- Know Your HTTP Posters (GitHub) — A0-posters about the HTTP protocol.
- Crowdserfing — when a large corp uses crowd-sourced volunteering for its own financial gain, without giving back. It offends my sense of reciprocity as well, but nobody is coerced into using Google Maps or contributing data to it. How do we decide what is “right”?
- Exposed Webcam Viewer — hotels in Russia, lobbies in California, and blinking lights in the darkness from all around the world. (via Hacker News)
- Beauty and Joy of Computing — an introductory computer science curriculum developed at the University of California, Berkeley, intended for non-CS majors at the high school junior through undergraduate freshman level. Uses Snap, a web-based implementation of Scratch.
ENTRIES TAGGED "crowdsourcing"
Four short links: 15 April 2013
Know Your HTTP, Digital Exploitation, Insecure Webcams, and CS Courses
Four short links: 6 February 2013
Cite Spam, Astro Science Labs, Citizen Science, and Accelerating Research
- Manipulating Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics: simple, easy and tempting (PDF) — scholarly paper on how to citespam your paper up Google Scholar’s results list. Fortunately calling your paper “AAAAAA In-vitro Qualia of …” isn’t one of the winning techniques.
- Seamless Astronomy — brings together astronomers, computer scientists, information scientists, librarians and visualization experts involved in the development of tools and systems to study and enable the next generation of online astronomical research.
- Eye Wire — a citizen science game where you map the 3D structure of neurons.
- Open Science is a Research Accelerator (Nature Chemistry) — challenge was: get rid of this bad-tasting compound from malaria medicine, without raising cost. Did it with open notebooks and collaboration, including LinkedIn groups. Lots of good reflection on advertising, engaging, and speed.
Four short links: 11 January 2013
Comms 101, RoboTurking, Geek Tourism, and Implementing Papers
- How to Redesign Your App Without Pissing Everybody Off (Anil Dash) — the basic straightforward stuff that gets your users on-side. Anil’s making a career out of being an adult.
- Clockwork Raven (Twitter) — open source project to send data analysis tasks to Mechanical Turkers.
- Updates from the Tour in China (Bunnie Huang) — my dream geek tourism trip: going around Chinese factories and bazaars with MIT geeks.
- How to Implement an Algorithm from a Scientific Paper — I have implemented many complex algorithms from books and scientific publications, and this article sums up what I have learned while searching, reading, coding and debugging. (via Siah)
The MOOC movement is not an indicator of educational evolution
MOOCs get the attention, but DIY and peer-to-peer exchange are more fertile grounds for development
Somehow, recently, a lot of people have taken an interest in the broadcast of canned educational materials, and this practice — under a term that proponents and detractors have settled on, massive open online course (MOOC) — is getting a publicity surge. I know that the series of online classes offered by Stanford proved to be extraordinarily popular,…
Four short links: 13 November 2012
3D Printing Booth, Crowdsourcing Nanoscience, Mobile Numbers, and Web Techniques
- 3D Printing Photobooth Opening in Japan (io9) — A technician at the lab will scan your body (much like with early photography, you’ll need to be able to hold a certain pose for 15 minutes) and print out an impressively realistic 3D photo that captures not only your features, but also the basic textures of your clothing and hair. (via Julie Starr)
- Feynman Flowers — crowdsourcing analysis of STM imagery for nanoscale physics research. (via OKFN)
- Mobile Trends — Android on exponential growth vs iOS’s linear growth, and many more data-driven observations. Apple has a mobile product at every $50 price point between $0 and $850.
- The Definitive Guide to Forms-Based Website Authentication (Stack Overflow) — exactly what the title says.
Four short links: 1 October 2012
Crowdsourcing Flights, Teaching Programming, Redeploying Finance Engineers, and Recognising Cat Faces
- 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.
Four short links: 3 September 2012
Edu Tech, Harnessing Audiences, ALL CAPS, and Effective Meetings
- The Seductive Allure of Edu-Tech Reform (Chris Lehmann) — While it may be seductive to think that rooms of children on computers, each following some computerized instruction at their pace, monitored by school aides, with a handful of teachers around when things get particularly tough is a solution to both the educational and fiscal crisis we find ourselves, we need to understand that it’s fools gold we would be chasing.
- human.io — write microapps, tasks for people to do. This is a simple way to allow a publisher to turn a passive audience into a mobile army of participants. This allows publishers to easily create missions and activities to get people involved more directly than just reading stuff on a screen. If Twitter is HTML, then Human.io is CGI. (via Joshua Schachter)
- Why Contracts Have UPPER CASE PARAGRAPHS — fascinating! (via Anil Dash)
- Designing Meetings to Work (Luke Wroblewski) — notes from Kevin Hoffman’s talk. Doing something is better than seeing something, which is better than hearing something. THIS.
Seeking prior art where it most often is found in software
Open Invention Network plans to mine open source projects for patent busters
Patent ambushes are on the rise again, and cases such as Apple/Samsung shows that prior art really has to swing the decision–obviousness or novelty is not a strong enough defense. Obviousness and novelty are subjective decisions made by a patent examiner, judge, or jury.
In this context, a recent conversation I had with Keith Bergelt, Chief Executive Officer of the…
Four short links: 15 August 2012
Reproducibility, Open Projects, Disposable Forums, and Prosthetic Retina
- Reproducibility Initiative (Science Exchange) — a service offering researchers who will attempt to reproduce your work. Validated studies will receive a Certificate of Reproducibility acknowledging that their results have been independently reproduced as part of the Reproducibility Initiative. Researchers have the opportunity to publish the replicated results as an independent publication in the PLOS Reproducibility Collection, and can share their data via the figshare Reproducibility Collection repository. The original study will also be acknowledged as independently reproduced if published in a supporting journal. See also writeup in Nature.
- Designing Open Projects (PDF) — IBM report with very sensible advice on steps to take when creating open projects for engagement and participation. Should be recommended reading for all who hope to get others to help.
- Hustleboards — “disposable forums”, easy lightweight web-based chats. Nice and simple UI.
- Prosthetic Retina Helps Restore Sight in Mice (Nature) — computer-mediated vision won’t change our world, but it’ll change what we think is in our world.
On co-creation, contests and crowdsourcing
A portrait of a design contest and what it says about the future of co-creation.
I had decided to update the branding at one of my companies, and that meant re-thinking my logo.
Here’s the old logo:
The creative exercise started with a logo design contest posting at 99designs, an online marketplace for crowdsourced graphic design.
When it was all done, I had been enveloped by…
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