Crowdsourcing Tolstoy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at the NewYorker: “When Leo Tolstoy’s great-great-granddaughter, the journalist Fyokla Tolstaya, announced that the Leo Tolstoy State Museum was looking for volunteers to proofread some forty-six thousand eight hundred pages of her relative’s writings, she hoped to generate enough interest to get the first round of corrections done in six months.

Within days, some three thousand Russians—engineers, I.T. workers, schoolteachers, retirees, a student pilot, a twenty-year-old waitress—signed on. “We were so happy and so surprised,” said Tolstaya. “They finished in fourteen days.”

Now, thanks largely to the efforts of these volunteers, nearly all of the great Russian writer’s massive body of work, including novels, diaries, letters, religious tracts, philosophical treatises, travelogues, and childhood memories, will soon be available online, in a form that can be easily downloaded, free of charge. “Of course we realized there are some novels on the Internet,” Tolstaya said. “But most [writings] are not. We in the museum decided this is not good.”…

The definitive, ninety-volume jubilee edition of Tolstoy’s works, compiled and published in Russia from the nineteen-twenties to the nineteen-fifties, had already been scanned by the Russian State Library. However, converting the PDFs into an easy-to-use digital format posed a challenge. For one thing, even after ABBYY, a company that specializes in translating printed documents into digital records, offered their services for free, proofreading costs were likely to be prohibitive. Charging readers to download the works was not an option. “At the end of his life, Tolstoy said, ‘I don’t need any money for my work. I want to give my work to the people,’ “ said Tolstaya. “It was important for us to make it free for everyone. It is his will.”

That was when they hit on the idea of crowdsourcing, Tolstaya said. “It’s according to Leo Tolstoy’s ideas, to do it with the help of all people around the world—vsem mirom—even the world’s hardest task can be done with the help of everyone.”…(More)”

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-first Century

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Ryan Avent: “None of us has ever lived through a genuine industrial revolution. Until now.

Digital technology is transforming every corner of the economy, fundamentally altering the way things are done, who does them, and what they earn for their efforts. In The Wealth of Humans, Economist editor Ryan Avent brings up-to-the-minute research and reporting to bear on the major economic question of our time: can the modern world manage technological changes every bit as disruptive as those that shook the socioeconomic landscape of the 19th century?

Traveling from Shenzhen, to Gothenburg, to Mumbai, to Silicon Valley, Avent investigates the meaning of work in the twenty-first century: how technology is upending time-tested business models and thrusting workers of all kinds into a world wholly unlike that of a generation ago. It’s a world in which the relationships between capital and labor and between rich and poor have been overturned.

Past revolutions required rewriting the social contract: this one is unlikely to demand anything less. Avent looks to the history of the Industrial Revolution and the work of numerous experts for lessons in reordering society. The future needn’t be bleak, but as The Wealth of Humans explains, we can’t expect to restructure the world without a wrenching rethinking of what an economy should be….(More)”

Measuring Scientific Impact Beyond Citation Counts

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Robert M. Patton, Christopher G. Stahl and Jack C. Wells at DLib Magazine: “Measuring scientific progress remains elusive. There is an intuitive understanding that, in general, science is progressing forward. New ideas and theories are formed, older ideas and theories are confirmed, rejected, or modified. Progress is made. But, questions such as how is it made, by whom, how broadly, or how quickly present significant challenges. Historically, scientific publications reference other publications if the former publication in some way shaped the work that was performed. In other words, one publication “impacted” a latter one. The implication of this impact revolves around the intellectual content of the idea, theory, or conclusion that was formed. Several metrics such as h-index or journal impact factor (JIF) are often used as a means to assess whether an author, article, or journal creates an “impact” on science. The implied statement behind high values for such metrics is that the work must somehow be valuable to the community, which in turn implies that the author, article, or journal somehow has influenced the direction, development, or progress of what others in that field do. Unfortunately, the drive for increased publication revenue, research funding, or global recognition has lead to a variety of external factors completely unrelated to the quality of the work that can be used to manipulate key metric values. In addition, advancements in computing and data sciences field have further altered the meaning of impact on science.

