Technology & Innovation — December 6, 2011

Crowdsourcing Revives Use of Human Computers

Using lots of brains each doing small tasks to together complete major jobs is not new but is enjoying a renaissance. Examples include Mechanical Turk, CrowdForge, and CastingWords.

bigthinkeditor

What’s the Latest Development?

A new generation of human computers is doing tasks that computers can’t. They are employed in large numbers and organised into streamlined workflows. As was the case in the age before electronic computers, their output is combined to generate results that could not easily be produced in any other way. Mechanical Turk, CrowdForge, CastingWords are riding the resurge.

What’s the Big Idea?

Microsoft researcher Eric Horvitz envisages a future in which algorithms co-ordinate an army of human workers, physical sensors and conventional computers. Say a child goes missing, an algorithm might assign some volunteers to search duties and others to examine CCTV footage. The system would also trawl local news reports for similar cases and the element combined to create a cyborg detective.

a computer generated image of a human brain.

Thinking

The great free will debate featuring Michio Kaku and Steven Pinker

Who — or what — really controls your mind?

Building destroyed by the Halifax Explosion. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

The Past

The largest accidental explosion of all time

More than a century ago, Halifax suffered an accidental blast one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

a collage of photos of a man with a hat and a book.

High Culture

6 great books with wildly unreliable narrators

Dive into the twisted truths and concealed realities told by literature’s most unreliable narrators.

a group of five matches on a pink background.

The Well

Signs you’re burned out — and how to bounce back

If you don’t feel better after the weekend, the “burnout paradox” could explain why.

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7 min

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Laurie Santos

Starts With A Bang

The trick to instantly identifying JWST images

If you can identify a foreground star, the spike patterns are a dead giveaway as to whether it’s a JWST image or any other observatory.

Up Next

Surprising Science

The Price of Superfast Internet: Botnets, Hacking…

One of the world’s most wired countries, South Korea, illustrates the downside of high speed internet and real name verification–an epidemic of hacking, data theft and botnets.