Crowdsource that research
Feed KM with Big Data
Embed GIS
Feed KM with Big Data
Embed GIS
Showing posts with label crowdsourcing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crowdsourcing. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Crowdsourcing Citizen Science Into Big Data KM
Nobel Prize winner Dr. Peter Doherty told the NorCal World Affairs Council tonight about "Disease in a Borderless World." He was there mainly to share excerpts from his most recent books but I picked up a couple of insights that I think can drive innovation.
Dr. Doherty mentioned that Audubon Society members' bird watching activity provides a useful data set to ornithology research. This is a perfect example of how crowdsourcing can support citizen science initiatives that engage the broader public. People may be more likely to believe scientific research if they helped assemble its supporting data. Crowdsourced scientific research can be a major driver of public policy if it can demonstrate public acceptance of a contested topic like climate change.
One of Dr. Doherty's claims tonight may have been incorrect. He said that infectious diseases make ineffective bioweapons. I beg to differ. The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention exists precisely because infectious diseases can be weaponized. This 2003 EMBO report republished by the NCBI demonstrates that the world should be very concerned about bioterror from infectious diseases. I'm clarifying this matter to demonstrate how even the scientific community has gaps in its knowledge base.
The scientific community's knowledge gaps can feed poor practices in the private sector. Dr. Doherty said that breeding areas for chickens and water fowl should be kept separate because commingling the two can spread pathogens. Dumping chicken manure effluent onto rice paddies as fertilizer is a poor farming technique because water fowl land in those paddies and carry off diseases.
I'll outline the start of a solution to such knowledge gaps. Dr. Doherty mentioned the World Health Organization as one of the UN's most effective agencies. It already has a data repository on infectious diseases and a Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System (GISRS) that monitors data from a collection of national influenza centers. WHO's projects should be the knowledge management repository for the Big Data pushed from national organizations like the US Public Health Service, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control. WHO's ultimate goal should be the creation of embedded data maps that work the way I described in my recent blog post about geojournalism. Embedded maps make knowledge management easy because data and analysis have a context that is specific to a given geography and time series. Crowdsourced research projects will get citizens involved in creating these embedded data feeds.
I considered posting this article on Third Eye OSINT but decided that its value as a business proposition was more relevant than its value as an intelligence product. The blending of GIS and text-formatted analysis creates a KM environment conducive to sharing among business and public policy analysts. No longer will agribusiness be a silent enabler of contagion if it could access geo-specific warnings on separating chickens from wetlands or rice paddies. The possibilities are endless. So is my own genius.
Dr. Doherty mentioned that Audubon Society members' bird watching activity provides a useful data set to ornithology research. This is a perfect example of how crowdsourcing can support citizen science initiatives that engage the broader public. People may be more likely to believe scientific research if they helped assemble its supporting data. Crowdsourced scientific research can be a major driver of public policy if it can demonstrate public acceptance of a contested topic like climate change.
One of Dr. Doherty's claims tonight may have been incorrect. He said that infectious diseases make ineffective bioweapons. I beg to differ. The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention exists precisely because infectious diseases can be weaponized. This 2003 EMBO report republished by the NCBI demonstrates that the world should be very concerned about bioterror from infectious diseases. I'm clarifying this matter to demonstrate how even the scientific community has gaps in its knowledge base.
The scientific community's knowledge gaps can feed poor practices in the private sector. Dr. Doherty said that breeding areas for chickens and water fowl should be kept separate because commingling the two can spread pathogens. Dumping chicken manure effluent onto rice paddies as fertilizer is a poor farming technique because water fowl land in those paddies and carry off diseases.
