Luis von Ahn: Massive-scale online collaboration

Cairns Blog: Crowdsourcing Governance [Video intro ends at 52 seconds; Intro by Dr. Gref ends at 2'18; Speech ends at 11'15; then Q&A] For Prime Minister Putin's presentation, click here. Crowdsourcing Governance We’ve heard today that as individuals we are smarter collaborating together than working alone. That is as true for institutions as it is for individuals. Here's How People Look at Your Facebook Profile When potential dates, employers and friends glance at your online social profiles, what do they see? EyeTrackShop, a startup that runs eye-tracking studies for advertisers, helped Mashable find out by applying its technology to the profile pages of popular social networks. The study used the webcams of 30 participants to record their eye movements as they were shown profile pages from Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Klout, Reddit, Digg, Tumblr, Twitter, StumbleUpon and Pinterest at 10-second intervals. What participants looked at on each page and in what order is recorded in the images below. It's not a perfect study.

Crowdsourcing improves predictive texting - tech - 25 February 2012 SMARTPHONES may soon get a lot better at finishing your sentences for you - with the help of words and phrases gleaned from crowdsourcing. The software packages in today's phones often struggle with texts and voice commands if a user attempts words or phrases that aren't included in the phone's database. To see if the crowd could help, Keith Vertanen of Montana Tech in Butte and Per Ola Kristensson at the University of St Andrews, UK, called upon workers of the Amazon Mechanical Turk. The plan was to try and improve a predictive system used in Augmented and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices, which help disabled people to communicate by painstakingly typing out words interpreted from their muscle twitches or blinks.

World’s largest 3D artwork hits the streets of London If you’ve ever felt like you wanted the ground to open up and swallow you, then check out this video of digital street art at Canary Wharf’s Quayside. Artist duo ’3D Joe & Max’ collaborated with Reebok CrossFit to create an outdoor workout space where you might want to tread carefully. Deep crevasses, cliff overhangs and plunging waterfalls made up this 12,490.441 square feet work of art, setting the Guinness World Record for both the largest and longest 3D painting. Now if only the gym could have this added extra dimension, we might be more inclined to go. SparkNotes Graphing calculator with algebra. Essential tool for school and college. Replaces bulky and expensive handheld graphing calculators. Multiple functions on a graph, polar graphs, graphing of implicit functions, values and slopes, roots, extremes, intersections. Algebra: polynomials, polynomial equation solving, matrices, fractions, derivatives, complex numbers and more. Shows results as you type.

Solver Develops Solution to Help Clean Up Remaining Oil From the 1989 Exxon Valdez Disaster Boston, MA and Cordova, AK - November 7, 2007 - InnoCentive, the leader in prize-based Open Innovation sourcing, is helping to make a positive impact on Environmental Conservation by working with the Oil Spill Recovery Institute (OSRI) and other conservation groups. OSRI has posted 3 Challenges on the InnoCentive website, all dealing with oil spill recovery issues. The first of these challenges was solved last week by an oil industry outsider who used his expertise in the concrete industry to come up with the winning solution. Best and worst stereoscopic 3D console games It sometimes seems that the only time people talk about 3D TV lately is to knock it . The much-hyped 3D revolution hasn't exactly set the world on fire after it kicked off at CES 2010, and even though plenty of new television sets are 3D compatible, the actual amount of 3D content available remains slim (and with 3D losing its luster at the box office, it may become slimmer still). One possible exception is stereoscopic 3D video games , currently supported by both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Stereoscopic 3D feels like a perfect fit for this technology, which hypothetically only needs to render the 3D information already present in nearly every game (with the exception of, for example, 2D side-scrolling games). On the PC side, stereoscopic 3D has been around for several years, thanks to Nvidia's 3D Vision platform, which uses compatible hardware and active shutter 3D glasses to enable you to at least try and play almost any PC game.

Microwork Microwork is a series of small tasks which together comprise a large unified project, and are completed by many people over the Internet. [1] [2] Microwork is considered the smallest unit of work in a virtual assembly line. [3] It is most often used to describe tasks for which no efficient algorithm has been devised, and require human intelligence to complete reliably. The term was developed in 2008 by Leila Chirayath Janah of Samasource. [4] [5] Microtasking[edit] The Top 20 iPhone And iPad Apps of 2011 Editor’s note: Contributor Brad Spirrison is the managing editor of mobile app discovery services Appolicious, AndroidApps.com and AppVee. With this post, he continues an annual tradition of picking the best iOS apps of the year. It’s telling that Apple chose an app that debuted more than 14 months ago, Instagram, as its “iPhone App of the Year” for 2011. This should not imply that there was a shortage of quality and groundbreaking apps released this year.

50 Free Android Apps Every College Student Needs Saving money is paramount in college, as most students don’t have a lot of that commodity to throw around. So, you may welcome some free Android apps that can push your productivity, creativity and communication always seem welcome. You may find at least one or two apps you’ll want from this list of 50 free Android apps that every college student needs. Productivity 3banana: Capture your thoughts, ideas and notes as well as photos.ASTRID: Astrid is an open-source task list that is simple enough; but, for the important things in your life, it encourages you into staying organized.Books WordPlayer: Download books in seconds or load from your sdcard to read on your Android.CoursePro Demo: Try the trial version for free and you may want the full version for the price of a cup of coffee. Reference

Crowdsourcing Crowdsourcing is a sourcing model in which individuals or organizations obtain goods and services. These services include ideas and finances, from a large, relatively open and often rapidly-evolving group of internet users; it divides work between participants to achieve a cumulative result. The word crowdsourcing itself is a portmanteau of crowd and outsourcing, and was coined in 2005.[1][2][3][4] As a mode of sourcing, crowdsourcing existed prior to the digital age (i.e. Wolfram Alpha launches the coolest flight tracker ever Have you ever wanted to know where the planes flying overhead were going? If so, you finally have a way to find out. If you head over to Wolfram Alpha right now and input "flights overhead" into the search box, the site will return all the planes that are currently over your position, their altitude, angle, and slant distance. The site even displays a Sky map to show where planes are in relation to the position of the sun and moon. But if you want more usable data, like where the planes took off from and where they're going, simply click on one of the flights, and you'll have all the information you need. Plus, you can see a map showing where the plane is currently, and what its flight path will be.

11 Technologies in Danger of Going Extinct Intro <p></p><p>It's a common story: The hottest technologies on the market are often upstaged by the next big thing. As new advancements are made, products that once changed our lives are left in the dust and swapped for the new, the shiny and the updated. Here are 11 devices — some you'd expect and some you might not — that are still roaming the streets but facing rapid extinction.</p><p></p>