Crowdsourcing part II

Posted on March 30, 2011 by gydle

A few days ago, I wrote a post about smartphones and traffic jams. Pretty soon, thanks to billions of anonymous bits of data flying all over the place, you won’t have to get stuck on the freeway or wait in line at Disneyland ever again. I have since learned that the smartphone stuff was just the tip of the crowdsourcing iceberg. Down below the penguins and their migratory traffic jams, the iceberg is gargantuan. It boggles the mind. We’re like the Titanic, most of us. Blissfully unaware.

Way back in 1999, UC Berkeley started tapping into the unused processing power of home computers all over the world to scan radio waves for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Currently, more than 3 million people are involved in the SETI@home project, doing their little bit to locate aliens. CERN also uses volunteer-based distributed computing to crunch its enormous particle physics data sets, a task that would constipate even the biggest, baddest supercomputer in the world. The rise of the internet has been nirvana-like for people in charge of iterative tasks like these that can be distributed, calculated remotely, and then reassembled into some meaningful form at the other end. All that computer power for free! You don’t have to put an expensive IBM petaflop supercomputer into your project budget, you just have to convince a lot of people (a crowd!) that volunteering the unused processing power on their PCs is a cool thing to do.

I could get my mind around this. The next step should have been obvious to me. But it happened so subtly it didn’t even register. Until my smartphone epiphany, that is.

Computers are great for a lot of things. Give a network of computers a number, an equation, a set of parameters, and they crunch away happily. A symbolic smorgasbord. A banquet of bits. A few more dimensions? Ten thousand more iterations? Not a problem. Computers don’t sleep, have sex, demand respect, drink coffee, or take sick leave. They won’t join a union, have babies or demand yearly pay increases. And when those computers all belong to other people, you don’t even have to pay for it. How great is that?

But unfortunately there are quite a few things computers can’t do very well. They can’t identify faces, emotions, words and images from partial or incomplete samples. They don’t get when something’s funny. They’re unable to recognize and capture beauty in music, art, dance or photography.

The human brain – even the most average, run-of-the-mill, McDonald’s eating, MTV-watching brain – can do things no computer on the planet can do, and all on the power of a 60-watt lightbulb. Such a terrible waste! All those brains out there, operating at a fraction of their potential. All that valuable processing power squandered on mundane tasks like navel gazing and Facebook.

What if you could find a way to connect all those brains, get them to communicate and interact without having to be in physical proximity? Get them to join a global network of some kind? Now that would be a truly formidable source of information processing, a machine that could handle just about any problem. Uh, wait a sec…

And that, my friends, is the essence of crowd-sourcing.

I have seen the future and it is the iceberg.

In case you still don’t get it, here are a few examples.

Wikipedia. The classic. Why hire a bunch of encyclopedia writers when the world is full of experts who will write copy for free? And in case they make mistakes, there are more experts out there to correct their copy for free? Wikipedia is a crowd of know-it-alls. And the information it contains is being constantly refined.

iStockphoto. Why pay a photographer hundreds of dollars for the rights to use a photo when the world is full of excellent amateur photographers who would be ecstatic to sell their shots online for a dollar?

Citizen science. Why pay for those grad students when the world is full of geeks that will do your gruntwork for free? Identifying protein folding patterns was turned into a game called Foldit, in which volunteers outperform computers consistently. In Galaxy Zoo people look at images of outer space and classify the galaxies they see in them. You build up a “reputation” for how accurate you are. Several novel structures have been discovered this way, such as a “weird green thing” (Dave’s description) called Hanny’s Voorwerp. Herbaria@home taps into the British armchair naturalist crowd to document the vast numbers of plant specimens held in the UK’s herbaria. “Documenting large herbarium collections is an extremely labour-intensive task and most museum collections are woefully under-funded.” You get the picture.

