The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is using a
challenge program to find out whether it's possible to put shredded documents back together again.
"DARPA’s Shredder Challenge calls upon computer scientists, puzzle enthusiasts and anyone else who likes solving complex problems to compete for up to $50,000 by piecing together a series of shredded documents.
The goal is to identify and assess potential capabilities that could be used by our warfighters operating in war zones, but might also create vulnerabilities to sensitive information that is protected through our own shredding practices throughout the U.S. national security community."
[more inside]
posted by keli
on Nov 23, 2011 -
55 comments
Two Aussie psychologists studied the 66-year-old testimony of 70 German sailors rescued after their boat sank. The ship which sank it, the HMAS Sydney, also sank ... taking 645 sailors with it.
After analyzing the stories the shrinks - knowledgeable in the vagaries of storytelling - found that the Germans weren't lying. They crowdsourced the stories, sat down together with a map of the Indian Ocean and ...
posted by Twang
on Oct 1, 2011 -
21 comments
ALEC Exposed is a wiki site set up by The Center for Media and Democracy which posts and chronicles leaked documents including more than 800 model bills drafted and approved by corporations during ALEC meetings. The documents have been analyzed and
marked-up for clarity. Journalists along with the general public are invited to
download the documents and sift through the
bills in order to help map the connections back to their own state legislation and legislators.
[more inside]
posted by stagewhisper
on Jul 14, 2011 -
22 comments
"
Mother Jones [and, later, other media outlets] requested [Sarah] Palin's
gubernatorial emails during the 2008 election. Almost three years later, the wait is over. ... Today, at [1:00 pm ET] in Juneau, the state of Alaska is scheduled to release 24,199 pages of emails Sarah Palin sent and received during her half-term as governor of the Last Frontier. State workers will distribute six-box sets and hand trucks (which must be returned) to representatives of
a dozen or so media outfits" "Volunteers from the League of Women Voters and the Retired Public Employees of Alaska will be at Juneau's Centennial Hall convention center ... look[ing] for
any significant or interesting emails, stick a post-it note on the page, and pass them to journalists, who also will be reading through the 24,000 pages. Exact copies of the best of those emails will be posted online immediately. ... In the same room ... a second set of the documents will be scanned for msnbc.com by Crivella West, an analytics and investigative-research company from Pittsburgh, returning the records to their original electronic form, allowing anyone anywhere to join in the crowdsourcing. That free, public, searchable archive will go online, sometime later on Friday, at
http://palinemail.msnbc.msn.com." "The
Washington Post is looking for '100 organized and diligent readers' to work with reporters to 'analyze, contextualize, and research the emails.'
The New York Times is employing a similar system.'"
* [more inside]
posted by ericb
on Jun 10, 2011 -
158 comments
Wikipedia And The Death Of The Expert - "McLuhan prefigured the Internet era in a number of surprising ways. As he said in
a March 1969 Playboy interview: 'The computer thus holds out the promise of a technologically engendered state of universal understanding and unity, a state of absorption in the Logos that could knit mankind into one family and create a perpetuity of harmony and peace' ... Wikipedia, along with other crowd-sourced resources, is wreaking a certain amount of McLuhanesque havoc on conventional notions of 'authority', 'authorship', and even 'knowledge' ... Knowledge is growing more broadly and immediately participatory and collaborative by the moment."
posted by kliuless
on May 29, 2011 -
90 comments
With
kettling becoming a commonly deployed tactic by the London Met, students from the University College London are fighting back with
Sukey, launched this morning.
[more inside]
posted by asymptotic
on Jan 29, 2011 -
56 comments
Five years ago, the dinosaurs of Ryan North's
Dinosaur Comics discussed writing a short story about a "Machine of Death" that would predict your fate. It sparked a
forum discussion, which snowballed into
a book project headed by North, Matthew Bennardo, and
David Malki to create an anthology of short stories about the Machine of Death. Stories were
submitted*,
selected, and
illustrated. Alas, no one was willing to publish an anthology that didn't feature Stephen King, Dave Eggers, Neil Gaiman or Nick Hornby. So they
published it themselves and set out a challenge for their fans:
"We want Machine of Death to become a Number One bestseller [on amazon.com] for exactly one day — October 26." And it happened! Meanwhile,
unbeknownst to our heroes, October 26 was
also the release date of a new book by a fellow called Glenn Beck (if you've not heard of him,
a quick Google seems to indicate that he’s some sort of Ron Popeil-like infomercial huckster). And he's
not happy about missing out on the #1 spot.
