|
Prediction markets get interesting when compared to polls about the same topics -- Howard "Having said all of that, I’ve finally found a use for Intrade. The website is a very convenient way to quantify conventional wisdom. According to Intrade on a recent (Monday) night, President Obama had precisely a 58.8 percent chance of getting reelected. Apparently, his odds had dropped about six-tenths of 1 percentage point in the previous day. This decline is presumably a result of the crowd’s assessment of the impact of Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage (as if that will really have an impact six months from now). On that Monday, the Intraders saw Republicans as having a 74.9 percent chance of keeping their House majority. Democrats had a 29.8 percent chance of regaining the chamber. These predictions strain credibility a bit, as the odds add up to more to than 100 percent, but that’s another matter." 
An example of stigmergy -- Howard "In the natural world, ants (initially) wander randomly, and upon finding food return to their colony while laying down pheromone trails. If other ants find such a path, they are likely not to keep travelling at random, but to instead follow the trail, returning and reinforcing it if they eventually find food (see Ant communication). The "who knows who knows what" problem: "The problem of knowing who knows what is multi-faceted. Knowledge and expertise lie on a spectrum and one's expertise in one topic area may have little bearing on one's knowledge in a disparate topic area. In addition, we continue to learn new things over time. Each of us see but a sliver of our acquaintances' and co-workers' areas of expertise. By making explicit and visible many individual perceptions of cognitive authority, this work shows that a group can know what its members know about in a relatively efficient and inexpensive manner." Papers from Collective Intelligence 2012 available online 
The new techniques behind instant crowdsourcing makes human intelligence available on demand for the first time. "In the largest collaborative study of the brain to date, scientists using imaging technology at more than 100 centers worldwide have for the first time zeroed in on genes that they agree play a role in intelligence and memory. Scientists working to understand the biology of brain function — and especially those using brain imaging, a blunt tool — have been badly stalled. But the new work, involving more than 200 scientists, lays out a strategy for breaking the logjam. The findings appear in a series of papers published online Sunday in the journal Nature Genetics. “What’s really new here is this movement toward crowd-sourcing brain research,” said Paul Thompson, a professor of neurology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and senior author of one of the papers. “This is an example of social networking in science, and it gives us a power we have not had.”" 
"MIT wants to change all that by tasking thousands of people with analyzing a 0.3-millimeter slice of mouse retinal tissue. Using a new site called Eyewire, MIT will ask users to track a neuron’s path by coloring in each axon (tendril). In the future, MIT will roll out another “game” which challenges users to find the synapses. The end result will be the connectome (a tome of connections) of the mouse’s retina." 
"How can we use digital media so that they help us become empowered participants rather than passive consumers? In Net Smart, I show how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and, above all, mindfully. Download the table of contents (PDF) here. Mindful use of digital media means thinking about what we are doing, cultivating an ongoing inner inquiry into how we want to spend our time. I outline five fundamental digital literacies, online skills that will help us do this: attention, participation, collaboration, critical consumption of information (or "crap detection"), and network smarts. I explain how attention works, and how we can use our attention to focus on the tiny relevant portion of the incoming tsunami of information. I describe the quality of participation that empowers the best of the bloggers, netizens, tweeters, and other online community participants; I examine how successful online collaborative enterprises contribute new knowledge to the world in new ways; and I present a lesson on networks and network building. There is a bigger social issue at work in digital literacy, one that goes beyond personal empowerment. If we combine our efforts wisely, it could produce a more thoughtful society: countless small acts like publishing a Web page or sharing a link could add up to a public good that enriches everybody." 
