New Florence. New Renaissance.

Crowdfunding Olympic Athletes

There’s plenty of glory, but not much money for the athletes. So many are turning to creative sources to fund their training and other costs. FastCompany describes some.

The U.S. wrestling hopeful , Ben Kjar, capitalized on social media and persuaded one of his sponsors, LowVARates, to donate $2 for every new "Like" the company got on Facebook. The U.S. archer, Khatuna Lorig, earned money (and publicity) by helping Jennifer Lawrence prep for her role as shooting-savvy Katniss in the popular flick The Hunger Games.

The Great Big Rollin' Railroad!

My bad…should have posted this earlier. But drop everything and enter this contest by tomorrow to honor Union Pacific’s 150th anniversary. You could win $ 15,000 - your challenge is to create a contemporary version of its TV commercial from the 70s. The great news is the site has plenty of resources lined up – see below.

Even if you do not enter, explore the site and see how even a complex production can be crowdsourced.

And while you are at it, take a tour of the Union Pacific timeline and all the technologies they have pioneered and the role they have played in U.S. history 

Street Pothole App

"Perhaps the digital sensors in smartphones can do a better job all by themselves.That's the idea behind Street Bump, an Android app piloted by the City of Boston. The app, which should be available to the public this summer, makes the smartphone's accelerometer do the job of sensing potholes. If you're driving and you hit a pothole while the app is loaded, Street Bump pairs up data about the size of the bump with a GPS coordinate - and sends that to a city database."

"Discouraged by the muddy data, the city decided to launch a global challenge in partnership with a group called InnoCentive. Liberty Mutual donated $25,000 in prize money for the group or groups that could use equations to distinguish between a pothole-y bump and all those other run-of-the-road vibrations.Three winners were announced, and the city is working to implement their algorithmic solutions now."

KTLA.com

Crowdsourced maps

(Israeli company) Waze is taking off in countries that don't already have good digital maps, such as Costa Rica and Malaysia. Entire portions of the global street map are being filled in not by professionals, but by ordinary citizens with smart phones. If maps are subject to the same forces that have affected online encyclopedias, then the arc of history is clear: crowdsourcing isn't just cheaper than expert-driven data, it's also potentially faster and more accurate.

MIT Technology Review

What would you do with the 1 GBPS web?

“Citizens in Chattanooga, Tennessee, have access to one-gigabit-per-second Internet—that's 100 times the U.S. national average, and fast enough to download a two-hour movie in about five seconds. The only question is: what to do with it?

The city is hoping a contest with $300,000 in prize money will help answer that question. Entrants are invited to come up with clever ways of making use of the city's blisteringly fast Internet, which was installed in late 2010 with a $111 million U.S. Department of Energy grant, as part of federal stimulus efforts that also built out the city utility's long-planned smart grid. “

MIT Technology Review

Photo Credit

 

Crowdsourced Analytics

By far the most lucrative prize on Kaggle is a $3 million reward offered by Heritage Provider Network to the person who can most accurately forecast which patients will be admitted to a hospital within the next year by looking at their past insurance claims data. More than 1,000 people have downloaded the anonymized data that covers four years of hospital visits, and they have until April 2013 to post answers.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Photo Credit: Kaggle

Yahoo's Political Predictions

Data scientists at Yahoo are using prediction markets—along with polls, sentiment analysis on Twitter, and trends in search queries—to create the mother of all political prediction engines. The project involves Web-based prediction markets like Intrade, in which large numbers of people bet on the outcomes of elections.

The researchers behind this effort, David Rothschild, an economist at Yahoo Research, and Dave Pennock, a computer scientist at Yahoo Research, call their effort the Signal. They plan to produce data visualizations that best convey probability to a lay audience, and to publish work on machine learning and fundamental economic models based on the effort.

MIT Technology Review

Graph Credit: The Signal

Cop-Sourcing

"The latest smartphones bristle with sensors such as GPS receivers, accelerometers and gyroscopes, and researchers are making the most of this by enrolling people with these handsets in crowdsourcing projects, effectively handing the job of data collection to the public. In Boston, for example, drivers will soon be able to download an app called Street Bump that uses their phone's accelerometer and GPS to record the location of a pothole whenever their car bounces over one. Street Bump will then send this data to the city council.

Yet smartphones, along with other wireless gadgets, are also set to become powerful new tools for detecting law-breakers. In university labs and government agencies, engineers are linking our gadgets into novel surveillance networks designed to help catch criminals red-handed, or spot threats to public safety. In future, your cellphone or vehicle satnav, along with thousands of other devices like them, could work together to find stolen electronics, gather vehicle licence plates for the police in real time, sniff out banned drugs or gas leaks - and even help foil chemical attacks. These networks won't eliminate the need for a police force, of course, but they will give the government eyes and ears in a thousand places at once, creating what amounts to a 21st century neighbourhood watch - iWatch, perhaps - that criminals will have every reason to dread."

New Scientist (sub required)

 

3D Printing and crowdsourced product design

“Corporations already use 3-D printers to make product prototypes before embarking on mass manufacturing. Now a handful of technology companies, including HP and Google, are looking for ways to bring 3-D printing to consumers and small businesses -- a trend that could have profound implications for manufacturing and design. Here's why: The blueprints or files for 3-D printing are digital and, as a result, can potentially be edited by anyone -- if the designer permits.

Enthusiasts believe that such intense user input will lead to improved, more consumer-friendly products. A vibrant "crowdsource" community of designers already has formed around do-it-yourself 3-D printing -- echoing the make-your-own-computer scene from the late 1970s that popularized the PC.”

Fortune

The Polymath Project

No – nothing to do with my book:)

“Mathematicians don't have to be brilliant loners. The first analysis of a successful wiki-style mathematical project shows how a large-scale collaboration made up of amateurs and professionals can be just as effective.

The project, called Polymath, was born in January 2009 when University of Cambridge mathematician Timothy Gowers proposed it in a blog post. Another leading mathematician, Terence Tao of the University of California, Los Angeles, flagged the idea on his own blog. The project began in earnest with a wiki for collecting the mathematical contributions made to these and other blogs.

Polymath does more than just bring together pre-existing knowledge, Wikipedia-style. It is an attempt to divvy up and democratise the process of mathematical discovery.”

“Now computer scientists Justin Cranshaw and Aniket Kittur at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, have analysed whether his vision has been borne out.”

Read more on at New Scientist (subscription needed for extended text) or in the paper (linked below) by the the CMU professors

Photo Credit from CMU paper by Cranshaw and Kittur