Signe Brewster at Gigaom: “Since its formation in 2007, Noisebridge has grown from a few people meeting in coffee shops to an overflowing space on Mission Street where members can pursue projects that even the maddest scientist would approve of…. When Noisebridge opened the doors of its first hackerspace location in San Francisco’s Mission district in 2008, it had nothing but a large table and few chairs found on the street.
Today, it looks like a mad scientist has been methodically hoarding tools, inventions, art, supplies and a little bit of everything else for five years. The 350 people who come through Noisebridge each week have a habit of leaving a mark, whether by donating a tool or building something that other visitors add to bit by bit. Anyone can be a paid member or a free user of the space, and over the years they have built it into a place where you can code, sew, hack hardware, cook, build robots, woodwork, learn, teach and more.
The members really are mad scientists. Anything left out in the communal spaces is fair game to “hack into a giant robot,” according to co-founder Mitch Altman. Members once took a broken down wheelchair and turned it into a brainwave-controlled robot named M.C. Hawking. Another person made pants with a built-in keyboard. The Spacebridge group has sent high altitude balloons to near space, where they captured gorgeous videos of the Earth. And once a month, the Vegan Hackers teach their pupils how to make classic fare like sushi and dumplings out of vegan ingredients….”
Using Crowdsourcing In Government
Daren C. Brabham for IBM Center for The Business of Government: “The growing interest in “engaging the crowd” to identify or develop innovative solutions to public problems has been inspired by similar efforts in the commercial world. There, crowdsourcing has been successfully used to design innovative consumer products or solve complex scientific problems, ranging from custom-designed T-shirts to mapping genetic DNA strands.
The Obama administration, as well as many state and local governments, have been adapting these crowdsourcing techniques with some success. This report provides a strategic view of crowdsourcing and identifies four specific types:
- Type 1: Knowledge Discovery and Management. Collecting knowledge reported by an on-line community, such as the reporting of earth tremors or potholes to a central source.
- Type 2: Distributed Human Intelligence Tasking. Distributing “micro-tasks” that require human intelligence to solve, such as transcribing handwritten historical documents into electronic files.
- Type 3: Broadcast Search. Broadcasting a problem-solving challenge widely on the internet and providing an award for solution, such as NASA’s prize for an algorithm to predict solar flares
- Type 4: Peer-Vetted Creative Production. Creating peer-vetted solutions, where an on-line community both proposes possible solutions and is empowered to collectively choose among the solutions.
By understanding the different types, which require different approaches, public managers will have a better chance of success. Dr. Brabham focuses on the strategic design process rather than on the specific technical tools that can be used for crowdsourcing. He sets forth ten emerging best practices for implementing a crowdsourcing initiative.”
Collaboration In Biology's Century
Todd Sherer, Chief Executive Officer of The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, in Forbes: “he problem is, we all still work in a system that feeds on secrecy and competition. It’s hard enough work just to dream up win/win collaborative structures; getting them off the ground can feel like pushing a boulder up a hill. Yet there is no doubt that the realities of today’s research environment — everything from the accumulation of big data to the ever-shrinking availability of funds — demand new models for collaboration. Call it “collaboration 2.0.”…I share a few recent examples in the hope of increasing the reach of these initiatives, inspiring others like them, and encouraging frank commentary on how they’re working.
Open-Access Data
The successes of collaborations in the traditional sense, coupled with advanced techniques such as genomic sequencing, have yielded masses of data. Consortia of clinical sites around the world are working together to collect and characterize data and biospecimens through standardized methods, leading to ever-larger pools — more like Great Lakes — of data. Study investigators draw their own conclusions, but there is so much more to discover than any individual lab has the bandwidth for….
Crowdsourcing
A great way to grow engagement with resources you’re willing to share? Ask for it. Collaboration 2.0 casts a wide net. We dipped our toe in the crowdsourcing waters earlier this year with our Parkinson’s Data Challenge, which asked anyone interested to download a set of data that had been collected from PD patients and controls using smart phones. …
Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration 2.0
The more we uncover about the interconnectedness and complexity of the human system, the more proof we are gathering that findings and treatments for one disease may provide invaluable insights for others. We’ve seen some really intriguing crosstalk between the Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease research communities recently…
The results should be: More ideas. More discovery. Better health.”
A collaborative way to get to the heart of 3D printing problems
PSFK: “Because most of us only see the finished product when it comes to 3D printing projects – it’s easy to forget that things can, and do, go wrong when it comes to this miracle technology.
3D printing is constantly evolving, reaching exciting new heights, and touching every industry you can think of – but all this progress has left a trail of mangled plastic, and a devastated machines in it’s wake.
The Art of 3D Print Failure is a Flickr group that aims to document this failure, because after all, mistakes are how we learn, and how we make sure the same thing doesn’t happen the next time around. It can also prevent mistakes from happening to those who are new to 3D printing, before they even make them!”
Smartphones As Weather Surveillance Systems
Tom Simonite in MIT Technology Review: “You probably never think about the temperature of your smartphone’s battery, but it turns out to provide an interesting method for tracking outdoor air temperature. It’s a discovery that adds to other evidence that mobile apps could provide a new way to measure what’s happening in the atmosphere and improve weather forecasting.
Startup OpenSignal, whose app crowdsources data on cellphone reception, first noticed in 2012 that changes in battery temperature correlated with those outdoors. On Tuesday, they published a scientific paper on that technique in a geophysics journal and announced that the technique will be used to interpret data from a weather crowdsourcing app. OpenSignal originally started collecting data on battery temperatures to try and understand the connections between signal strength and how quickly a device chews through its battery.
