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"Working on the assumption that large groups of public non-experts can be trained to recognize infectious diseases with the accuracy of trained pathologists, researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA have created a crowd-sourced online gaming system in which players distinguish malaria-infected red blood cells from healthy ones by viewing digital images obtained from microscopes."
"So how quickly can a crowd be put into action.?That's the question tackled today by Michael Bernstein at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and a few pals.
In the past, these guys have found ways to bring a crowd to bear in about two seconds. That's quick. But the reaction time is limited to how quickly a worker responds to an alert.
Now these guys say they've find a way to reduce the reaction time to 500 milliseconds--that's effectively realtime. A system with a half second latency could turn crowdsourcing into a very different kind of resource.
The idea that Bernstein and co have come up with is straightforward. These guys simply "precruit" a crowd and keep them on standby until a task becomes available. Effectively, they're paying workers a retainer so that they are available immediately when needed"
"Cookies and web trackers are constantly monitoring our online lives. But who are the big players tracking us? Help us to identify them and we'll reveal what they're doing with our data"
"We must therefore find another criterion, which I think is the motivated crowds. People who work on Wikipedia … are not the indiscriminate crowd [but] are the part of the crowd who feels motivated to work with Wikipedia. Here it is: I’d replace the theory of the “wisdom of the crowd” with the theory of the “wisdom of the motivated crowds.” The general crowd says we should not pay taxes; the motivated crowd says that it’s fair to pay them. In fact, it’s not the ditch diggers or illiterates who contribute to Wikipedia, but people who already belong to a cultural crowd for the very fact they’re using a computer."
"It all hinges upon whether the answer to a question is demonstrable or not. If it is demonstrable, then an expert who knows the answer can prove that he does so by using logic or evidence, and non-experts will defer to him. Consultation will then work, simply by virtue of bringing expertise into play.
But some knowledge is non-demonstrable. The expert might be able to distinguish between Klee and Kandinsky, but he’ll find it harder to demonstrate his expertise to laymen than, say, a mathematician will be able to demonstrate that he knows the solution to an equation. And where knowledge is non-demonstrable, people might follow false experts."
"regular event with the Biochemical Society exploring science online. Last week, we had one on science and hobbies, a combination that doesn't need the web to come about, but is arguably facilitated by it. I know the word 'hobby' seemed a bit off-puttingly folksy for some, but I wanted to capture the difference between doing or talking about science for a living, and doing/ talking about science in one's spare time. Fully aware that this divide isn't clear cut, I thought the topic would generate debate. I think it did."
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What counts as value in citizen science? One of the audience members gave the example of a crowd-sourced citizen research project run by their university, where they realised that it would have been cheaper just to employ a single professional to do the work, largely because it all had to be checked by an expert anyway. One response was that this argument relies largely on the idea that the outcome being funded is purely research. If it is engagement too (and you count citizen involvement as engagement, not just free labour), then maybe it’s a false comparison.
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Do we need to consider the ethics of citizen science? In many ways, this follows on from above. If a citizen research project could have just employed a professional academic, are they robbing someone of a job? One of the reasons science became professionalised was to allow people who were not independently wealthy make a living from it. We have seen similar tensions around journalism and music. We might equally ask whether citizen science projects like those run by the Zooniverse simply exploit their members for free labour
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