I'll outline the start of a solution to such knowledge gaps. Dr. Doherty mentioned the World Health Organization as one of the UN's most effective agencies. It already has a data repository on infectious diseases and a Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System (GISRS) that monitors data from a collection of national influenza centers. WHO's projects should be the knowledge management repository for the Big Data pushed from national organizations like the US Public Health Service, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control. WHO's ultimate goal should be the creation of embedded data maps that work the way I described in my recent blog post about geojournalism. Embedded maps make knowledge management easy because data and analysis have a context that is specific to a given geography and time series. Crowdsourced research projects will get citizens involved in creating these embedded data feeds.
I considered posting this article on Third Eye OSINT but decided that its value as a business proposition was more relevant than its value as an intelligence product. The blending of GIS and text-formatted analysis creates a KM environment conducive to sharing among business and public policy analysts. No longer will agribusiness be a silent enabler of contagion if it could access geo-specific warnings on separating chickens from wetlands or rice paddies. The possibilities are endless. So is my own genius.
Monday, September 16, 2013
The Arrival Of Geojournalism
Tonight the Commonwealth Club asked "Does The Environment Matter?" I was there. It really should have asked whether journalism matters. Traditional news media have been in decline for years. Newspapers can't compete with the advertising reach of online media. I think too many journalists are still enthralled with old-fashioned media doing old-fashioned beat reporting. The new beats are all online covered by bloggers like Yours Truly. The number of full-time journalists has declined but the amount of informed commentary available online has exploded. Journalism is morphing into a concept that fuses data analysis, geospatial mapping, and time-series reporting. This is the realm of the "geojournalist."
The geojournalist uses GIS tools to embed text and data within photos and maps. This requires skills in data mining and content curation that aren't taught in journalism schools. I think an open-source knowledge management practitioner (ahem, Yours Truly once again) qualifies as a geojournalist. It also calls for some mobile media savvy. I noticed one hot journalist babe at this CW Club talk tonight use her smartphone to record one of the panelist's answers. Old-fashioned note-taking will soon give way to digital tablet notations for geojournalists who embed their stories into maps on the spot.
Some environmental media sites are doing geojournalism well. InfoAmazonia tracks reports by map location within the amazon rain forest. ClimateCommons adjusts US temperature data for anomalies like industrial emissions. Internews teaches social media techniques to aspiring geojournalists in developing nations. Interdisciplinary academic initiatives like the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication need to adapt geojournalist techniques if they want to be heard.
Other digital media can adapt to the new realities of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. Journalists are IMHO too dependent on foundation grants and PBS money. I've seen some filmmakers pitching ideas for short films on crowdfunding sites. This could work for investigative journalists making documentary films that can embed into GIS maps if geojournalists think like entrepreneurs. They need an elevator pitch to get donors' attention and market data on the size of an audience for their project. Market data for short films is easy to find with view counts for similar content on YouTube. I say the Society for Environmental Journalists should teach startup thinking to geojournalists. Just ask me how to do it and I'll show you if the price is right.
The geojournalist uses GIS tools to embed text and data within photos and maps. This requires skills in data mining and content curation that aren't taught in journalism schools. I think an open-source knowledge management practitioner (ahem, Yours Truly once again) qualifies as a geojournalist. It also calls for some mobile media savvy. I noticed one hot journalist babe at this CW Club talk tonight use her smartphone to record one of the panelist's answers. Old-fashioned note-taking will soon give way to digital tablet notations for geojournalists who embed their stories into maps on the spot.
Some environmental media sites are doing geojournalism well. InfoAmazonia tracks reports by map location within the amazon rain forest. ClimateCommons adjusts US temperature data for anomalies like industrial emissions. Internews teaches social media techniques to aspiring geojournalists in developing nations. Interdisciplinary academic initiatives like the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication need to adapt geojournalist techniques if they want to be heard.
Other digital media can adapt to the new realities of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. Journalists are IMHO too dependent on foundation grants and PBS money. I've seen some filmmakers pitching ideas for short films on crowdfunding sites. This could work for investigative journalists making documentary films that can embed into GIS maps if geojournalists think like entrepreneurs. They need an elevator pitch to get donors' attention and market data on the size of an audience for their project. Market data for short films is easy to find with view counts for similar content on YouTube. I say the Society for Environmental Journalists should teach startup thinking to geojournalists. Just ask me how to do it and I'll show you if the price is right.