The remainder of this paper will highlight recent advancements in both cultural and technological factors that now influence scientific impact as well as suggest new factors to be leveraged through full content analysis of publications….(More)”

Next big thing: The ‘uberfication’ of crowdsourced news

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ken Doctor at Politico: “Get ready to hear a lot about the “uberfication” of user-generated content.

Yes, it’s a mouthful. But it’s also the next big thing. Fresco News, a two-year-old New York start-up, sees itself becoming a hot property as it cracks the code on local amateur content generation….Fresco News now enables local TV stations to assign, receive and quickly get on air and online lots of amateur-shot newsy videos in their metro area.

Its secret sauce: Uberizing the supply chain process from station assignment to Fresco “qualified” shooter to shooting smartphone video to uploading and optimizing its quality for quick delivery to consumers, online or on the air.

Meyer’s team of 40, which includes numerous part-timers, has assiduously worked through the many frictions. That’s one hallmark of successful Uberfication.

“We just did a tremendous amount of just non-stop testing,” he says. “I would say, even with simple things like user acquisition, which is a major part of our process and entering new markets. We’ve tested hundreds of different ad types, graphics that we’ve designed internally that effectively, and I would say cheaply, bring in prospective citizen journalists.”

Stations can assign easily. Would-be shooters can see assignments, geographically displayed, on a single screen. The upload works well and stations’ ability to quickly use the videos is a strong selling point. Fresco, then, handles the billing and payment processes, much as Uber does.

As with once-taxi rides, individual transaction amounts compute small. Shooters get $50 for each video used by a TV station or $20 for a still photo. Stations pay $75 for a video and $30 for a still. As a standalone business, Fresco News is a scale play.

It’s not a new idea.

UGC – or user-generated content – was supposed to be huge. The late ’90s notion: the Internet could make anyone and everyone a reporter, and make it easy for them to share their work widely and cheaply. Many newspaper chains bought into the idea, and tested it unevenly, hoping that UGC could provide what was, for awhile called, “local-local” content. Local-local meaning neighborhood plus, that kind of locally differentiating news coverage that publishers thought readers wanted, but coverage publishers believed cost too much if they had to pay professional reporters to do it.

Short story: It didn’t work for the chains. In part, the technology was immature. More importantly, it turns out that reporting – and writing – remains, even the Internet age, largely a professional skill. Publishers couldn’t find enough dependable local amateurs, and besides, they never really iterated a business model around the idea.

Then, there were the national start-up efforts. NowPublic, one memorable one partnered with the Associated Press, launched in 2005 …but never found traction. Today, several other companies ply the territory, with Storyful a standard of quality. Importantly, Storyful focuses on national and global content. Fresco News aims squarely at local – first across the 3,000-mile breadth of the U.S.

The dots tell the story

Take a look at the many dots on the Philly map above. Each blue dot represents an active, signed-up Fresco video shooter in the area. Each yellow dot shows current assignments. In this August visualization, visually, you get a sense of quickly and energetically local TV station Fox 29, WTXF, has deployed – and uses – Fresco News.as earned “preferred” status at Fresco, has been around journalistic operations for a long time and looks forward to contributing news tips as Fresco might expand what its tech can do for local stations…(More)”

Leveraging Mixed Expertise in Crowdsourcing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dissertation by David Merritt: “Crowdsourcing systems promise to leverage the “wisdom of crowds” to help solve many kinds of problems that are difficult to solve using only computers. Although a crowd of people inherently represents a diversity of skill levels, knowledge, and opinions, crowdsourcing system designers typically view this diversity as noise and effectively cancel it out by aggregating responses. However, we believe that by embracing crowd workers’ diverse expertise levels, system designers can better leverage that knowledge to increase the wisdom of crowds. In this thesis, we propose solutions to a limitation of current crowdsourcing approaches: not accounting for a range of expertise levels in the crowd. The current body of work in crowdsourcing does not systematically examine this, suggesting that researchers may not believe the benefits of using mixed expertise warrants the complexities of supporting it. This thesis presents two systems, Escalier and Kurator, to show that leveraging mixed expertise is a worthwhile endeavor because it materially benefits system performance, at scale, for various types of problems. We also demonstrate an effective technique, called expertise layering, to incorporate mixed expertise into crowdsourcing systems. Finally, we show that leveraging mixed expertise enables researchers to use crowdsourcing to address new types of problems….(More)”

Social Machines: The Coming Collision of Artificial Intelligence, Social Networking, and Humanity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by James Hendler and Alice Mulvehill: “Will your next doctor be a human being—or a machine? Will you have a choice? If you do, what should you know before making it?