Corporate R&D. Why pay for an expensive R&D department if you can avoid it? Companies like Boeing, DuPont, Procter & Gamble and Eli Lilly post their most intractable scientific problems on a website called InnoCentive, which anyone can join for a small fee. The companies (“seekers”) pay anywhere from $10,000 – $100,000 per solution. More than 30% of the problems have reportedly been cracked, “which is 30 percent more than would have been solved using a traditional, in-house approach,” said InnoCentive’s chief scientific officer Jill Panetta. And just think of all the money they’ve saved not having to shell out for health insurance benefits!

CAPTCHA. I like this one the most. Say it aloud. Isn’t it clever? It stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. Whenever you are asked to type squiggly, hard-to-read words in order to verify that you are a human being and not an evil, webtrolling, spamming bot, you are solving a CAPTCHA. It turns out that a lot of the words in these images are from old documents that have been scanned for archiving. Computers parse the images, turning them into digital text, which takes up a lot less room. But often the computers can’t decipher the images. From the reCAPTCHA website:

About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

When you are asked to solve a two-word CAPTCHA like the one in the picture, the first word is already known and the second word is one that a computer hasn’t been able to read. If you get the first one right, then they figure you’ve got the second one right, too. The image is sent out to lots of people to statistically verify that your answer is correct. I bet you didn’t know you were being crowd-sourced when you typed in those words. I sure didn’t.

Combine spam protection with 150,000 hours of free human optical recognition processing per day. That has got to be the ultimate win-win.

Crowdsourcing takes impossible tasks and turns them into games, contests, and time-fillers for millions of under-occupied neocortexes around the world. I once read an article about an eccentric genius who claimed he wanted to build “the game layer on top of the world.” I thought, “huh?” Now I think he might be onto something. Where is it written that we have to spend our waking hours doing things we think are boring and unsatisfying? Life’s a game. Join the crowd.

My brother Dave (who started all this) said, “You could become wealthy if you could figure out how to use crowdsoursing for tranbslation.”

“Or spelling,” I replied.

The best post yet

Posted on March 28, 2011 by gydle

Titles are important. I rarely stoop to judging a book by its cover, but I don’t hesitate to judge them by their titles. I once even wrote an essay for the campus newspaper about how I bought Al Gore’s book The Assault on Reason just because it didn’t have a subtitle. If you want to read that particular piece I added it to the blog here. Why I thought the campus community would find my obsession with titles and subtitles in any way interesting kind of baffles me now. Never mind! Move on.

In my days as a university press officer, I wrote tons of titles. Titles for press releases, news items, web pages, brochures, slogans. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of finding the perfect title. It captures the gist of the article or whatever it is you’ve written, it’s short, succinct, and has a catchy lilt to it. You know the reader will be dying to read on, and your painstakingly crafted prose won’t just be skimmed over like so much whey in a cheese vat.

Title writing is tricky, though. If the magnificent title bears little resemblance to the content that follows it (see above title), you lose credibility. If that becomes a habit, your byline won’t be worth squat. If you go the other direction and write a really detailed, careful, accurate-as-can-be title, chances are it will be as catchy as a nosebleed and the reader won’t bother to go any further.

I still get daily e-mail alerts from a press release service (Newswise) I used when working at the university. A couple weeks ago, this title caught my eye:

Giant Extinct Rabbit was the King of Minorca

What a title! I was dying to read more about this extraordinary rabbit and how he could be king and extinct at the same time, but the release was under embargo for a week, meaning that only card-carrying, bonafide journalists had access to it. Time flew by, I flew to California. The embargo was lifted. Finally I had the chance to read the press release. It was great! Chock full of exclamation points!

“This massive rabbit, aptly named the Minorcan King of the Rabbits (Nuralagus rex), weighed in at 12 kg (26.4 lbs)!”

“When I found the first bone I was 19 years old, I was not aware what this bone represented. I thought it was a bone of the giant Minorcan turtle!”

Sure, anyone could have made that mistake! Totally understandable! Wait, do turtles have big bones?