"The Climate CoLab project, developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (M.I.T.) Collective Intelligence Lab, uses an online forum to encourage institutional and citizen scientists alike to develop proposals for addressing climate change and then improve those proposals based on Web community feedback. The proposals—broken down into “global” and “local” categories—are then judged as part of a multi-phase global competition where the winners are invited to present their ideas to public officials. This year’s competition asks the question: “How should the global economy evolve through 2100, given the risks of climate change?” The competition is in its second phase, during which teams and individuals writing proposals seek to improve upon their original ideas with help from the more than 2,100 members of Colab’s online community. After the second phase wraps up on October 31 a team of judges will choose the most practical proposals to move on to the third and final round.". 
"We created this community because we, like you, love science. We love the thrill of a new discovery. And the chance to extend the bounds of human knowledge.
On Petridish, you can get involved first hand with research projects that are changing our world. Discover teams lead by world-renowned researchers. Make science truly come to life by backing your favorite scientists and causes.
Without your support, none of these projects could happen.
We hope you like Petridish as much as we enjoyed building it. Below are some of the finer details about our community.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Petridish?
Petridish is a new way for scientists to showcase their research to the public, and for the public to show recognition to innovative researchers. We hand select the most interesting and meaningful projects we find to be featured on our site and then allow you to get involved.
Back your favorite projects with small donations, and in exchange, researchers will provide insider updates on their progress, acknowledgements and unique rewards." 
"Editor's Note: The following infographic traces the chronology of Crowdsourcing from the early 1700s through 4 centuries of innovation up to today." "With recent advances in harnessing the knowledge and skill of large groups of (unknown) network-connected humans, researchers and practitioners have been designing systems that make contributions of users entertaining and more engaging. Game mechanics are being applied to the traditional human computation tasks, such as transcription, classification and labeling. Seminal examples of such applications include ESP game and FoldIt. At the same time, companies seek strategies to include elements of gaming into business processes to increase productivity and engagement of employees. Framing a business goal in the form of a game is also a promising method for motivating newer generations in the workforce." 
"Want to see how people feel about the weather in San Diego, right now? Check out the weather sentiment prediction web app. Read about how Google Prediction API and DialogueEarth.org's Crowd Sourced data was used to train the cloud!" |
Mark Elliott's thesis is the definitive work on stigmergic collaboration, in which the environment is shaped by aggregated individual behavior in ways that help shape collective behavior -- Howard
"'This thesis presents an application-oriented theoretical framework for generalised and specific collaborative contexts with a special focus on Internet-based mass collaboration. The proposed framework is informed by the author's many years of collaborative arts practice and the design, building and moderation of a number of online collaborative environments across a wide range of contexts and applications. The thesis provides transdisciplinary architecture for describing the underlying mechanisms that have enabled the emergence of mass collaboration and other activities associated with 'Web 2.0' by incorporating a collaboratively developed definition and general framework for collaboration and collective activity, as well as theories of swarm intelligence, stigmergy, and distributed cognition.'" "New research shows the power of the web to spread diversity and infect conformity by the provocation of weak signals. Farhad Manjoo from Slate reconsiders his(?) book True Enough’s proposition that the web was narrowing networkers’ worlds to the news/info selections that they chose. Now Facebook has released a study with an interesting design (based on millions of participants) that shows users’ worlds are actually expanded – not because of frequent exchanges with close friends – but because of unexpected encounters with distant acquaintances – the so-called weak signals in the study. Building on my dissertation research on Leadership & Learning in Self-Organizing Systems, I found that Leaders were the participants in the system who could initiate a weak signal and grow a new pattern from it. Leaders could also amplify a weak signal created by another(s) and create (or co-create) a pattern that could impact and change the perspectives of the conformity enforcers (who defined the system norms)." "This literature review focuses on collective intelligence in humans. A keyword search was performed on the Web of Knowledge and selected papers were reviewed in order to reveal themes relevant to collective intelligence. Three levels of abstraction were identified in discussion about the phenomenon: the micro-level, the macro-level and the level of emergence. Recurring themes in the literature were categorized under the above-mentioned framework and directions for future research were identified." 
