but the regular people and niche celebrities tend to open up in fascinating ways. 
  • Over the last several years, the IamA subreddit has gone from interesting curiosity to a juggernaut of a media brand. Its syntax and abbreviations have invaded the public consciousness like Wired's aged Wired/Tired/Expired rubric. It's a common Twitter joke now to say, "I [did something commonplace], ask me anything." 
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Reddit was about to become the preeminent place for "real 'expert'" AMAs that were extremely useful and enlightening.
  • AMAs among common folk focus on dishing on what sex, disease, or jobs are really like. The celebrity versions borrow the same idea, but they serve up inside information on celebrity itself (generally speaking) or politics itself. 
  • The AMA is supposed to expose the mechanism. The AMA is about exposing the "inside conversations." The AMA is like the crowdsourced version of those moments when Kevin Spacey turns to the camera in House of Cards and breaks things down. 
Javier E

Welcome to Google Island | Gadget Lab | Wired.com - 0 views

  • As soon as you hit Google’s territorial waters, you came under our jurisdiction, our terms of service. Our laws–or lack thereof–apply here. By boarding our self-driving boat you granted us the right to all feedback you provide during your journey. This includes the chemical composition of your sweat.
  • Unified logins let us get to know our audience in ways we never could before. They gave us their locations so that we might better tell them if it was raining outside. They told us where they lived and where they wanted to go so that we could deliver a more immersive map that better anticipated what they wanted to do–it let us very literally tell people what they should do today. As people began to see how very useful Google Now was, they began to give us even more information. They told us to dig through their e-mail for their boarding passes–Imagine if you had to find it on your own!–they finally gave us permission to track and store their search and web history so that we could give them better and better Cards. And then there is the imaging. They gave us tens of thousands of pictures of themselves so that we could pick the best ones–yes we appealed to their vanity to do this: We’ll make you look better and assure you present a smiling, wrinkle-free face to the world–but it allowed us to also stitch together three-dimensional representations. Hangout chats let us know who everybody’s friends were, and what they had to say to them. Verbal searches gave us our users’ voices. These were intermediary steps. But it let us know where people were at all times, what they thought, what they said, and of course how they looked. Sure, Google Now could tell you what to do.
  • “We learned so much about regulation with Google Health. It turns out, the government has rules about health records, and that people care about these rules for some reason. So we began looking around for ways to avoid regulation. For example, government regulation meant it was much easier to experiment with white space in Kenya than in the United States. So we started thinking: What if the entire world looked more like Kenya? Or, even better, Somalia? Places where there are no laws. We haven’t adapted mechanisms to deal with some of our old institutions like the law. We aren’t keeping up with the rate of change we caused through technology. If you look at the laws we have, they’re very old. A law can’t be right if it’s 50 years old. Like, it’s before the Internet
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • I don’t want this,” I stammered, removing the glasses. “Sure you do, you just aren’t aware of that yet. For many years now, we’ve looked at everything you’ve looked at online. Everything. We know what you want, and when you want it, down to the time of day. Why wait for you to request it? And in fact, why wait for you to discover that you even want to request it? We can just serve it to you.”
  • “These are Google Spiders. They’ve crawled the entire island, and now we’re ready to release them globally. We’re sending them everywhere, so that we can make a 3D representation of the entire planet, and everyone on it. We aren’t just going to recreate the planet, though–we’re going to make it better.” “Governments are too focused on democracy and rule of law. On Google Island, we’ve found those things to be distractions. If democracy worked so well, if a majority public opinion made something right, we would still have Jim Crow laws and Google Reader. We believe we can fix the world’s problems with better math. We can tear down the old and rebuild it with the new. Imagine Minecraft. Now imagine it photorealistic, and now imagine yourself living there, or at least, your Google Being living there. We already have the information. All we need is an invitation. This is the inevitable and logical end point of Google Island: a new Google Earth.”
Javier E

Kids' Cognition Is Changing-Education Will Have to Change With It - Megan Garber - Tech... - 1 views

