Four short links: 16 May 2017
Flash Organizations, Collaboration Data Set, De-Anonymizing Mobile Data, and Hacking Economics
- Flash Organizations: Crowdsourcing Complex Work By Structuring Crowds As Organizations — Our system introduces two technical contributions: 1) encoding the crowd’s division of labor into de-individualized roles, much as movie crews or disaster response teams use roles to support coordination between on-demand workers who have not worked together before; and 2) reconfiguring these structures through a model inspired by version control, enabling continuous adaptation of the work and the division of labor. We report a deployment in which flash organizations successfully carried out open-ended and complex goals previously out of reach for crowdsourcing, including product design, software development, and game production.
- Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online (PDF) — research from Data & Society that seeks to answer the questions: Who is manipulating the media? Where do these actors operate? What motivates media manipulation? What techniques do media manipulators use? Why is the media vulnerable? What are the outcomes?” (via BoingBoing)
- Trajectory Recovery From Ash (Adrian Colyer) — how easy it is to deanonymize theoretically anonymous data. Even in a data set in which you might initially think there is no chance of leaking information about individuals, they can recover data about individual users with between 73% and 91% accuracy—even in data sets which aggregate data on tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of users! Their particular context is mobile location data, but underpinning the discovery mechanism is a reliance on two key characteristics: (1) individuals tend to do the same things over and over (regularity)—i.e., there are patterns in the data relating to given individuals, and (2) these patterns are different across different users (uniqueness).
- Economia: A Festival on Economy Without the Economists (We Make Money Not Art) — As curators Wiepko Oosterhuis and Olga Mink wrote: Why not start by treating economics like any other technology? Play with it, hack it, use input from other disciplines, unleash science fiction on it, approach it in an artistic manner. In short, take ownership so that we can reshape and rework economics as we see fit. I love the idea of the minimum wage machine: Turning the crank yielded a one cent euro coin every 4.018 seconds, that’s €8.96 an hour, the minimum wage in The Netherlands right now. The coins dropped as long as you turned the crank. I saw many people trying it. All of them stopped after the first few cents. You want to have a go because it’s a fun and straightforward installation, but you quickly realize how depressing and mind-numbing routine work is.
