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Four short links: 1 October 2012

Crowdsourcing Flights, Teaching Programming, Redeploying Finance Engineers, and Recognising Cat Faces

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | Comment: 1 | October 1, 2012

Flightfox — Real people compete to find you the best flights. Crowdsourcing beating algorithms …. (via NY Times)
Code Monster (Crunchzilla) — a fun site for parents to learn to program with their kids. Loving seeing so much activity around teaching kids to program. (via Greg Linden)
Telling People to Leave Finance (Cathy O’Neil) — There’s an army of engineers in finance that could be putting their skills to use with actual innovation rather than so-called financial innovation.
Kittydar (GitHub) — cat face recognition in Javascript.

tags: crowdsourcing, cv, education, face recognition, finance, Innovation, javascript, open source, programming

gcapiel

I’d like to see someone apply Kittydar to a socially useful need in identifying images on a page that should be represented as data tables (e.g. pie charts) or MathML in order to make the information accessible to blind and vision impaired people. After identification a visual user would could have the option to “describe” the image for a blind or visually impaired user – a form of Crowdsourcing or micro-volunteerism. Ping me if you’re interested in tackling this project.