This book introduces the reader to the pitfalls and promises of artificial intelligence in its modern incarnation and the growing trend of systems to “reach off the Web” into the real world. The convergence of AI, social networking, and modern computing is creating an historic inflection point in the partnership between human beings and machines with potentially profound impacts on the future not only of computing but of our world.

AI experts and researchers James Hendler and Alice Mulvehill explore the social implications of AI systems in the context of a close examination of the technologies that make them possible. The authors critically evaluate the utopian claims and dystopian counterclaims of prognosticators. Social Machines: The Coming Collision of Artificial Intelligence, Social Networking, and Humanity is your richly illustrated field guide to the future of your machine-mediated relationships with other human beings and with increasingly intelligent machines.

What you’ll learn

• What the concept of a social machine is and how the activities of non-programmers are contributing to machine intelligence• How modern artificial intelligence technologies, such as Watson, are evolving and how they process knowledge from both carefully produced information (such as Wikipedia or journal articles) and from big data collections

• The fundamentals of neuromorphic computing

• The fundamentals of knowledge graph search and linked data as well as the basic technology concepts that underlie networking applications such as Facebook and Twitter

• How the change in attitudes towards cooperative work on the Web, especially in the younger demographic, is critical to the future of Web applications…(More)”

Designing the Next Generation of Open Data Policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Andrew Young and Stefaan Verhulst at the Open Data Charter Blog: “The international Open Data Charter has emerged from the global open data community as a galvanizing document to place open government data directly in the hands of citizens and organizations. To drive this process forward, and ensure that the outcomes are both systemic and transformational, new open data policy needs to be based on evidence of how and when open data works in practice. To support this work, the GovLab, in collaboration with Omidyar Network, has recently completed research which provides vital evidence of open data projects around the world, including an analysis of 19 in-depth, impact-focused case studies and a key findings paper. All of the research is now available in an eBook published by O’Reilly Media.

The research found that open data is making an impact in four core ways, including:…(More)”

Impact: How Law Affects Behavior

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Lawrence M. Friedman: “Laws and regulations are ubiquitous, touching on many aspects of individual and corporate behavior. But under what conditions are laws and rules actually effective? A huge amount of recent work in political science, sociology, economics, criminology, law, and psychology, among other disciplines, deals with this question. But these fields rarely inform one another, leaving the state of research disjointed and disorganized. Lawrence M. Friedman finds order in this cacophony. Impact gathers recent findings into one overarching analysis and lays the groundwork for a cohesive body of work in what Friedman labels “impact studies.”

The first important factor that has a bearing on impact is communication. A rule or law has no effect if it never reaches its intended audience. The public’s fund of legal knowledge, the clarity of the law, and the presence of information brokers all influence the flow of information from lawmakers to citizens. After a law is communicated, subjects sometimes comply, sometimes resist, and sometimes adjust or evade. Three clusters of motives help shape which reaction will prevail: first, rewards and punishments; second, peer group influences; and third, issues of conscience, legitimacy, and morality. When all of these factors move in the same direction, law can have a powerful impact; when they conflict, the outcome is sometimes unpredictable….(More)”

Crowdsourcing at Statistics Canada

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Pilot project by Statistics Canada: “Our crowdsourcing pilot project will focus on mapping buildings across Canada.

If you live in Ottawa or Gatineau, you can be among the first to collaborate with us. If you live elsewhere, stay in touch! Your town or city could be next. We are very excited to work with communities across the country on this project.

As a project contributor, you can help create a free and open source of information on commercial, industrial, government and other buildings in Canada. We need your support to close this important data gap! Your work will improve your community’s knowledge of its buildings, and in turn inform policies and programs designed to help you.