The rabbit’s neighbors subjects included “a bat, a large dormouse, and the above-mentioned giant tortoise.” The big bunny had lost the ability to hop, and had reduced visual and hearing acuity, according to the release. “So although it might be assumed that this rabbit must have had huge ears, that would be wrong; N. rex had relatively diminutive ears for its size.”

So let me sum it up: 3-5 million years ago an overweight rabbit lived on the island of Minorca. It was unable to hop, nearly blind and deaf, and had some odd but probably cute neighbors. In the late twentieth century a teenager dug up its leg bone, thinking it was a turtle. Some taxonomist determined it was in fact a rabbit, thought its size was incredible and named it Rex.

The paleontologist was ecstatic. “Quintana is so excited about his new find he thinks N. rex might even make a good island mascot, ‘I would like to use N. rex to lure students and visitors to Minorca!’”

Well, I’m tempted. I’d take a shovel. Maybe I’d get lucky and dig up the remains of a giant toothless beaver that couldn’t swim.

Other writers got a kick out of this, too, because they had a field day with their own titles. Here are a few:

Giant Rabbit Fossil Found: Biggest Bunny was “Roly Poly” (National Geographic)
Five-million-year-old monster bunny couldn’t hop (NewScientist)
Newly Discovered Pre-historic Bunnies are Totally Creepy (Hypervocal blog)
Bigs Bunny: How giant rabbits SIX times the size of modern cousins limped across the earth … as they were too huge to hop (Daily Mail)

Here’s another classic title I saw the other day:
Social Media Help Moms Keep Their Hair

I read the release – well, ok, the first paragraph – and no, it has nothing whatsoever to do with postpartum baldness. There are people who really tear out their hair, it’s a kind of obsessive-compulsive-type disorder called trichotillomania, but the article isn’t about that, either. It’s just about how Facebook is great for moms because you can still have adult interaction and nobody can see that you’re still wearing last week’s sweats and snacking on the kids’ goldfish (the crackers, not real fish. Yuck.). Social media as the ultimate solution to the Bad Hair Day.

There is so much (or so little) in a title.

Al Gore and subtitle fatigue

Posted on March 26, 2011 by gydle

(Originally written for the EPFL campus newspaper, the Flash).

Al Gore’s new book, The Assault on Reason, is out: I’m buying it immediately if only to vote with my wallet for a non-fiction book without a colon and a subtitle. Last week’s New York Times Book Review was riddled with colons like a kid with the chicken pox. The Atomic Bazaar: the Rise of the Nuclear Poor; or how about Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years; or Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy; and perhaps the best, Ralph Ellison: A biography. What, it’s not Ralph Ellison:the Cookbook?

Am I the only one with colon fatigue? Continue reading →

Crowd Pleasing

Posted on March 23, 2011 by gydle

On a ride into San Francisco one day my brother pulls out his smartphone, hooks it into a cradle on the dashboard. So let’s check out the traffic on Google maps! Up pops the live traffic situation — the freeway is green if it’s smooth sailing, yellow if it’s slow and – 10 points if you can guess the color – if it’s stop-and-go.

How do they figure that out? Does the satellite look down, count the number of cars or their speed, judge the traffic flow, and upload the color? No, Dave tells me, it’s a clever app that takes advantage of the fact that most Californians have two things in common: they have GPS-enabled smartphones and they’re obsessed with avoiding traffic jams. Here’s an explanation of how it works from an official Google blog back in August 2009:

When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you’re moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions.

Continue reading →

Garden Delights

Posted on March 16, 2011 by gydle

The daffodils are out this week. Spring is officially here. Never mind the groundhog (probably took one look and said “Okay, bad dream, back to bed.”). When the daffodils bloom it’s time to put the skis away and start buying tulips for the coffee table.

Tip: if you put a penny in the vase, the tulips won’t wilt.

