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" GitHub allows a form of collaboration without collaborating. If Facebook and Twitter are social networks based upon mutual or asymmetrical relationships between users (“those you went to school with” and “those you wish you went to school with” as the two networks are occasionally described), then GitHub is a social network which allows the creation of relationships between texts through a process of replication. While users on GitHub can “follow” each other, as you would on Twitter, you can “star” projects that you interested in or “watch” their progress over time. Any public repository can also be very easily “cloned,” which downloads the project to your computer, complete with the hidden “.git” directory that contains its full history."
" But his new effort, a five-person outfit called Smart Patients, actually does look like something that could actually change the way patients, doctors, and industry interact. Its web site, envisioned as a kind of combination of clinical trials search engine and message board community, might further empower cancer patients whose relationship with their disease has already been changed fundamentally by the Internet. ... that takes advantage of the untapped knowledge that exists in a network of cancer patients and caregivers both so they can better help each other and so the healthcare system around them can learn from them. The two goals of the company are to help patients and caregivers to learn even more even faster, and to innovate the ways the healthcare system can learn from them.”
The intelligence community turns to big data to predict social unrest, election results, and currency collapse
Recently I've had some inquiries about the best tool to use for a group to collaborate and share articles, videos, images, documents, etc. My initial thought was a wiki, but now that I've fully inv...
Scientists are using video games to tap the collective intelligence of people around the world, while doctors and educators are turning to games to treat and teach.
I've been collecting URLs related to "Sharing Economy" for nearly ten years at http://delicious.com/hrheingold/sharing_economy -- and now we're seeing it kick into high gear. Technology lowers barriers to collective action (smart mobs) and also lowers barriers to sharing (sharing economy). -- Howard "As the sharing economy picks up momentum, its reach has become global. In cities and towns around the world, people are creating ways to share everything from baby clothes to boats, hardware to vacation homes. There are also groups emerging that consciously identify with the big-picture sharing movement. These groups focus on education, action and community-building, and advocate for a cultural shift toward widespread sharing. From neighborhood-level cooperatives to global organizations, these groups work to bring sharing into the mainstream. They see sharing as a new paradigm; a means to a more democratic society, and they understand that sharing is not a new fad but an ancient practice that technology is reinvigorating."
So much work on augmented intelligence is about the technology. This approach appears to combine the social and technological aspects -- truly augmented collective intelligence. -- Howard "Computer scientists are looking to improve on the performance of artificially intelligent personal assistants by devising a way to use the power of a human crowd to chat you instead. The system, known as Chorus, was designed by researchers at the University of Rochester to allow a number of users to act as a single agent that converses with a single end user in real time. Chorus was made to try and deal with a couple of problems - the limited knowledge base of a single human user, and the often stilted conversational ability of AI that can leave you feeling like you would be better off talking to your dog. The use of a multitude of human users means that everyone can suggest answers, providing a large pool of possible responses, with the crowd voting to reach a consensus about the best way to proceed."
Augmentation always requires the individual human brain, the technological extension and the methods, language, and training that support use of the technology, and social communication among populations of individuals. In this extended e-book, I try to situate augmentation in the historical progression of human biological and cultural evolution and project a vision of where it might go in the future. -- Howard "Mind Amplifier: Can Our Digital Tools Make Us Smarter? examines the origins of digital mind-extending tools, and lays out the foundations for their future. In it, Rheingold proposes an applied, interdisciplinary science of mind amplification. He also unveils a new protocol for developing techno-cognitive-social technologies that embrace empathy, mindfulness, and compassion — elements lacking from existing digital mind-tools."
If it is done right, this could be a collective intelligence platform as well as a crowdsourcing tool for journalists and an experiment in the public sphere. -- Howard "The Washington Post today announced it has launched a new platform for crowdsourcing. “Crowd Sourced” is The Post’s special feature that allows Post journalists to ask questions about today’s concerns and begin a conversation about these issues. Users will be able to answer those questions and vote for the ideas they value most, so the most popular responses are surfaced on the page."
