Tag Archives: computer
My Wife, the Computer
December 5, 2009… their work would be used down the line.
In the modern world it seems odd that a human could be a computer – the sentence “allow me to introduce my wife; she’s a computer” would surely raise some eyebrows. A moment’s consideration of the word itself removes the oddness – to compute is to calculate, so it follows that a “computer” would correspond to “one who calculates”. So before the machines established their binary monopoly on working stuff out, there was only one way …
Tags: computer David Alan Grier human computation Manhattan Project mass collaboration Richard Feynman
computer, David Alan Grier, human computation, Manhattan Project, mass collaboration, Richard Feynman | Leave a commentWe, Robot: A Vision of What’s to Come
December 18, 2009… the benefit of millions of years of natural selection’s tiny, incremental improvements. Robot or computer vision has only a couple of lousy decades on the board which, even with a multitude of talented researchers on the case, is hardly enough time to catch up.
But catching up it is. Researchers are constantly developing algorithms to enable robots to better filter out relevant information from their images. A clever way of addressing this problem has recently been crafted by harnessing …
Tags: cloud labor collective intelligence computer vision digital outsourcing human computation mass collaboration Mechanical Turk research robotics
cloud labor, collective intelligence, computer vision, digital outsourcing, human computation, mass collaboration, Mechanical Turk, research, robotics | Leave a commentFrom millions of tasks to thousands of jobs: Bringing digital work to the developing world
February 1, 2012… Because these tasks are completely digital, they can be physically carried out anywhere where a computer can be connected to the Internet.
A recent trend is that demand for such digital blue-collar work is satisfied through so-called “crowdsourcing” and “microsourcing” models. This means that instead of a company hiring a staffer or a contractor to carry out a job, the job is broken down into individual tasks and distributed to a large pool of workers over a digital network.
For …
Crowdsourcing democracy: was the Arab Spring over-hyped?
October 26, 2011… King Mohammed VI created a committee to revise the constitution. In response, two Morocco-based computer geeks set up reforme.ma. In Morocco (unlike in Egypt) reform was based on the old constitution, so people had a clear starting point for discussion. In one month, reforme.ma received over 150,000 opinions and suggestions. This huge response convinced the national committee to consider crowdsourced suggestions when drafting the new constitution.
It’s interesting that …
Crime-sourcing: the dark side of the crowd
October 20, 2011 Share What do you do if your bank account gets hacked? Option 1: cancel your credit cards, have a couple of drinks and promise to stop opening emails from long lost cousins based in Nigeria. Option 2: take it personally, put on some dark sunglasses and go after the hackers.
Misha Glenny chose option 2, and then spent over two years infiltrating the murky world of cyber-crime. …
Tags: captcha Computer crime crowd crowdsourcing Denial-of-service attack microwork Misha Glenny Nigeria Sarah Palin Twitter Yahoo! Mail
captcha, Computer crime, crowd, crowdsourcing, Denial-of-service attack, microwork, Misha Glenny, Nigeria, Sarah Palin, Twitter, Yahoo! Mail | Leave a comment← Older posts