I have a bit of a fraught relationship with the plant world. My mother and my sister are plant fanatics – on family hikes they’d constantly be stopping to identify flowers. If you saw an orchid, the day was made. My sister has since made a fantastic career out of the activity, traipsing around in jungles and deserts and swamps in search of stuff that nobody has named yet and getting it on the books before it’s too late. She’s amazing. We’ll be on a walk somewhere, and she’ll suddenly screech and bend down and dig out some tiny miniscule clump of moss or something and say, “Look! Microlittleus mossiporous! I haven’t seen this since 1986 on my trip to eastern Timbuktu!” while prying the poor little thing’s innards apart and examining them avidly. No, you can’t just walk from point A to point B with these types. The ground is literally covered with distractions.

As a teenager, I wanted nothing to do with this, naturally. I decided that it wasn’t the name of the thing that was important, or how rare it was, but how it made me feel. Why should I appreciate an orchid more than skunk cabbage? Wasn’t that a form of prejudice? Skunk cabbage is elegant! Just because something is rare doesn’t make it better, does it? Why is a pigeon a nuisance and a peregrine falcon a wonder? Both poop on city window ledges. I felt that looking at individual flowers and classing them away into neat categories missed the big picture, somehow. Of course, I probably just wanted to hike without having to stop every ten feet and hear “Oh! Look! Spotted mugwort!” “Umm, I’m not sure. See this leaf? It could be spotted hareweed. We should check. Get the book – right hand pocket –“

Come to think of it, I wonder if my decision to major in philosophy in college might not have originated in this adolescent fulmination against arranging nature into neatly-labeled categories.

Clearly, if there was a family plant-appreciation gene, I didn’t inherit it. There are a few varieties that I manage to keep from killing – they’re the ones labeled “hardy” at the nursery. The poor plant in our study has been dead for at least a year. It stays there, listing gently to one side, a constant reminder to me to water the other, luckier specimens downstairs.

I didn’t compensate for my botanical deficiencies through marriage, either. My husband’s idea of gardening is opening the phone book to “landscaping”. “We need to keep the economy moving, Mary,” he’ll say. He’s one of the only people I know who can make shirking a job look like public service.

When we moved into our house three years ago and had to plan a garden from scratch, I wanted a garden that took care of itself. The landscapers put loads of little baby plants in, promising me they’d cover the ground eventually, and then left. I spent the next two years in an all-out war with the hordes of weeds that invaded my vulnerable little plantings. The first two tons of weeds were kind of rewarding. I’d yank the things out by the roots, pleased with myself for knowing what was a weed and what wasn’t, pile them in the car and haul them out to the village dump. But soon every time I went out the front door I’d see weeds. Everywhere. There is one kind that won’t pull out. It breaks off at the base, leaving the roots to sprout new leaves. It drives me mad. I’ll be going out for a jog, and I won’t get past the driveway. I go back for a trowel, just to get that one weed. Then I see another. Then another. Pretty soon there’s a pile two feet wide on the driveway and I have a killer backache. I have to go in and get a beer and recuperate.

Two years ago, I decided that we needed a vegetable garden. I hired a gardener to pile up a bunch of dirt on a patch of grass, and planted carrots, lettuce, arugula, zucchini, tomatoes, and snowpeas. I bought a cheap compost bin and put it next to the garden. This was good! I was growing food! I could be a gardener. We would have juicy, red tomatoes, fresh lettuce from the garden in the evenings, zucchini, it would all be so healthy and so free. (Even after six years here, I still reel at the prices in the Swiss supermarkets.)

Nobody else showed the least interest in either the garden or the vegetables. When I came home after a visit to the US, the beautiful little cherry tomatoes were rotting on the vines, their poor stems choked with weeds, the snowpeas dessicated and crumbling, the lettuce sporting very unlettucy-looking flower stalks, the leaves all gone leathery and tough. The zucchini was the size of my lower leg.