posted by alopez
on Oct 29, 2010 -
74 comments
New York:
High Quality - $448.92/oz
Medium Quality - $341.42/oz
Low Quality - $183.36/oz
posted by swift
on Sep 21, 2010 -
173 comments
Lost Films, a project of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, is a wiki aimed at identifying the over 3500 films declared orphaned or lost in their archives. Other archivists and the public can go to the
Identify section and look at surviving photographs, film fragments, and documents, as well as comment and upload any materials of your own, just in case you had promo materials for some unidentified 1915 German war buddy comedy just lying around. (Via
Slate).
posted by Weebot
on Jul 9, 2010 -
6 comments
Offering up a
bass track, a guitar track, and a drum track as the common fodder, Wired.com invites
remixes from its readers and runs a crowdsourced music
experiment.
Note for those producing solo in their hovels/studies/caves/garrets/cubicles, and those looking for new sports through which to sell concert tickets and t-shirts: the artists of the future are inclined to
organize into teams.
posted by darth_tedious
on Jun 12, 2010 -
11 comments
The winners of the prize - for software 10% better at recommending movies than Netflix own Cinemax - were a team described here
back in June. They beat another team by getting their results in 20 minutes earlier.
Netflix was happy: “You look at the cumulative hours and you’re getting Ph.D.’s for a dollar an hour.” - so happy they're offering
two new $half-million prizes.
No mention yet whether there's been any progress on the "
Napolean Dynamite problem" ... the movies it's hard to predict your reaction to.
When Bertoni showed me a list of his 25 most-difficult-to-predict movies, I noticed they were all similar in some way to “Napoleon Dynamite” — culturally or politically polarizing and hard to classify, including “I Heart Huckabees,” “Lost in Translation,” “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,” “Kill Bill: Volume 1” and “Sideways.”
posted by Twang
on Sep 22, 2009 -
97 comments
Crowd surf,
crowd sourcing,
crowd funding? Like being supported by an ocean of people, or collaboration from around the world,
crowd funding gets projects financial backing from the people. It's not new, as it has been the method for funding charities and political campaigns for a very long time, but it is a novel attempt at getting funds for other projects. Some people have placed their hopes in crowdfunding as a way to
save journalism, while other companies are looking to get
micropayment-scale
public investments in fashion by offering investors the potential for a cut of future profits. The more typical return is physical goods, like
getting the t-shirt you help sponsor [via
mefi projects], or
a limited edition version of the album. There's another site long these lines, but more free-form in structure:
Kickstarter, crowdfunding for people who make stuff. [via
mefi projects] The fundees can set a fundraising goal, deadline, and a set of rewards for backers. If the goal's reached by the deadline, then everyone's charged and backers get their goodies. If not, nobody's charged. The
previously discussed 8-bit tribute to Miles Davis'
Kind of Blue,
Kind of Bloop was funded this way.
posted by filthy light thief
on May 20, 2009 -
7 comments
"The Mass Observation movement was founded by a group of 1930s' British intellectuals who believed the most revealing way to document an event was to document the peripheral activities surrounding it. The Mass Observers carried out their greatest project on May 12th, 1937, when they dispatched more than 200 observers throughout London to monitor the coronation of
King George VI." This coming Tuesday, the folks at
Januarythe20th.com are attempting to create a day of Mass Observation in the United States.
posted by TheWash
on Jan 16, 2009 -
18 comments
FaceStat, a new startup from
crowdsourcing consultants at
Delores Labs bills itself as "market research for the individual." You upload a photo of yourself, and "within a couple hours, you will have detailed statistics about how people feel about the picture you provide." Oh, and it's powered by creepers like you, using Amazon's
Mechanical Turk (previously posted about
here).
[more inside]
posted by thisjax
on May 7, 2008 -
37 comments
