Tell me, when was the last time you discovered a new astronomical phenonemon? Helped curing AIDS? Caught a British Member of Parliament red-handed in claiming money for his new duck house? Most likely, your answer is ‘never’ and you feel that these jobs are reserved for persons more suitable for the job, like clever scientists or savvy journalists. However, in our digital day and age, those same scientists and journalists are using people like you and me for crunching the data they simply do not have the time for doing. Welcome, crowd sourcing.
One of the earliest crowd sourcing examples is Galaxy Zoo. As a user, you will be shown telescope data and are asked to classify galaxies according to their roundness, ‘spiralness’ and several other attributes. This data is then used to answer several questions, like how spiral galaxies are in our universe. Another example is foldit . After downloading a small programme, you are tasked to correctly ‘fold’ proteins, scoring points and obtaining highscores along the way. Since protein structures are a pain to determine and computers are notoriously bad at optimizing these structures, the human touch is a welcome one.
Last week, British newspaper the Guardian released an application, which allows you to check the expenditures of several British MPs, following the recent scandals. You will be shown receipts and invoices that British MPs handed in over the last few years, and asked to answer the basic questions “what is this?” and “is it interesting?”. In just a few days, 132.000 documents have been reviewed! The time it took to develop this application, saved the Guardian weeks and months of analyzing all the documents.
Why do these examples work? First of all, the task has to be simple enough, so that most people are able to do it correctly. Due to their scientific nature, foldit and galaxy zoo have to train their users a fair bit before their users are able to generate useful data. Secondly, the tasks have to be fun enough so that trained users return to continue their hard ‘work’. Foldit tries to solve this problem by awarding scores to users that are performing well, making it possible to ‘win’ puzzles by obtaining the highest score possible. And last of all, there has to be this implicit possibility of discovering something really great, like Dutch school teacher Hanny van Arkel did, when she discovered what is now called “Hanny’s Voorwerp“.
Now, let me get back to checking whether Caroline Flint really needed that 145 pounds costing leather swivel chair…
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