Month: September 2006

Human Computation

For example, you might ask Mozes Mob (as I recently did) where the best car washes are in San Diego. Local subscribers will ping back almost instantly, via IM or SMS, with answers to your question.

Why do people do it? Call it an example of human computation. People are better searchers than computers are, especially for local services, and they want to share that knowledge. It works, and it’s an insanely interesting app.

using human computation and SMS to improve local search
2007-03-24:

I do this primarily for the money, but I also view it as a form of therapy to get me used to working again> The experience has gotten me thinking about pursuing a library science degree.

2007-09-22:

No one but a utopian would have predicted how readily people will work for free.

in their treatment of human computation. i also like the snarky coining of eHarmony spouse.

Robot Exploration

A fleet of 100 robotic submarines could in 5 years’ time be roaming the vast unexplored stretches of the world’s seafloors and helping unlock their mysteries. “The pace of exploration in the ocean is going a little too slowly”. Only 5% of the ocean floor has been explored in detail, which means there may be numerous new species and geothermal processes waiting to be discovered.

NOAA plans to map the oceans floors with unmanned vehicles.
2010-10-25: Antarctica Ocean UAV. Such a baby step. we should have fleets of fully autonomous ocean robots by now, mapping the sea floors.

Gavia, a bullet-shaped robot developed by the University of British Columbia, is currently in Antarctica on a mission to explore heretofore uncharted areas of the ocean.

2013-04-21: Some speculation

excavating the past will mean deploying teams of remote-sensing robotic machines semi-autonomously flying, crawling, gridding, scanning, squeezing, and non-destructively burrowing their way into lost rooms and buried cities, perhaps even translating ancient languages along the way.

2018-11-20: Robot Wreck Discovery

The wreckage of the ARA San Juan (S-42) was found by Ocean Infinity. Ocean Infinity used 5 Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) to carry out the search. Ocean Infinity’s ocean search capability is the most advanced in the world. Their AUV’s are capable of operating in depths from 5 meters to 6000 meters and covering vast areas of the seabed at unparalleled speed. The AUVs are not tethered, allowing them to go deeper and collect higher quality data. They are equipped with side scan sonar, a multi-beam echo-sounder HD camera, and synthetic aperture sonar. Ocean Infinity is able to deploy 2 work class ROVs and heavy lifting equipment capable of retrieving objects weighing up to 45T from 6000 meters.

Map Quest

teleatlas tries to find new roads from google news alerts, navteq drives around

Each discovery Williams makes – 30-40 per week – soon ends up on a map of the country. That information will then become accessible to computers, GPS devices, and, one hopes, the car navigation system used by the UPS delivery guy in Indiana. But Tele Atlas has decided to plot the world by starting with the electronic news alert instead of the steering wheel. The cartographic competition has suddenly become intense.

Personalized fashion

A trip to the FIT museum with its 1000s of fashion pieces from 500 years made me wonder why we can’t have it all? Where is the startup that lets me pick whatever I like from a catalog that spans the centuries, takes my measurements and then produces the garments in a fully automated factory? Failing that, how about leveraging that same labor that now brings us crappy jeans? A catalog so vast my require some recommendation technology to help me make picks, too.
Seefeld points to coco myles. Wired reports on a 3D scanner for taking body measurements.