Week 10 Lecture- Multiplicity

This weeks lecture was looking at a couple different things that all really tie together.
-Sampling
-Solutions to Insufficient Bandwidth
- Scale
-Iteration
-Collaborative Filter
-Crowd Sourcing- The wisdom of the crowd.

Rather than go through each thing individually this week I thought I would do just a quick overview and then talk about some articles I've been reading that caught my eye on the web.

Essentially, in the lecture we were looking at the wisdom of the crowd. The idea that the collective can do a better job than a single individual.
The example that Michael gave in the lecture was about the weight of the cow at a fair and the person who guessed closest won the cow. But what was cool was the average of all the answers was closer than the person who won. Now you might wonder what does this tell us? It tells us that the idea 'collective intelligence' is not restricted to the web and that a collective can answer better than an individual because each person brings their own knowledge to the table until you have an ultimate table of amazing intelligence or until you run out of chairs or until they realise the need to send someone to buy more chairs.

Iteration so doing a process over and over till you reach a result or destination. Now this is done with computers with music and video which Michael mentioned in the lecture. The computer reconstructs the audio or video till humans cannot tell the difference between the original and the copy.  This ties into solution to insufficient bandwidth- we can do fewer samples of the mp3 and it would take up less bandwidth. The other option is we develop a better method of compression.

So Michael quickly touched on Twitter and the scale it took off means that the Twitter guys needed to develop a way of monetizing it. If you haven't seen it Michael put an article up on moodle and though it was predictable, I must say that I'm a little disappointed with their solution (they have to make money I guess, least its a new way to present ads). The people at Twitter propose to put advertisements in your Twitter feed, however these ads will be directed at you specifically depending on key words that companies can buy. So if Starbucks wanted in on the action which I'm sure they will they might buy 'Starbucks' and 'coffee' for instance. Then depending on how often you tweeted using these keywords Starbucks tweets would come up in your feed to see. Things like discounts and offers and things. Twitter is currently charging companies for every 1000 tweets until they finalise their business model.

Personally I don't use twitter, don't really care what your doing right now. But its something that has taken off so hats off to the technology.

Another cool site I checked out earlier this week was 99 Designs. The idea behind that is you can come to this site and pay the site to run a design competition on your behalf. Then designers submit their designs and at the end of the competition the designer I imagine wins the contract and you get buy the rights to their designs. Really opens up the design community.

Anyway that's enough banter for today.
Lastly really can't wait to get into photosynth that's really cool stuff, internet has been shaped 4 more days sigh....