Tag Archives: Richard Feynman
My Wife, the Computer
December 5, 2009… as to render their human forebears obsolete.
The tipping point came during WWII when a young Richard Feynman created a competition of sorts while working on the Manhattan Project. Human computers would square off against a machine named the Punched-Card Tabulator to do calculations required for the plutonium bomb. Bravely, the humans held out for two days, maintaining an equal pace to their mechanical counterpart. But on the third day the machine rose to take the lead; the humans had …
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 commentSome work is born digital: from gold farmers to game masters
June 1, 2010… making one’s own character act as a sort of bodyguard to another player’s character. Professor Richard Heeks estimates that at one point these tasks provided employment to as many as 400,000 individuals around the world. Every aspect of this work is born digital: it is conducted entirely through digital channels, its fruits are digital, and the demand for it arises from people’s fascination with digital environments and the goals and objectives they provide. In sci-fi author Cory …
Tags: captcha crowdsourcing digital labor human computation Mechanical Turk richard heeks world of warcraft
captcha, crowdsourcing, digital labor, human computation, Mechanical Turk, richard heeks, world of warcraft | 3 CommentsDown on MyFarm: gamification goes rural
May 26, 2011… geek ? Or how about a middle-aged English farmer ? Okay, the clue is in the title. Farmer Richard Morris is the proud manager of 1200 acres of prime agricultural land, and the unlikely overseer of real-life gaming venture: MyFarm.
Back to the land
In the US, FarmVille players now apparently outnumber real famers 60:1 (that’s one of those statistics that goes round the blogosphere so fast it must be true). Encouraged by the sudden popularity of virtual agriculture, the …
2011: a crowded year
May 4, 2011… served up with some decent beer). The packed schedule includes crowdsourcing A-listers such as Richard Lewis from Clickworker, Lukas Biewald from CrowdFlower, Pia Erkinheimo from Nokia, Jeff Howe from Wired, Carl Esposti from crowdsourcing.org and last but not least, Microtask’s own Dear Leader (“just call me CEO”) Ville Miettinen. Check out Crowdconvention.com for more details.
HCOMP 2011
The Human Computation Workshop is this year’s third go-to industry event. …
Read all about it! Crowd makes the news
March 10, 2011 Share “Researchers have always wondered what made hit songs, books and movies, just that, hits. What they’ve found is that quality had only little to do with it.”
At first glance, these 27 words look fairly ordinary. An interesting idea, but hardly revolutionary journalism. Even so, this innocent-looking sentence has caused quite a stir in the blogosphere. Why? …