Friday, February 15, 2013
Can Crowdsourcing Limit Algorithimic Trading?
The Gold Report has John Kaiser's interesting take on the TSX Venture Exchange. The exchange is at risk because the inevitable collapse of nonviable junior resource companies will deter more successful juniors from listing on the exchange. Crowdsourcing opinions on junior stock valuation may be a way out.
The discrete information provided by NI 43-101 reports leaves wide gaps in time that algorithmic traders can explore. Mr. Kaiser argues that adding crowdsourced estimates of mining project NPV and IRR would add market information that arbitrageurs strip away from share prices. I think that's a neat idea and I'd like to see it work. Let me throw out some hurdle questions.
How would you protect the integrity of the crowdsourced ratings from manipulation? Adapting Yelp's model works if the crowdsource platform uses a project's 43-101 data. The real problem is ensuring the identity of the crowdsource participants. Software that can create and manage multiple identities in real time exists. Unscrupulous parties could use multiple identities to game the project ratings on a portal. We'll need more than CAPTCHAs to fix it.
What is a sufficient critical mass of crowdsource ratings for a project? Hedge funds can execute millions of trades per day in deeply liquid markets. Crowdsourcers can render ratings on dozens of stocks several times per day. Measuring impact by frequency of execution leaves hedge funds the clear winners. The discrete number of crowdsourcers who publish project ratings would have to be numerous enough that their combined ratings approach the daily average traded volume of the project's associated ticker symbol. That is hard enough to do for large-cap stocks with huge volumes on major exchanges. The smaller daily volumes for thin issues on the TSX-V are an easier hurdle to leap for crowdsourcers. There's probably a shortcut to creating meaningful data, with an entrepreneurial opportunity for a portal that can build in the statistical corrections Mr. Kaiser suggests.
I think an existing equity crowdfunding portal could easily build out the tech that would enable such crowdsourced opinions. The portal that gets there first will have a value-adding service built for non-accredited investors who will soon be allowed to invest in private placements under the JOBS Act.
The discrete information provided by NI 43-101 reports leaves wide gaps in time that algorithmic traders can explore. Mr. Kaiser argues that adding crowdsourced estimates of mining project NPV and IRR would add market information that arbitrageurs strip away from share prices. I think that's a neat idea and I'd like to see it work. Let me throw out some hurdle questions.
How would you protect the integrity of the crowdsourced ratings from manipulation? Adapting Yelp's model works if the crowdsource platform uses a project's 43-101 data. The real problem is ensuring the identity of the crowdsource participants. Software that can create and manage multiple identities in real time exists. Unscrupulous parties could use multiple identities to game the project ratings on a portal. We'll need more than CAPTCHAs to fix it.
What is a sufficient critical mass of crowdsource ratings for a project? Hedge funds can execute millions of trades per day in deeply liquid markets. Crowdsourcers can render ratings on dozens of stocks several times per day. Measuring impact by frequency of execution leaves hedge funds the clear winners. The discrete number of crowdsourcers who publish project ratings would have to be numerous enough that their combined ratings approach the daily average traded volume of the project's associated ticker symbol. That is hard enough to do for large-cap stocks with huge volumes on major exchanges. The smaller daily volumes for thin issues on the TSX-V are an easier hurdle to leap for crowdsourcers. There's probably a shortcut to creating meaningful data, with an entrepreneurial opportunity for a portal that can build in the statistical corrections Mr. Kaiser suggests.
I think an existing equity crowdfunding portal could easily build out the tech that would enable such crowdsourced opinions. The portal that gets there first will have a value-adding service built for non-accredited investors who will soon be allowed to invest in private placements under the JOBS Act.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)