Crowdsourcing is usually mindless -- parcelling out microtasks to many people, each of whom contribute a bit of work or perception (often for a few cents). What about combining crowdsourcing and collective intelligence (where each contributor adds a piece of the puzzle, with contributions aggregated and perhaps filtered)? -- Howard "Personal assistants such as Apple's Siri may be useful, but they are still far from matching the smarts and conversational skills of a real person. Researchers at the University of Rochester have demonstrated a new, potentially better approach that creates a smart artificial chat partner from fleeting contributions from many crowdsourced workers."
Enlisting amateurs to assist scientists in solving protein-folding problems started with a distributed computation project (http://stanford.folding.edu) and then was turned into a game, Foldit. Recently, Foldit players solved a significant problem involving the enzyme protease, which is important in the functioning of the immune system. Here, Foldit founder talk about the future of massive games to solve complex scientific problems. -- Howard
Swarm intelligence involves the aggregate behavior of actors who may be unintelligent. When swarm intelligence principles are more clearly understood and applied to collective intelligence of smart actors, we may see engineered stigmergic intelligence. -- Howard "Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, is an algorithm that manages data congestion on the Internet, and as such was integral in allowing the early web to scale up from a few dozen nodes to the billions in use today. Here's how it works: As a source, A, transfers a file to a destination, B, the file is broken into numbered packets. When B receives each packet, it sends an acknowledgment, or an ack, to A, that the packet arrived. This feedback loop allows TCP to run congestion avoidance: If acks return at a slower rate than the data was sent out, that indicates that there is little bandwidth available, and the source throttles data transmission down accordingly. If acks return quickly, the source boosts its transmission speed. The process determines how much bandwidth is available and throttles data transmission accordingly. It turns out that harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) behave nearly the same way when searching for food. Gordon has found that the rate at which harvester ants – which forage for seeds as individuals – leave the nest to search for food corresponds to food availability."
Finally, an analysis of "information overload" that eloquently presents the case that "it isn't as simple as all that." -- Howard "In this sense, technology is neither an abstract flood of data nor a simple machine-like appendage subordinate to human intentions, but instead the very manner in which humans engage the world. To celebrate the Web, or any other technology, as inherently edifying or stultifying is to ignore its more human scale: our individual access to this imagined expanse of pure information is made possible by technologies that are constructed, designed, and constantly tweaked by human decisions and experiences. These technologies do not exist independently of the human persons who design and use them. Likewise, to suggest that Google is making us stupid is to ignore the historical fact that over time technologies have had an effect on how we think, but in ways that are much more complex and not at all reducible to simple statements like “Google is making us stupid.”"
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The truth is that if Reddit is actually interested in using the power of its crowd to help the authorities, it needs to dramatically rethink its approach.
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page[1] and used by the Google web search engine, that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is referred to as the PageRank of E and denoted by 
The name "PageRank" is a trademark of Google, and the PageRank process has been patented (U.S. Patent 6,285,999). However, the patent is assigned to Stanford University and not to Google. Google has exclusive license rights on the patent from Stanford University. The university received 1.8 million shares of Google in exchange for use of the patent; the shares were sold in 2005 for $336 million.[2][3]
The value of incoming links is colloquially referred to as "Google juice", "link juice" or "Pagerank juice".[citation needed]
Connections 4.5 will become available in March. At the top of its enhancements list are document management capabilities that allow networked members to access, analyze, and act on data. It will also have a content manager feature so teams and communities can build "collective intelligence" that was either unachievable in the past or possible only under lengthy time constraints. It helps if you think of this in terms of the Pony Express versus the telegraph. The anticipated upside, as IBM is eager to point out, will be much quicker business problem solving, increased productivity, and--you'll be happy to hear this--rising profits.
