Tag Archives: research
Hey! You! Get off my crowd: is crowdsourcing becoming a meaningless buzzword?
February 20, 2012… the input of some 150 users resulted in six alterations to the bill. This comes right after new research revealed that crowdsourced businesses may have an even brighter future than everyone (except us, of course) predicted.
Away from the sideshow of the Super Bowl ‘crowdsourcing’ experiment, with its alarmingly sexist corn chip commercials and accusations of plagiarism, the crowdsourcing model continues to demonstrate its value in both the public and private spheres. The best we can …
Confidence tricks: can crowdsourcing keep our feet on the ground?
January 18, 2012… overconfident in our judgments? And what keeps those with valuable knowledge in the background? Research from social psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning may explain why we get it wrong so often.
Their experiments revealed that people generally overestimate their ability in areas they understand poorly, and underestimate their ability where their understanding is good. This is known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and is one of many cognitive biases that affect us all.
Only the …
Better shred than read: DARPA uses competitive crowdsourcing to revive destroyed documents
January 12, 2012… might not be as unreadable as they thought.
Our old friends at DARPA (or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency if you have the time) decided that there might be something worth reading on those strips. They wanted to create software that could identify scanned strips and piece them together as quickly as possible.
Money to learn
DARPA’s annual budget is $3.2 billion. They could have hired a crack team of programmers without making a scratch on that figure. But even the best …
All I want for Christmas is you clear terminology
December 19, 2011
… sickeningly sentimental posts, cynically exploiting the Christmas spirit to avoid doing proper research and hard-thinking.* I have real Christmas-related, crowdsourced news to report.
Crowdsourcing is all around me, and so the feeling grows
As you may recall, a year ago we wrote about how crowdsourcing was now (then) so mainstream, that you could take care of all your Christmas essentials using only crowdsourcing companies (assuming you were happy to eat only donuts and pizza, and …
Winds of change: can crowdsourcing help solve environmental problems?
December 8, 2011… compiled to create an interactive map of meteorological weirdness.
Of course the Guardian’s research has its shortcomings too. Claims can’t be verified, meaning hoaxsters (or those people who can’t be bothered looking out the window) could potentially skew the data. But if we assume that no one wants to sabotage the experiment with false sightings of wild primroses (which seems unlikely), the information collected should create a useful record for climate scientists. It won’t save …
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