Tagging...

ESPGame / Google Image Labeler

There are a number of experiments in trying to harness some of the things people can do well, but computers can not, such as describing the contents of an image. Tim O'Reilly has coined the phrase "bionic software to describe them.

CMU computer scientist Luis Van Ahn introduced a novel way of tagging images using a game. In the ESPGame, people are paired up with an anonymous partner and both are shown an image and asked to type tags that describe it in a small amount of time. Each player does not know what the other is typing and gets points when they agree on a tag.

The game is apparently so compelling that Ahn had to put a 15-hour continuous play limit out of moral deference to America's employers. The tags are fairly accurate and he has a number of fascinating tweaks. His video of his talk at Google is very interesting. Ahn claims that he could tag all of the images on Google in less than 3 weeks.
www.espgame.org
http://images.google.com/imagelabeler (Google's version of ESP Game)

Polar Rose

Swedish startup Polar Rose also tries to use social web techniques to identify pictures and the people and objects within those pictures, coupled with some 3D facial recognition algorithms to attach human context to images.
www.polarrose.com

Steve: Art Museum Social Tagging Project

The Steve project asks users to tags works of art in various museums in an effort to improve access to museum collections through the use of a folkasomic approach to identifying key words with artwork.
http://www.steve.museum/

They Say, I Say: Dialogical Writing

Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein-Graff propose an alternative to teaching kids the five-paragraph essay in their "They Say, I Say" approach which uses a dialogic approach. Kids are encouraged to treat their writing as a conversation using structure to help scaffold arguments by incorporating other people’s ideas and reacting, contrasting, and expanding upon it.
http://tigger.uic.edu/~ggraff/research
http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=3270 (lecture)
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393924092/stagetoolscom (book)

Random Fact

Apparently the actress Hedy Lamarr, who played Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille's "Samson and Delilah" was as inventive as she was beautiful. She holds the 1942 patent (2,292,387) on the first spread spectrum (a.k.a. frequency hopping) technique for sending secret messages over many channels.
www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT2292387

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Audio of the Week

Clay Shirky’s Ontology is Overrated. NYU professor Clay Shirky lays out the case that rigid hierarchies and taxonomies, like the kind libraries use to organize access to information may be a dinosaur, related more to physical convenience than effective access in a virtual work. He is engaging, articulate, and convinced me of the increasing value of folksonomies.
44 minute Presentation at the 2005 Emerging Technology Conference
www.itconversations.com/shows/detail470.html

Book of the Week

Beautiful Evidence (2006) by Edward Tufte. The latest addition to Yale professor Tufte’s four volume set of beautifully realized books on information visualization. If you haven’t read “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information,” that’s probably the best one to start with, and well worth the journey.
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0961392177/stagetoolscom

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If you have any items you think fits this NewsWire, please feel free to email me at bferster - @ - virginia.edu (remove the dashes and spaces).

Thanks!

Bill