CrowdControl appears to be a crowdsourcing engine for the enterprise -- a kind of roll your own Mechanical Turk that claims to combine AI technology with human crowdsourcing. Their site uses the term "best of breed," which always makes me suspicious about how much is technological innovation and how much is marketing hype. -- Howard 
"Genes of collective intelligence identified by Malone: "who (who is carrying out the collective intelligence task), what (what is going to be done, which is the task and how (how this task is going to be completed." 8 elements common to all definitions of crowdsourcing: "a crowd (the gene who), a task to perform for a specific purpose (the gene what), a reward for the rowd (the gene why), a participative process (the gene how), a crowdsourcer that launches the activity, a reward for this crowdsourcer, the existence of an open call and the use of Internet."" 
"Contrast this with some of my work, where I joined with colleague Fei-Yue Wang and a team of Chinese researchers in exploring what has come to be known as the The “outrageously priced haircut” is a good example. The community of Zhengzhou City in Henan Province was outraged when they read on the Web about two teens being charged more than 200 times the typical price for a haircut. The barber was getting away with it due to political connections. Within a few days, over 1,100 people joined in the action, working both on and offline to identify the culprits and to expose their government connections. In studying this and hundreds of other examples of HFSE communities we found very different patterns than those found in games. In these networks we see that people are working together with people they wouldn’t know in the real world. So where communities in the fantasy world of games resembled those offline, in this case of people solving real-world problems, the communities differ far more." 
Protease is, of course, a key to curing/preventing HIV. "Following the failure of a wide range of attempts to solve the crystal structure of M-PMV retroviral protease by molecular replacement, we challenged players of the protein folding game Foldit to produce accurate models of the protein. Remarkably, Foldit players were able to generate models of sufficient quality for successful molecular replacement and subsequent structure determination. The refined structure provides new insights for the design of antiretroviral drugs." 
"Think of the challenge of connection productivity as one of tipping the scales at the individual level. On one side of the scale is the cost to the individual of participating — the time required, the hassle involved if the system is cumbersome, and so on. On the other side is the payoff to the individual — new ideas gained, shortcuts learned. Progressive companies, searching for better ways to spread tacit know-how, need to find ways to tip the scales by decreasing the cost or increasing the return. Or both. One promising approach is to designate hubs or cross-pollinators to synthesize input and provide relevant, timely output. These individuals act as bridges or connectors at critical intersections, charged with gathering pertinent information and transmitting either warnings or signals of opportunity rapidly across the organization. Millennium, the Takeda Oncology Company, has designated a small group of scientists to act as knowledge intermediaries and brokers. Rather than continuing to struggle with getting preoccupied researchers to take the time to share lessons from their experiments, the knowledge intermediaries are charged with summarizing the findings and submitting them to a shared internal data base." 
"These projects use online tools as cognitive tools to amplify our collective intelligence. The tools are a way of connecting the right people to the right problems at the right time, activating what would otherwise be latent expertise. Networked science has the potential to speed up dramatically the rate of discovery across all of science. We may well see the day-to-day process of scientific research change more fundamentally over the next few decades than over the past three centuries." Proceedings of February CSCW workshop, with downloadable papers. "Whether you are part of a family, organizational team or business in a supply chain, systems thinking is a valuable approach to understanding the complexity of today's world. Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, Senior lecturer at MIT and Founder of the Society for Organizational Learning shares his perspectives on leadership and systems thinking with IBM. Senge focuses on the problems that are most difficult to solve and the mental models today's leaders need in order to build a smarter planet. Leaders today need to be able to be prepared reassess their strategies, work across multiple groups to find solutions and have the vision to work through high leverage solutions over time. Working smarter means working in ways that are collective and are based on collective intelligence across cities and supply chains to produce social, ecological and economic well being."
"Want to see how people feel about the weather in San Diego, right now? Check out the weather sentiment prediction web app. Read about how Google Prediction API and DialogueEarth.org's Crowd Sourced data was used to train the cloud!" |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |  |
8 |
|
Next |
