Crowdsourcing
Convergence
As readers of my blog posts know, I talk a lot about evolutionary systems, the formal structure of cooperation, the role of both in emergence of new levels of complexity, and I sometimes use cellular automata to make points about all these things and the reification of useful models (here’s a summary of how they all relate). I’ve also touched on this “thing” going on with the system of life on Earth that is related to technological singularity but really is the emergence or (or convergence) of an entirely new form of intelligence/life/collective consciousness/cultural agency, above the level of human existence.
From The Chaos Point. Reproduced with permission from the author.
In a convergence of a different sort, many of these threads which all come together and interrelate in my own mind, came together in various conversations and talks within the last 15 hours. And while it’s impossible to explain this all in details, it’s really exciting to find other people who are on …
World’s Most Ambitious Crowdsource
Everyone has heard about the Large Hadron Collider, arguably the most ambitious and complex engineering project ever undertaken, anywhere. The purpose, no less ambitious, is to answer all sorts of burning questions about the nature of the universe, including whether the Standard Model of particle physics is valid. Given such ambition and high stakes, it would surprise most people that the LHC is managed in a collaborative manner with very little hierarchy. Essentially it’s a giant, crowdsourced science experiment.…
Foldit
Has anyone played Foldit, the protein-folding game that is designed to advance the science? This Wired article makes it sound like Ender’s Game meets biochemistry! Sounds like the Poehlman kid is the protein-folding equivalent of Stephen Wiltshire. I love the crowdsourcing, the meta-evolutionary algorithm of it (to find the savants), and the implications for science.…
Peer-Review vs. Info Prizes and Markets
I have been having a 140 character discussion with Ciarán Brewster (@macbruski) via twitter. And while it’s kind of interesting to force complex subject matter into very few characters, it is limiting the discussion, so I will summarize it so far here and hopefully others can weigh in too.…
Crowdsourcing Election Verification, part 3
In part 1 I advocated photographing your completed ballot before submitting it and posting your photograph online. Turns out that if you followed this piece of advice in Missouri, you might be in jail right now. Oops! Sorry :-)…
The Nature of Innovation
One of my favorite talks of all time is Ken Robinson’s on how children are born naturally innovative and the process of schooling and growing up in our society beats it out of them by the time they are adults. More recently, Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat Pray Love fame) opened some eyes with this talk on how we think of individual creativity and where it comes from.…
Tribes
Tribes are hot.
Kevin has referred more than once to the famous Dunbar number for limits on optimal human tribe size.
One of my favorite books recently is Seth Godin’s book on leadership, called — you guessed it — Tribes.
Yesterday I heard a great talk by David Logan, co-author of Tribal Leadership.…
Radical Transparency
In a March 2009 Wired article, Daniel Roth calls for radical transparency in financial reporting as the path to recovery and a more secure financial system. He argues that the reporting requirements today allow companies to obscure what’s going on and that the way to fix things is as follows. Embrace a markup language with which bite-sized chunks of standardly defined pieces of financial data are thrown out to the world so that users can crowdsource the true picture of a company’s financial health.…
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
Has anyone read the entire text of the stimulus package?
The ambiguity of this question is intentional.
…
Designing for Generosity
Clay Shirky is always a great speaker. Here’s his Pop!Tech from last year:
Your Seat at the Table
The Obama Transition team wants your input on how to fix the country:
No, seriously. Check out the various meetings they have upcoming and the comments sections that go with each. Some topics like Health Care have lots of comments. Others like the Humanitarian, Refugee, and Asylum Policy meeting currently have no comments, which means you could have quite a bit of influence by being the only one to spout your opinion…
So, what do you think? Will Obama policy be shaped by this promising open forum with unprecedented input from the average citizen, or will this end up as just good PR?
p.s. is that Stephen Colbert looking askance at the bald dude? :-)…
Crowdsourcing Election Verification, part 2
Back in June, I suggested that public voting records would be healthy for our democracy if the populace were comfortable revealing their voting records. There is now a movement* and new web site for this called Who Voted? though they are not going as far as I am in advocating for revealing your actual choices.…
Crowdsourcing Truthiness
Google Labs has a new service called “In Quotes” which might be tweakable to do a truth market of sorts. Here’s the suggestion I just emailed them on this topic:
…I would love to use Google “In Quotes” to crowdsource measures of truth.
For instance, I just saw this:
“In a world of hostile and unstable suppliers of oil, this nation will achieve strategic independence by 2025,” said Mr. McCain during a campaign speech. [ Wed, 29 Oct 2008 Washington Times ]
Predicting the 2008 Presidential Election
I am a fan of prediction markets. They have typically done much better than polls at predicting the outcome of elections. Why? Here’s a thought experiment. Consider who you think is going to win the election (not who you want to win). Now consider that I was going to bet you $10,000 of your hard earned money on whether your prediction comes true. Did that change your thinking at all? Some of you might have even switched candidates once money was on the line. That’s the difference between a poll and a prediction market.…
Hive Mindstein
David Basanta’s blog has an interesting thread (quite a few of them actually). Here’s the setup but you should read the original post, including the Wired article:
…Apparently, some people are seeing some potential in cloud computing not just as an aid to science but as a completely new approach to do it. An article in Wired magazine argues precisely that. With the provocative title of The end of theory, the article concludes that, with plenty of data and clever algorithms (like those developed by Google), it is possible to obtain patterns that could be used to predict outcomes…and all that without the need of scientific models.
Crowdsourcing Election Verification
I take it as accepted fact at this point that the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election would have gone to John Kerry if everyone who attempted to vote that day were able to and all the votes were counted correctly. Here’s the the Wikipedia entry on the subject and here’s a documentary to get you started.…
Complex Links: TED
I attended the TED Conference this year for the first time. It was a transformative experience, one that I hope everyone can have in some form or another before too long. One way to simulate being there is watch as many of these incredible talks from past TED conferences as you can in a short period of time. If you are inspired, check out the TED Prize and how you can be a part of a growing global meta-movement for positive change in the world.
I will be blogging about things that piqued my interest at TED, but below are some cool links that I came away with:…
X Prize Annuity Funds
In the March 9, 2008 Sunday Magazine section of the NY Times, Freakonomics authors, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt wrote about an idea I shared with them (with my permission of course). Given all of the interest and critique that’s resulted, I am posting the original conception below and encourage you to express your thoughts about the project either in the comments here or on the Freakonomics blog. If you are interested in becoming involved beyond just providing public input, just say so in your comment and I will contact you directly.
…
Mechanical Turk
A few months ago, on a different blog I posted a method for reading books for free on Amazon. Hopefully they didn’t take offense to this but rather saw it for what I did which was a way to get people interested in a book enough to want to purchase it. But just in case Amazon has any hard feelings, I will make amends here by plugging one of their little-known but extremely powerful services called Mechanical Turk.…
What is Cancer?
[ I’m asking for your help in answering this question, read past the fold to see how ]
In my post on invisible etiology, I challenged us all to be as open-minded as possible when dealing with our most complex problems, for this is the only way to make the invisible become visible. Here’s where I attempt to practice what I preach.…
Blog Comment, Cancer, Causality, Crowdsourcing, Invisible Etiology, Pop!Tech, Science Blog Comment, Cancer, Causality, Crowdsourcing, Invisible Etiology, Pop!Tech, Science, 0