Re: [unrev-II] Online volunteering article

From: Henry van Eyken (vaneyken@sympatico.ca)
Date: Mon May 07 2001 - 02:51:58 PDT

  • Next message: Bernard Vatant: "Re: [unrev-II] Online volunteering article"

    Thanks, Grant. You contributed a motherlode of potentially useful data!

    Doug has arranged for me to visit the Valley again. We hope that this will
    lead to take the Bootstrap site further toward serving Doug's ultimate
    objective. Now that I have seen the lay of the land during my November visit,
    I hope to come up with a decent outline of whom to consult about what, etc.
    Hope to contact a number of people like yourself either directly or through
    Doug's administrative assistant for fruitful encounters. These cover a number
    of workaday technical issues, but I especially hope that we can usefully
    ponder the question of how to put systems that augment human intelligence to
    work in solving society's urgent, complex problems. One H of a challenge

    Henry

    Grant Bowman wrote:

    > This is an article about "distributed human projects." The
    > http://www.dmoz.org yahoo-like directory is one of them with 34,000
    > editors participating.
    >
    > Mind Over Matter: Online volunteers donate their brainpower for
    > interests of science
    >
    > http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/tech/867163
    >
    > A few quotes:
    >
    > "Open Mind volunteers can take part in more than 25 online activities to
    > create a sort of common-sense database, feeding information into a
    > computer based on tasks that range from the straightforward (listing
    > objects that appear in a picture) to the thoughtful (teaching the
    > computer about people's goals and desires). Eventually a computer with
    > a modicum of common sense could be used for a variety of purposes,
    > including vastly improved Web searching."
    >
    > "These collaborations are widely viewed as the next step in
    > distributed-computing projects, which break down complex computations
    > into many smaller tasks that are then parceled out via the Net to
    > volunteers' computers. The PCs work on the tasks when idle. Such
    > projects have become quite common, attracting millions of volunteers to
    > endeavors like scanning radio-telescope signals for alien messages and
    > cracking data-encryption codes."
    >
    > "I've estimated that something like 100 million mouse clicks have been
    > wasted on Solitaire," Stork said. "Instead of just playing a game, Web
    > volunteers could be helping science or contributing to the world's
    > largest software endeavor."
    >
    > --
    > -- Grant Bowman <grantbow@svpal.org>
    >
    > Community email addresses:
    > Post message: unrev-II@onelist.com
    > Subscribe: unrev-II-subscribe@onelist.com
    > Unsubscribe: unrev-II-unsubscribe@onelist.com
    > List owner: unrev-II-owner@onelist.com
    >
    > Shortcut URL to this page:
    > http://www.onelist.com/community/unrev-II
    >
    > Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

    Community email addresses:
      Post message: unrev-II@onelist.com
      Subscribe: unrev-II-subscribe@onelist.com
      Unsubscribe: unrev-II-unsubscribe@onelist.com
      List owner: unrev-II-owner@onelist.com

    Shortcut URL to this page:
      http://www.onelist.com/community/unrev-II

    Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon May 07 2001 - 03:02:30 PDT