In the online conversation, Professor Malone addresses a very important question that comes up when first considering a brand new concept like collective intelligence. “Why are we doing all this work?” “There are at least three answers. The first is, as scientists, we want to understand how the world works, and in particular, how the world of groups of people and computers work together. How human societies and human networks work. Second, we want to help businesses, governments and other kinds of organizations know how to work better themselves. How can we create more intelligent organizations, more intelligent businesses, more intelligent governments, more intelligent societies?” “Third, in a way, we are trying to understand how our whole world and society is evolving in a way that I think is making us more collectively intelligent. You could say that the Internet is one way of greatly accelerating the connections among different people and computers on our planet. As all the people and computers on our planet get more and more closely connected, it's becoming increasingly useful to think of all the people and computers on the planet as a kind of global brain.” “Our future as a species may depend on our ability to use our global collective intelligence to make choices that are not just smart, but also wise.”
This article is part of a series: ‘Governance and other systems of mass collaboration’. Stigmergy is a mechanism of indirect coordination between agents or actions. The principle is tha...
Tom Malone's MIT Center for Collective Intelligence is emerging as the single most active researchsite for studying augmented collective intelligence. -- Howard "If we want to predict what's going to happen, especially if we want to be able to take advantage of what's going to happen, we need to understand those possibilities at a much deeper level than we do so far. That's really our goal in the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, which I direct. In fact, one way we frame our core research question there is: How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any person, group or computer has ever done before? If you take that question seriously, the answers you get are often very different from the kinds of organizations and groups we know today."
I haven't tried this yet. -- Howard "A mural is a flexible content format that aggregates media and files, ideal for group ideation and visual sharing."
I have not tried this, but it looks like a potentially powerful augmentation technology. -- Howard "Expertmaker’s technology is based on Artificial Intelligence and advanced Computational Intelligence, including machine learning and evolutionary computation. This is normally very complex stuff. However, we have packaged all the advanced technology into a simple to use platform making it available to literally anyone. The desktop toolkit is a software application you download to your PC. You use the toolkit to create your solutions. In addition this is your interface to the server and API configurations. The toolkit contains the various AI technologies that you use to create your search solutions. You can use several different AI technologies in one solution. With the solution you can create your own semantic structures for handling complex solutions."
Collective intelligence in the public sphere? Jury is still out on whether it can work, but experiments like this might show the way. -- Howard "We improve social decision making through better information, increased public engagement, and the collective creativity of communities."
Crisis mapping, combining instant reports from mobile phones with online mapping resources, is a promising emerging genre of augmented collective intelligence. -- Howard "OpenStreetMap, the free and editable map of the world, kicked off its international conference today in Tokyo, with the entire first day dedicated to improving disaster response and crisis mapping. With the March 2011 Tōhoku tsunami still fresh on people's minds and events like the recent Talas Typhoon reminding us that disasters are a constant threat, we know that disaster response must be an ongoing, structural concern. The Japanese community hosting the conference did a great job highlighting how crisis mapping needs to be central in disaster response efforts -- and how a free tool like OpenStreetMap can make a big difference. Fukushima resident and mapper Kinya Inoue talks about the utter devastation the 2011 tsunami left behind."
I haven't read this yet, but it's going on my list toward the top. -- Howard "In Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (public library), neuroscientist Christof Koch — “reductionist, because I seek quantitative explanations for consciousness in the ceaseless and ever-varied activity of billions of tiny nerve cells, each with their tens of thousands of synapses; romantic, because of my insistence that the universe has contrails of meaning that can be deciphered in the sky about us and deep within us” — explores how subjective feelings, or consciousness, come into being. Among Koch’s most fascinating arguments is one that bridges philosophy, evolutionary biology and technofuturism to predict a global Übermind not unlike McLuhan’s “global village,” but one in which our technology melds with what Carl Jung has termed the “collective unconscious” to produce a kind of sentient global brain:" "There is no reason why this web of hypertrophied consciousness cannot spread to the planets and, ultimately, beyond the stellar night to th..."
Although this article focuses on education, mindmapping can be a great planning and coordination tool for any kind of group project, whether collaborators are physically copresent or geographically separated. -- Howard "Online collaboration has become very popular in both education and business. We now have the ability to easily and freely share all file types using different cloud based platforms. People working collectively on a project or assignment no longer need to be in the same room or even in the same country for that matter. Collaborative platforms have enabled educators to create online learning environments where students can benefit from sharing ideas and communicating with each other, their mentors and external organizations."
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