  • Elon University and the Pew Internet and American Life Project released a report about the cognitive future of the millennial generation. Based on surveys with more than 1,000 thought leaders -- among them danah boyd, Clay Shirky, David Weinberger, and Alexandra Samuel -- the survey asked thinkers to consider how the Internet and its environment are changing, for better or worse, kids' cognitive capabilities.
  • The survey found, overall, what many others already have: that neuroplasticity is, indeed, a thing; that multitasking is, indeed, the new norm; that hyperconnectivity may be leading to a lack of patience and concentration; and that an "always on" ethos may be encouraging a culture of expectation and instant gratification.
  • also found, however, another matter of general consensus among the experts they surveyed: that our education systems will need to be updated, drastically, to suit the new realities of the intellectual environment. "There is a palpable concern among these experts," Rainie puts it, "that new social and economic divisions will emerge as those who are motivated and well-schooled reap rewards that are not matched by those who fail to master new media and tech literacies."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • It also offers its experts' predictions about what the most-desired life skills (for young people, but ostensibly for everyone else, too) will be in the year 2020. Among the skills they highlighted: public problem-solving through cooperative work -- crowdsourcing and the like; the ability to search effectively for information online; the ability to distinguish the quality and veracity of online discoveries; the ability to synthesize, or combine facts and details from different sources into coherent narratives; the ability to concentrate; and the ability to distinguish between the signal and the noise as the information we're exposed to gets bigger, and broader, and more plentiful.
  • All these skills can be taught. The question is whether kids will learn them in school, or outside of it.
Javier E

Crowd-Sourcing Brain Research Leads to Breakthrough - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • these guys finally did what needed to be done to take a real stab at merging imaging and genomics
  • Brain imaging studies are expensive and, as a result, far too small to reliably tease out the effects of common gene variations. These effects tend to be tiny, for one thing, and difficult to distinguish from the background “noise” of other influences. And brain imaging is notoriously noisy: not only does overall brain size vary from person to person, for instance, but so do the sizes of specialized brain regions like the hippocampus, which is critical for memory formation.
  • persuaded research centers around the world to pool their resources and create one large database. It included genetic and extensive brain imaging results from about 21,000 people. The team then analyzed the collective data to see whether any genes were linked to brain structure.
Javier E

Science and Truth - We're All in It Together - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Almost any article worth reading these days generates some version of this long tail of commentary. Depending on whether they are moderated, these comments can range from blistering flameouts to smart factual corrections to full-on challenges to the very heart of an article’s argument.
  • These days, the comments section of any engaging article is almost as necessary a read as the piece itself — if you want to know how insider experts received the article and how those outsiders processed the new
  • By now, readers understand that the definitive “copy” of any article is no longer the one on paper but the online copy, precisely because it’s the version that’s been read and mauled and annotated by readers.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The print edition of any article is little more than a trophy version, the equivalent of a diploma or certificate of merit — suitable for framing, not much else.
  • We call the fallout to any article the “comments,” but since they are often filled with solid arguments, smart corrections and new facts, the thing needs a nobler name. Maybe “gloss.” In the Middle Ages, students often wrote notes in the margins of well-regarded manuscripts. These glosses, along with other forms of marginalia, took on a life of their own, becoming their own form of knowledge, as important as, say, midrash is to Jewish scriptures. The best glosses were compiled into, of course, glossaries and later published
  • The truth is that every decent article now aspires to become the wiki of its own headline.
  • t any good article that has provoked a real discussion typically comes with a small box of post-publication notes. And, since many magazines are naming the editor of the article as well as the author, the outing of the editor can come with a new duty: writing the bottom note that reviews the emendations to the article and perhaps, most importantly, summarizes the thrust of the discussion. If the writer gains the glory of the writing, the editor can win the credit for chaperoning the best and most provocative pieces.
  • Some may fear that recognizing the commentary of every article will turn every subject into an endless postmodern discussion. But actually, the opposite is true. Recognizing the gloss allows us to pause in the seemingly unending back and forth of contemporary free speech and free inquiry to say, well, for now, this much is true — the ivory-bill still hasn’t been definitively seen since World War II, climate change is happening and caused by mankind, natural selection is the best description of nature’s creative force. Et cetera.
Javier E

