Month: April 2007
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Amazon Turk for Gathering Intelligence on Infectious Disease in China
Similar to the Who Is Sick? database, this Mechanical turk HIT seeks to collect information about disease from the crowd. Find description of a disease outbreak in China in Chinese We assume you read one or more Chinese newspapers daily. If you see any description of an infectious disease outbreak or even individual new cases…
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Amazon Turk for Intelligence Analysis
Interesting activities on Amazon Turk, as seen in this email I got from Amazon. It’s easy to image the utility of Amazon Turk in the analysis of satellite imagery of possible terrorist hideouts (“review these images and indicate if there is a truck in the picture”). Adding a prediction market element, you can show photos…
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Yeltsin Dead
AP coverage. Here’s a poem I wrote 13 years ago.Yeltsin appears in the apartment of the poet. Yeltsin’sbeen drinking. He pours another. The poem itself isread in a hoarse whisper, like Roddy McDowellin “Planet of the Apes” The Scolding of Yeltsin Alright:How often does the sun come up over the hill?At what point, exactly, does…
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Good Things Happen When Simple Tools Are Released in the Wild
Here’s a good take on why MySpace works. The same thing applies to all the other emerging stand-alone tools mentioned below. O’Reilly Radar > “remove the web developer and the web gets developed” In short, it seems that while many people thought of “blogging” as a thing that was understood and more or less set,…
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Upon Viewing United 93
Last night I watched the movie United 93. A crushing, horrible, beautiful film about people cooperating and trying to be safe. About people using the communication tools in front of them— seat-back phones, cell phones, cockpit alert systems— best they could. In the course of the 2 hours that it took for the whole thing…