首页
登录
职称英语
Crowdsourcing a Better World The crowdsourcing concept—c
Crowdsourcing a Better World The crowdsourcing concept—c
游客
2023-09-04
37
管理
问题
Crowdsourcing a Better World
The crowdsourcing concept—collecting contributions from many individuals to achieve a goal—was being used long before Wikipedia. The National Audubon Society has been organizing people to do an annual count of all the birds in the Western hemisphere since Christmas Day, 1900. The Pilsbury Bake-Off— crowdsourcing for a commercial cause—is now 62 years old.
But online crowdsourcing is a relatively recent phenomenon, and the efficiencies it brings to communicating within a large group make it useful in many new ways. At catwalkgenius. com it is bringing together fashion designers and financial backers. At usertesting. com it provides feedback on why people leave your Web site. It connects musicians and their fans to help organize private concerts at owngig. com. Innocentive. com uses it to solve scientific and technological problems: companies stuck on a problem put it up on the site and offer a cash prize for a solution. But today, I’ll look at how crowdsourcing can help with something else: aggregating and organizing knowledge.
Typical Crowdsource Sites
Immediately after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors began to fail in Japan, people turned to official sources for information. What they heard were often bland (平淡乏味的) and vague assurances of safety. But people wanted specifics. They wanted to know the radiation levels in their areas, and did not trust the government sources. In response, several crowdsource sites sprang up to collect and map radiation levels in Japan and even on the west coast of the United States: rdtn. org, geigercrowd. net and japanstatus. com are three of them. These sites ask people with Geiger counters—and if you happen to not own one, they tell you where to buy one—to measure radiation levels and send the information to their site. They aggregate and map the responses.
One prototype for this kind of crowdsourcing is Ushahidi.com. Ushahidi, which means "testimony" in Swahili, was developed in Kenya in 2008 to map numerous reports of post-election violence. Ory Okolloh, a blogger, simply asked her readers- "Guys looking to do something: Any techies out there willing to do a mash up of where the violence and destruction is occurring using Google Maps?"
A few days later, Kenyans had a Web site that allowed people to text or e-mail reports and see them plotted on a Google map of the country. It became useful not only for rapid intervention, but- as the name suggests—to document the deaths, injuries and destruction when virtually all other media were blacked out.
Since then, Ushahidi, led until recently by Okolloh, has become as ubiquitous (普遍存在的) in a disaster as the Red Cross. Just two hours after the earthquake in Haiti, Ushahidi set up a Haiti site and an Ushahidi techie who was studying at Tufts University in Massachusetts worked with a student group to organize 300 volunteers. Haitian radio stations told their listeners to text 4636 with their reports, which thousands of Creole-speaking volunteers in the US instantly translated. Any report that required action about or from a trapped person, for example—was mapped by the volunteers and sent to rescuers.
Ushahidi has tracked reports of election fraud in Mexico, damage caused by the Gulf oil spill and critical shortages of important medicines at public health clinics in Uganda. During Washington’s Snowmageddon last winter, Ushahidi was used to map obstacles like stuck cars and toppled trees. The idea was not to just give information to official work crews, but to allow ordinary citizens to organize themselves. Anyone with a shovel (铁锹) and a strong back could check the map for a site nearby and go. It has since been used in snow emergencies in other cities, including New York.
The Operations of Crowdsourcing Online and in Journalism
How can you be sure the information on a crowdsource site is trustworthy? Well, you can’t. But Ushahidi is taking a stab at vetting (审查) its data through, of course, crowdsourcing. Its Swift River project aggregates and plots on maps not only data sent or texted to Ushahidi, but combines it with data from Twitter, YouTube and other sources. When data comes in, anyone can rate it for trustworthiness. The higher the rating it gets, the more prominently it is displayed.
Crowdsourcing can aggregate ideas as well as data. The California-based design firm Ideo has a site called openideo. com, which posts various challenges: How can we get people to register to be bone-marrow donors? How can we use cell phones to improve maternal health in poor countries? How can we get kids more interested in eating fresh food? Each challenge has a financial sponsor; a group interested in solving the problem—the kids and food challenge, for example, was sponsored by British chef and healthy food crusader (改革者) Jamie Oliver.
The process collects random ideas from the public, winnows (筛选) them down by theme and then asks readers to refine the ideas. The public then votes. Jamie Oliver’s organization has launched a project with OpenIDEO, an initiative to help working people cook more. But this was not one of the winning ideas. "People want to be thought of as something other than a source of money. They want to be thought of as creative, thinking people," said Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. "It’s not hard to contribute ideas, but the question is how helpful it is."