Do you want to help build a happier city? BBC - 0 views

  • With colleagues at the University of Cambridge, I worked on a web game called urbangems.org. In it, you are shown 10 pairs of urban scenes of London, and for each pair you need to choose which one you consider to be more beautiful, quiet and happy. Based on user votes, one is able to rank all urban scenes by beauty, quiet and happiness. Those scenes have been studied at Yahoo Labs, image processing tools that extract colour histograms. The amount of greenery is associated with all three peaceful qualities: green is often found in scenes considered to be beautiful, quiet and happy. We then ran more sophisticated image analysis tools that extracted patches from our urban scenes and found that red-brick houses and public gardens also make people happy.
  • On the other hand, cars were the visual elements most strongly associated with sadness. In rich countries, car ownership is becoming unfashionable, and car-sharing and short-term hiring is becoming more popular. Self-driving cars such as those being prototyped by Google will be more common and will be likely to be ordered via the kind of mobile apps similar to the ones we use for ordering taxis nowadays. This will result into optimised traffic flows, fewer cars, and more space for alternative modes of transportation and for people on foot.
  • Cities will experience transformations similar to those New York has experienced since 2007. During these few years, new pedestrian plazas and hundreds of miles of bike lanes were created in the five boroughs, creating spaces for public art installations and recreation. And it’s proved popular with local businesses too, boosting the local economy in areas where cyclists are freer to travel.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • it is not clear whether the rise of post-war tower dwelling is a definite improvement on the modern city sprawl. Tall buildings (with the exception of glassed-office buildings and landmarks) are often found in sad scenes.
  • In recent years, the new mayor of the Colombian capital Bogota, Enrique Penalosa, has cancelled highways projects and poured the money instead into cycle lanes, parks and open spaces for locals – undoing decades of car-centric planning that had made the streets a no-go area for the capital’s children. On the day in February 2000 when Penalosa banned cars from the street for 24 hours, hospital admissions fell by a third, air pollution levels dropped and residents said it made them feel more optimistic about living in the city.
  • are the technologies we are designing really helping its users to be happy? Take the simple example of a web map. It usually gives us the shortest walking direction to destination. But what if it would give us the small street, full of trees, parallel to the shortest path, which would make us happier? As more and more of us share these city streets, what will keep us happy as they become more crowded?
  • the share of the world’s population living in cities has surpassed 50%. By 2025, we will see another 1.2 billion city residents. With more and more of us moving to urban centres, quality of life becomes ever-more important.
grayton downing

Mapping Disease | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

  • researchers and journalists have scrambled to map the spread of H7N9 bird flu through China to identify its source and highlight at risk areas. Mapping is a common response to outbreaks, especially of new diseases, but some scientists believe it must become a more proactive part of disease control
  • efforts to plot the locations of infectious diseases still tend to be reactive rather than proactive.
  • only 4 percent of important infectious diseases have been comprehensively mapped at a global scale. The rest are plagued by patchy data.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • audited existing maps for 174 infectious diseases of clinical importance. Following a huge systematic review, they scored the maps for each disease according to how much of the known global range is covered and the quality of the data—whether they were up-to-date and whether they relied on accurate measures like molecular diagnostics or GPS coordinates, rather than unverified expert opinion.
  • even the highest-scoring diseases have room for improvement.
  • . They argue that technology can help to plug the gaps in our maps in the future, and they point to several untapped sources of data. For example, both PubMed and GenBank, which collect biomedical literature and gene sequences respectively, contain geospatial information for the majority of diseases that the team reviewed. And social networks like Twitter can provide invaluable real-time clues about spreading symptoms and illnesses, often tagged with geographical information. During the 2009 outbreak of H1N1 swine flu, for example, Twitter predicted outbreaks 1 or 2 weeks ahead of traditional surveillance measures.
  • I struggled because governments or researchers wouldn’t share their information,” he said. “But there was all this incredible knowledge on the web being discussed through professional networks or news media.”
  • believes that the problem now is not a lack of data but a deluge of it. Sites like HealthMap and BioCaster are already using learning algorithms to filter online sources for information relevant to infections. They are also using crowdsourcing tools that ask online volunteers to check if flagged social media chatter actually relates to the disease of interest.
Javier E

View of #Ferguson Thrust Michael Brown Shooting to National Attention - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • in a situation hostile to traditional reporting, the crowdsourced, phone-enabled network of information that Twitter provides has proved invaluable.
  • “This story was put on the map, driven and followed on social media more so than any story I can remember since the Arab Spring,”
  • While much of mainstream media leaves communities of color unmoved — these are audiences that are underrepresented in terms of broadband access as well — Twitter is a place many black users rely on for information.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Perhaps all the things that led to the security situation in Ferguson being handed over to cooler heads would have ensued. But nothing much good was happening in Ferguson until it became a hashtag.
Javier E

