Tag: aardvark

Social Studies

Radiolab’s "Good" Explains Social Networking

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If you’ve not ever heard of political scientist Robert Axelrod and his computer modeling of altruism in the early 1980s, immediately go and listen to the podcast of a RadioLab show—public radio’s best hour— entitled “Good.”

Do that now.

Skip to around the 41 minute mark, and you’ll hear the start of Jad and Robert chatting with Axelrod. Aside: Often when I read something interesting, I imagine it spoken in a Robert Krulwich voice to decide if it would make a worthy post.

Anyway, “Good” is the best popular introduction I’ve come across as to why we’ve evolved to be civil to others.Continue reading

Social Studies

The Helpfulness of Crowds

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For the past few weeks I’ve been trying out a few of the collaborative recommendation sites that are  currently on the scene. My interest was initially piqued by an NYC startup or two, then I learned about Aardvark, now part of Google and one of the most successful of the purely crowdsourced Q&A sites.

You ask a question  and one of Aardvark subscribers is likely to have an answer. I was quite impressed that I got a quick and meaningful response about a good Spanish white wine to match with seafood.

Not all of the cloud-based oracles work this way.  Many instead rely on machine-learning techniques (decision trees, Bayesian classifiers, clustering, …) in which the mileage of your answers will vary based on the terrain of the data.

Then I learned about a mega success story from MetaFilter, a community weblog, in which two young Russian women were saved from entering the sex trade by MetaFilter members. Continue reading