An eye on the future

There are currently no accurate national-level statistics on buildings— and their attributes—that can be used to compare specific local areas. The information you submit will help to fill existing data gaps and provide new analytical opportunities that are important to data users.

This project will also teach us about the possibilities and limitations of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing data collection may become a way for Statistics Canada and other organizations around the world to collect much-needed information by reaching out to citizens.

What you can do

Using your knowledge of your neighbourhood, along with an online mapping tool called OpenStreetMap, you and other members of the public will be able to input the location, physical attributes and other features of buildings.

It all starts with you, on October 17, 2016

We will officially launch the crowdsourcing campaign for the pilot on October 17, 2016 and will provide further instructions and links to resources.

To subscribe to a distribution list for periodic updates on the project, send us an email at [email protected]. We will keep you posted!….(More)”

How Technology is Crowd-Sourcing the Fight Against Hunger

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Beth Noveck at Media Planet: “There is more than enough food produced to feed everyone alive today. Yet access to nutritious food is a challenge everywhere and depends on getting every citizen involved, not just large organizations. Technology is helping to democratize and distribute the job of tackling the problem of hunger in America and around the world.

Real-time research

One of the hardest problems is the difficulty of gaining real-time insight into food prices and shortages. Enter technology. We no longer have to rely on professional inspectors slowly collecting information face-to-face. The UN World Food Programme, which provides food assistance to 80 million people each year, together with Nielsen is conducting mobile phone surveys in 15 countries (with plans to expand to 30), asking people by voice and text about what they are eating. Formerly blank maps are now filled in with information provided quickly and directly by the most affected people, making it easy to prioritize the allocation of resources.

Technology helps the information flow in both directions, enabling those in need to reach out, but also to become more effective at helping themselves. The Indian Ministry of Agriculture, in collaboration with Reuters Market Light, provides information services in nine Indian languages to 1.4 million registered farmers in 50,000 villages across 17 Indian states via text and voice messages.

“In the United States, 40 percent of the food produced here is wasted, and yet 1 in 4 American children (and 1 in 6 adults) remain food insecure…”

Data to the people

New open data laws and policies that encourage more transparent publication of public information complement data collection and dissemination technologies such as phones and tablets. About 70 countries and hundreds of regions and cities have adopted open data policies, which guarantee that the information these public institutions collect be available for free use by the public. As a result, there are millions of open datasets now online on websites such as the Humanitarian Data Exchange, which hosts 4,000 datasets such as country-by-country stats on food prices and undernourishment around the world.

Companies are compiling and sharing data to combat food insecurity, too. Anyone can dig into the data on the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition platform, a data collaborative where 300 private and public partners are sharing information.

Importantly, this vast quantity of open data is available to anyone, not only to governments. As a result, large and small entrepreneurs are able to create new apps and programs to combat food insecurity, such as Plantwise, which uses government data to offer a knowledge bank and run “plant clinics” that help farmers lose less of what they grow to pests. Google uses open government data to show people the location of farmers markets near their homes.

Students, too, can learn to play a role. For the second summer in a row, the Governance Lab at New York University, in partnership with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), mounted a two-week open data summer camp for 40 middle and high school students. The next generation of problem solvers is learning new data science skills by working on food safety and other projects using USDA open data.

Enhancing connection

Ultimately, technology enables greater communication and collaboration among the public, social service organizations, restaurants, farmers and other food producers who must work together to avoid food crises. The European Food Safety Authority in Italy has begun exploring how to use internet-based collaboration (often called citizen science or crowdsourcing) to get more people involved in food and feed risk assessment.

In the United States, 40 percent of the food produced here is wasted, and yet 1 in 4 American children (and 1 in 6 adults) remain food insecure, according to the Rockefeller Foundation. Copia, a San Francisco based smartphone app facilitates donations and deliveries of those with excess food in six cities in the Bay Area. Zero Percent in Chicago similarly attacks the distribution problem by connecting restaurants to charities to donate their excess food. Full Harvest is a tech platform that facilitates the selling of surplus produce that otherwise would not have a market.

Mobilizing the world

Prize-backed challenges create the incentives for more people to collaborate online and get involved in the fight against hunger….(More)”