The AI is eating itself - by Casey Newton - Platformer - 0 views

  • there also seems to be little doubt that is corroding the web.
  • , two new studies offered some cause for alarm. (I discovered both in the latest edition of Import AI, the indispensable weekly newsletter from Anthropic co-founder and former journalist Jack Clark.)
  • The first study, which had an admittedly small sample size, found that crowd-sourced workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turks platforms increasingly admit to using LLMs to perform text-based tasks.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Until now, the assumption has been that they will answer truthfully based on their own experiences. In a post-ChatGPT world, though, academics can no longer make that assumption. Given the mostly anonymous, transactional nature of the assignment, it’s easy to imagine a worker signing up to participate in a large number of studies and outsource all their answers to a bot. This “raises serious concerns about the gradual dilution of the ‘human factor’ in crowdsourced text data,” the researchers write.
  • “This, if true, has big implications,” Clark writes. “It suggests the proverbial mines from which companies gather the supposed raw material of human insights are now instead being filled up with counterfeit human intelligence.”
  • A second, more worrisome study comes from researchers at the University of Oxford,  University of Cambridge, University of Toronto, and Imperial College London. It found that training AI systems on data generated by other AI systems — synthetic data, to use the industry’s term — causes models to degrade and ultimately collapse. While the decay can be managed by using synthetic data sparingly, researchers write, the idea that models can be “poisoned” by feeding them their own outputs raises real risks for the web
  • that’s a problem, because — to bring together the threads of today’s newsletter so far — AI output is spreading to encompass more of the web every day.“The obvious larger question,” Clark writes, “is what this does to competition among AI developers as the internet fills up with a greater percentage of generated versus real content.”
  • In The Verge, Vincent argues that the current wave of disruption will ultimately bring some benefits, even if it’s only to unsettle the monoliths that have dominated the web for so long. “Even if the web is flooded with AI junk, it could prove to be beneficial, spurring the development of better-funded platforms, he writes. “If Google consistently gives you garbage results in search, for example, you might be more inclined to pay for sources you trust and visit them directly.”
  • the glut of AI text will leave us with a web where the signal is ever harder to find in the noise. Early results suggest that these fears are justified — and that soon everyone on the internet, no matter their job, may soon find themselves having to exert ever more effort seeking signs of intelligent life.
peterconnelly

Meet the Wikipedia editor who published the Buffalo shooting entry minutes after it sta... - 0 views

  • After Jason Moore, from Portland, Oregon, saw headlines from national news sources on Google News about the Buffalo shooting at a local supermarket on Saturday afternoon, he did a quick search for the incident on Wikipedia. When no results appeared, he drafted a single sentence: "On May 14, 2022, 10 people were killed in a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York." He hit save and published the entry on Wikipedia in less than a minute.
  • That article, which as of Friday has been viewed more than 900,000 times, has since undergone 1,071 edits by 223 editors who've voluntarily updated the page on the internet's free and largest crowdsourced encyclopedia.
  • He's credited with creating 50,000 entries
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • In the middle of breaking news, when people are searching for information, some platforms can present more questions than answers. Although Wikipedia is not staffed with professional journalists, it is viewed as an authoritative source by much of the public, for better or for worse. Its entries are also used for fact-checking purposes by some of the biggest social platforms, adding to the stakes and reach of the work from Moore and others.
  • "Editing Wikipedia can absolutely take an emotional toll on me, especially when working on difficult topics such as the COVID-19 pandemic, mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and other disasters," he said.
  • "I like the instant gratification of making the internet better," he said.
  • "I want to direct people to something that is going to provide them with much more reliable information at a time when it's very difficult for people to understand what sources they can trust."
  • "It is considered cool if you're the first person who creates an article, especially if you do it well with high-quality contributions," said Rasberry.
  • To help patrol incoming edits and predict misconduct or errors, Wikipedia -- like Twitter -- uses artificial intelligence bots that can escalate suspicious content to human reviewers who monitor content.
  • Rasberry, who also wrote the Wikipedia page on the platform's fact checking processes, said Wikipedia does not employ paid staff to monitor anything unless it involves "strange and unusual serious crimes like terrorism or real world violence, such as using Wikipedia to make threats, plan to commit suicide, or when Wikipedia itself is part of a crime.
  • Rasberry said flaws range from a geographical bias, which is related to challenges with communicating across languages; access to internet in lower and middle income countries; and barriers to freedom of journalism around the world.
  • "I've got many other editors that I'm working with who will back me, so when we encounter vandalism or trolls or misinformation or disinformation, editors are very quick to revert inappropriate edits or remove inappropriate content or poorly sourced content," Moore said.
  • While "edit wars" can happen on pages, Rasberry said this tends to occur more often over social issues rather than news.
  • Wikipedia also publicly displays who edits each version of an article via its history page, along with a "talk" page for each post that allows editors to openly discuss edits.
  • "If no reliable sources can be found on a topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it," the page said.
  • "If it was a paid advertising site or if it had a different mission, I wouldn't waste my time."
1 - 11 of 11
Showing 20 items per page