ramesh was here

Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task (also known as community-based design[1] and distributed participatory design), refine an algorithm or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data (see also citizen science).

The term has become popular with business authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. However, both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticism.

Examples:

ReCAPTCHA -

reCAPTCHA is a system developed at Carnegie Mellon University which utilizes CAPTCHA to assist in the process of digitizing the text of books, while protecting websites from bots attempting to access restricted areas.^[1]

reCAPTCHA supplies subscribing websites with images of words that optical character recognition (OCR) software has been unable to read. The subscribing websites (whose purposes are generally unrelated to the book digitization project) present these images for humans to decipher as CAPTCHA words, as part of their normal validation procedures. They then return the results to the reCAPTCHA service, thereby contributing to the digitization project. The result is that the university receives approximately 3,000 man hours per day of free labor to help in the preservation of books.

The ESP Game -

The ESP Game by Luis von Ahn (later acquired by Google and renamed Google Image Labeler) was launched in 2004 and gets people to label images as a side-effect of playing a game. The image labels can be used to improve image search on the Web.
[Human Computation - video link]

Article One Partners -

Article One Partners, LLC launched as a new global community to legitimize the validity of patents. Community members – who Article One calls Advisors – have an opportunity to send in previously hard to find evidence of validity for high profile patents. By tapping the unique knowledge and referral networks of our Advisors, this publicly available evidence known as prior art can be discovered. Article One analyzes the prior art to determine whether it can show patents to be legitimized or invalid. If Article One forms an opinion that patents are invalid, Advisors earn up to U.S. $50,000, with $1,000,000 total being offered for launch. Advisors who actively build the community also earn premium compensation in Article One's Profit Sharing Plan of about five percent (5%) of the company's net annual profit. The result is a highly-rewarded community providing a citizen's review of U.S. patents to justify monopoly pricing for true innovation and energize U.S. patent reform.

Everything we do should be for some good purpose but as everybody knows there is nothing good that can come to a girl from a fresh boy. When a girl is sixteen or seventeen years old, she is as good as she ever will be, but when a boy is sixteen years old, he is then fresher than in all his stages of development. He is then not big enough to work but he is too big to be kept in a nursery and then to allow such a fresh thing to soil a girl—it could not work on my girl. Now I will tell you about soiling. Anything that is done, if it is done with the right party it is all right, but when it is done with the wrong party, it is soiling, and concerning those fresh boys with the girls, it is wrong every time. - Edward Leedskalnin, A book in every home

When I visited St. Petersburg in 1995 to participate in small computer art
festival called “In Search of Third Reality,” I saw a curious performance, which
may be a good parable of globalization. Like the rest of the festival, the
performance took place in the Planetarium. The Director of the Planetarium,
forced like everybody else to make his own living in the new Russian economic
order (or lack thereof), rented the Planetarium to conference organizers. Under the
black semi-spherical ceiling with mandatory models of planets and stars, a young
artist was methodically painting an abstract painting. Probably trained in the same
classical style as I was earlier, he was no Pollock; cautiously and systematically,
he made careful brushstrokes on the canvas in front of him. On his hand he wore a
Nintendo Dataglove, which in 1995 was a common media object in the West but a
rare sight in St. Petersburg. The Dataglove was transmitting the movements of his
hand to a small electronic synthesizer, assembled in the laboratory of some
Moscow institute. The music coming out of the synthesizer served as an
accompaniment to two dancers, a male and a female. Dressed in Isidora Dunkan
like clothing, they improvised a “modern dance” in front of the older and,
apparently, completely puzzled audience. Classical art, abstraction and a Nintendo
Dataglove; electronic music and early twentieth century modernism; discussions
of virtual reality (VR) in a Planetarium located in this classical city which, like
Venice, is obsessed with its past—what for me, coming from the West, were
incompatible historical and conceptual layers were here composited together, with
the Nintendo Dataglove being just one layer in this mix.
- Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media

The Art Machine is an episode of the series Human Contraptions (10×5 mins) produced in 2002. [ video link ]

Academy Award winning animator Bruce Petty takes a satirical look at the “contraptions” that shape our lives. Education, sex, finance, globalism, art, media, medicine, law, government and even the brain are transformed by Petty into evolving machines. Beginning with a simple concept, he takes us on an anarchic journey through history as each apparatus builds to its complex contemporary form. In the wry, ironic style that is his hallmark, Petty reveals these to be contraptions of a very human kind – imperfect, sometimes unpredictable and always subject to change. A witty, provocative and entertaining series, narrated by Andrew Denton.

A Film Australia National Interest Program. Produced with the assistance of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Between life and death lies just 0.003mm of latex.



Perverts are only those that do not use condoms