Open Source Homeland

Online Poll in High-Info Crowds = Prediction Market

Over at Second City Cop, they’ve posted a poll with options for the next police chief. Since (I assume, though SCC always notes he has readership all over the world) he probably has a pretty high cop readership, I wonder how accurate this poll will end up being. In effect, this free poll can act as a prediction market when exposed to the right readership.

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 in China, send an email in English describing in 1-3 sentences what the article says and include a hyperlink to the original article.

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 of houses and ask “does a terrorist live here?”.

A number of you have asked us to make it easier for you to be kept up to date on Amazon Mechanical Turk. This email is a way for us to share with you what’s happening.Currently, there is a large selection of HITs available on the site, and the mix of tasks changes frequently. Here is a small sample, but we encourage you to visit the site and see what else is available.

Information Locators — Identify and transcribe information from digital documents for Information Locators. To complete these HITs, find and transcribe the requested data from online digital documents.

Dimensional Analytics — Describe the contents of a website for Dimensional Analytics. These HITs ask you to provide the top 3 phrases that best describe a website.

Geospatial Vision — Identify and mark items in photographs such as road signs, lamp posts, storm drains and other features for Geospatial Vision using their custom Flash application.

Collectorz.com — Write a short plot description for movies you have watched. Collectorz.com offers several movie titles that you can choose from to write your own plot description.

Trivia Research Department — Create and edit trivia questions for Trivia Research. To complete these HITs, reseach, write and edit trivia questions in different categories using your own knowledge and other resources.

Amazon UnSpun — Express your opinion by ranking your top three choices in various list categories. This information is used by Amazon’s UnSpun website to populate its community opinion lists on a wide variety of topics.

CastingWords — Transcribe audio content and edit transcripts . CastingWords’ HITs ask you to complete such diverse tasks as transcribing audio content into text, editing transcripts for accuracy and verifying transcription quality.

There’s a lot of activity on Mechanical Turk, so the list of available HITs changes frequently. The best way to stay up to date is to check the site when you have a free minute.

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, MySpace asked themselves what kind of job the software did for most users, and figured out how to do that job better. Myspace is actually not as good as any of the standalone apps — blogging, photo sharing, IM, or email — but it puts them all together into an easy to use package that is not only more comprehensive but also easier to get started with.

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 to happen, technology failed them and technology was their best ally.

I remembered why I care about this stuff— about using simple technology to make things better. The government can’t do everything for us. The FAA and the military and the executive branch— they are full of competent, courageous, loving people who were of limited use. They couldn’t even get a hold of the President for a shoot down order. They were watching CNN for their information.

I say “that’s OK”. I would never rail against the deficiencies of these systems or the limitations of these people. We just have to open the circle, just like the passengers of United 93 did. Open wider the circle of those who are of use, who can be effective, who can kill terrorists with their bare hands and devise plans to try to stay alive.

We can do more. Let’s do more.