Crowdsourcing is also, of course, frequently used in journalism. Many media organizations now turn to readers for their experiences and for reporting help, but few do so as consistently and productively as ProPublica, a nonprofit group that produces investigative journalism that is published in media around the country, including in The Times. ProPublica’s Distributed Reporting Project has asked for information and tips from people affected by a variety of issues, including the Gulf oil spill and the mortgage and loan crisis. A request for information from people who had tried to modify their home loans brought some 3 000 responses, said Amanda Michel, ProPublica’s director of online engagement. Those contacted were asked to document their claims. ProPublica was aware its sample was far from random, but that wasn’t the aim. "We can take a much more subtle and granular (粒状的) look at complex processes by learning about the experiences of several thousand people," said Michel. "We’re not relying on a government official to tell us what is the average bad experience."
Readers can not only provide information to reporters about their own experiences, they can be reporters. For example, for its Stimulus Spot Check, ProPublica recruited readers to "rummage (翻找)around on the state’s Department of Transportation Web site and make several follow-up calls over the next week" to see how some 500 road and bridge projects were doing. They were given instructions on how to find out whether projects had been started, which companies had the contracts and how many jobs were produced. Although the Obama adminstration touted the summer of 2009 as "the summer of stimulus", the resulting story, published on August 18, 2009, reported that two thirds of the projects would be starting in the fall instead, and that states with very high unemployment tended to be moving more slowly than others. For all their novelty, crowdsourcing projects like these will only have a connection to a small numbers of readers’ lives. Many people’s impulse to better the world around them is usually satisfied by giving money. Crowdsourcing offers ways to do that, as well—but in ways that may offer donors more impact and a stronger connection to the social change happening on the ground. [br] Why did crowdsource sites show up dramatically after the failure of nuclear reactors in Japan?
选项
A、People wanted to know the details of the radiation levels.
B、The government performed poorly in detecting the radiation levels.
C、Geiger counters were not easy to come by at that time.
D、The local authority counted on these sites to release the results.
答案
A
解析
细节归纳题。定位句提到,日本福岛核反应堆失灵之后,人们立即寻求官方信息。接着指出,他们不想听到乏味而模糊的安全保证,而想了解具体的细节,他们想知道所在地区的辐射程度,不相信政府的信息源。于是,几家“众包”网站便涌现出来以收集并标示日本甚至美国西海岸地区的辐射程度。将上述内容进行归纳概括,“众包”网站的涌现是因为人们想要知道关于辐射程度的具体细节,因此答案为A)。
转载请注明原文地址:https://tihaiku.com/zcyy/2984595.html
相关试题推荐
Marriagemayimproveyoursleep,andbettersleepmayimproveyourmarriage,
Marriagemayimproveyoursleep,andbettersleepmayimproveyourmarriage,
Marriagemayimproveyoursleep,andbettersleepmayimproveyourmarriage,
Marriagemayimproveyoursleep,andbettersleepmayimproveyourmarriage,
Musicians—fromkaraokesingerstoprofessionalcelloplayers—arebetter
Conventionalwisdomsaysthatitisbettertobealargecompanythanasmal
Conventionalwisdomsaysthatitisbettertobealargecompanythanasmal
Conventionalwisdomsaysthatitisbettertobealargecompanythanasmal
Theconceptofpersonalchoiceinrelationtohealthbehaviorsisanimporta
Theconceptofpersonalchoiceinrelationtohealthbehaviorsisanimporta
随机试题
Whatisthetopicofthepassage?[br][originaltext]Carcrashesaretheto
TheEskimoisgenerallypicturedashospitable,amiableandobliging.A、admirable
Morethan360,000babiesareborneverydayontheplanet.Whichoneofthem
正常舌象的表现是()A.舌体灵活自如 B.胖瘦适中 C.质淡红 D.
女性,26岁,怀孕11周,此时病人间断低热,伴左胸疼,继而呼吸困难,就诊发现“左
关于麻醉前ASA病情分级标准错误的是A、Ⅰ级无脏器改变,估计耐受麻醉手术良好
房地产分支机构承接业务时,应当以( )的名义承接业务。A.设立该分支机构的房地
(2019年真题)当事人为了重复使用而预先拟定,并在订立合同时未与对方协商的条款
通过报检员资格考试合格的人员,取得《报检员资格证》后,()内未从事报检业务的,
下列项目中,符合工程项目定义,可以称为工程项目的是() A.发电机设计项目
最新回复
(
0
)