Crowdsourcing Scientific Research: Leveraging the Crowd for Scientific Discovery by Dave Oleson.
From the post:
Lab scientists spend countless hours manually reviewing and annotating cells. What if we could give these hours back, and replace the tedious parts of science with a hands-off, fast, cheap, and scalable solution?
That’s exactly what we did when we used the crowd to count neurons, an activity that computer vision can’t yet solve. Building on the work we recently did with the Harvard Tuberculosis lab, we were able to take untrained people all over the world (people who might never have learned that DNA Helicase unzips genes…), turn them into image analysts with our task design and quality control, and get results comparable to those provided by trained lab workers.
So, do you think authoring your topic map is more difficult than reliable identification of neurons? Really?
Maybe the lesson of crowd sourcing is that we need to be as smart at coming up new ways to do old tasks as we think we are.
What do you think?