Oddly enough, I couldn’t bring myself to care that much. I took a picture of Luc holding the gargantuan zucchini and then did damage control. I didn’t reproach them. I honestly think they don’t even see the garden. It just doesn’t register. Last summer I managed to get Brendan to mow the lawn in exchange for money. But for the most part, it’s just me versus the garden.

My neighbor makes it all look so effortless. She has planted her garden without the help of landscapers, bit by bit, as she has been inspired. Tons of amazing flowers bloom all the time. She has raspberries. Rosemary. Sage. It’s all so beautiful. She can go to the nursery and come home with just the right plant, put it in just the right place, and it will thrive. She can be gone for weeks at a time in the summer, and the garden looks just fine. I go to the nursery, wander the aisles, get overwhelmed with the possibilities, unable to picture anything at all in my own garden, leave with a packet of basil seeds (thinking about pesto), go home and curl up on the couch with a book. I leave for three days and weeds the size of baby redwoods sprout on the south-facing slope.

Oscar came today, to do a little spring pruning. I am amazed at how hardy these plants are. We didn’t have much of a winter this year, but we had some good snowfalls in December and many days below freezing. Nonetheless, the parsley is thriving and the lavender along the street is looking like it will survive, even though I pruned it way too late last summer. The garden looks like it might forgive me, once again, for my ignorance and ineptitude.

The daffodils, bless them, come up every year, no matter what I do. They’re the best part of the garden – the miracle of matter from nothing but sunlight and water, the promise of warmth and color and beauty – and most importantly, there’s as yet no indication of the weeds and chaos that will take over the garden (and my psyche) in the weeks to come. Time to gear up for another season of gardening!

Aftershocks

Posted on March 12, 2011 by gydle

The world feels so unstable. The earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan, the volcanoes coming to life in Hawaii. Here in Switzerland, someone I barely knew but had hoped to see again soon passed away in the night. How can that happen? Now I will never know her. All that she had not yet said, not yet done, not yet written, will never come to be.

My teenagers are moving into their own lives. I’m racked with doubt. Did I do what needed to be done? I’m standing at the side of the road, watching them head off, full of hope and trepidation. I want to go with them, patch up their problems, organize their backpacks, take inventory of the contents of their hearts. But I can’t. This is their road to take, not mine. Continue reading →

Toilet Talk

Posted on March 11, 2011 by gydle

I have some good news and some bad news. Bad news first.

Like me, you probably missed World Toilet Day, which was November 19, 2010. This was also the day that an outfit called FINISH launched a contest for creating new and improved sanitation systems for rural India. And now you’ve missed the contest deadline, too, which was February 28.

Now here’s the good news.

Continue reading →

Placebo

Posted on March 10, 2011 by gydle

“They can conquer who believe they can…” – Virgil (70 BC – 19 BC)

I started to write a long complicated post about placebos yesterday, because 1) I was worrying that this blog was in need of some Legitimate Content, 2) I am really interested in the placebo effect and 3) my brother Dave chose it when I gave him a choice between placebos, a juicy local murder mystery and a post about attention span. (I’m not entirely sure he paid attention long enough to get past the first choice…) Continue reading →

In Praise of Violists

Posted on March 7, 2011 by gydle

For the past few months, I’ve been playing in a small chamber orchestra that rehearses in a teeny little town near the French border called Collex. It’s a forty-minute drive from where I live, which for Switzerland is quite a trek. Tonight we have a concert in the village’s community center. You’re probably wondering what instrument I play. Well, I’ll give you a hint. It is the butt of an obscene number of jokes in the musical world, and it’s not the oboe. Continue reading →

Just Say No

Posted on March 4, 2011 by gydle

Will I never learn?

It’s happened again. Someone I’ve never met who is now working for my ex-boss has an Important Document that needs to be translated, it’s grippingly interesting, really, there’s just this one thing… it’s a tome with an undisclosed number of pages (I am in possession of “chapter 2” which is already 28 pages long) and needs to be done by next Friday. Continue reading →

Gydle

Monthly Archives: March 2011