OpenSignal’s crowdsourced weather-tracking effort joins another accidentally enabled by smartphones. A project called PressureNET that collects air pressure data by taking advantage of the fact many Android phones have a barometer inside to aid their GPS function (see “App Feeds Scientists Atmospheric Data From Thousands of Smartphones”). Cliff Mass, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington, is working to incorporate PressureNET data into weather models that usually rely on data from weather stations. He believes that smartphones could provide valuable data from places where there are no weather stations, if enough people start sharing data using apps like PressureNET.
Other research suggests that logging changes in cell network signal strength perceived by smartphones could provide yet more weather data. In February researchers in the Netherlands produced detailed maps of rainfall compiled by monitoring fluctuations in the signal strength measured by cellular network masts, caused by water droplets in the atmosphere.”
We the People Update
Washington Post: “The White House launched the We The People petition site in 2011 as a way for Americans to get their government to respond to their calls for action. On the digital platform, people can create and sign petitions seeking specific action on an issue from the federal government. In theory, once a petition has garnered a certain number of signatures within a certain time frame, it is reviewed by White House staff and receives an official response.
But that’s not always what happens.
Now a new site, www.whpetitions.info, takes its own tally and highlights petitions that have received enough signatures but have not received responses. By its count, the White House has responded to 87 percent of petitions that have met their signature thresholds with an average response time of 61 days. But the average waiting time so far for the 30 unanswered petitions is 240 days. And six of them have been waiting for over a year.”
Behold: A Digital Bill of Rights for the Internet, by the Internet
Mashable: “The digital rights conversation was thrust into the mainstream spotlight after news of ongoing, widespread mass surveillance programs leaked to the public. Always a hot topic, these revelations sparked a strong online debate among the Internet community.
It also made us here at Mashable reflect on the digital freedoms and protections we feel each user should be guaranteed as a citizen of the Internet. To highlight some of the great conversations taking place about digital rights online, we asked the digital community to collaborate with us on the creation of a crowdsourced Digital Bill of Rights.
After six weeks of public discussions, document updates and changes, as well as incorporating input from digital rights experts, Mashable is pleased to unveil its first-ever Digital Bill of Rights, made for the Internet, by the Internet.”
A Videogame That Recruits Players to Map the Brain
Wired: “I’m no neuroscientist, and yet, here I am at my computer attempting to reconstruct a neural circuit of a mouse’s retina. It’s not quite as difficult and definitely not as boring as it sounds. In fact, it’s actually pretty fun, which is a good thing considering I’m playing a videogame.
Called EyeWire, the browser-based game asks players to map the connections between retinal neurons by coloring in 3-D slices of the brain. Much like any other game out there, being good at EyeWire earns you points, but the difference is that the data you produce during gameplay doesn’t just get you on a leader board—it’s actually used by scientists to build a better picture of the human brain.
Created by neuroscientist Sebastian Seung’s lab at MIT, EyeWire basically gamifies the professional research Seung and his collaborators do on a daily basis. Seung is studying the connectome, the hyper-complex tangle of connections among neurons in the brain.”
Big data, crowdsourcing and machine learning tackle Parkinson’s
Successful Workingplace: “Parkinson’s is a very tough disease to fight. People suffering from the disease often have significant tremors that keep them from being able to create accurate records of their daily challenges. Without this information, doctors are unable to fine tune drug dosages and other treatment regimens that can significantly improve the lives of sufferers.
It was a perfect catch-22 situation until recently, when the Michael J. Fox Foundation announced that LIONsolver, a company specializing in machine learning software, was able to differentiate Parkinson’s patients from healthy individuals and to also show the trend in symptoms of the disease over time.…
To set up the competition, the Foundation worked with Kaggle, an organization that specializes in crowdsourced big data analysis competitions. The use of crowdsourcing as a way to get to the heart of very difficult Big Data problems works by allowing people the world over from a myriad of backgrounds and with diverse experiences to devote time on personally chosen challenges where they can bring the most value. It’s a genius idea for bringing some of the scarcest resources together with the most intractable problems.”
Can We Build A Kickstarter For Cancer?
Paul Howard in Forbes: “tarting you own band, writing your first novel, or re-publishing your favorite ‘80s tabletop RPG are all cool goals. You can do them all on Kickstarter. What would be cooler?
How about funding a virtual biotech company with one goal: Saving or extending the life of a cancer patient who doesn’t respond to “standard of care” treatments….
The Cancer Commons approach – a distributed framework for empowering patients and learning from every patient/treatment combination – breaks down traditional distinctions between clinical trials and patient treatment in the “real world.” Instead of developing treatments in a lab and then testing them on randomized patients in clinical trials (designed to benefit future patients), researchers would apply the latest scientific knowledge and tools to help each patient achieve the best possible outcome today based on what we know – or think we can predict – about a molecular subtype of cancer….
We’ll need more than money to power a Kickstarter-for-cancer movement. We’ll need to encourage companies – from Big Pharma to “small” biotechs – to participate in distributed, Bayesian trials where new biomarkers or combinations of biomarkers are tested in patients with particular molecular profiles. And the FDA is going to have to be convinced that the system is going to generate high quality data that benefits patients, not sell them snake-oil cures.
In return for companies making their compound libraries and experimental drugs available for the “virtual biotechs” launched by cancer patients and their families, there should be a regulatory path established to take the most promising drugs and drug combinations to market.”