I am choosing to research the massive amounts of potential projects done over the web with varying amounts of large participants; participants ranging from hundreds of thousands to as high as hundreds of millions. These are projects that are so time-man-and-resource consuming that the only practical way to achieve their goals is to use a massive amount of people and there is no way more practical than through the use of the internet.
Methods which utilize massive online collaborations are tried an true, though underrated. Most projects usually don’t inform the “workers” because they’d feel an obligation to be formally paid rather than a simple exchange of services. For example: reCAPTCHA is able to digitize 200,000 books a day by using the input of humans to read something a computer can’t. Paying a team of people to read and translate “analog” text to digital text is much more cost-expensive than the free service of millions of people who would use their 10 seconds anyways, but putting the 10 seconds “wasted” to a bigger and better use.
1. “reCAPTCHA”
Background: While it isn’t exactly an article, I thought it’d be appropriate to start with my prime example’s homepage. This page discusses the project mention earlier, reCAPTCHA, and gives a brief description, and evidence, of what I claimed the project to accomplish.
How I intend to use it: I can use this as reinforcement when mentioning reCAPTCHA as a “tried and true” project.
2. “Massive-Scale Online Collaboration”
Background: Back the roots, I will use the original documentation as a source. This article reinforces the purpose of CAPTCHA and how reCAPTCHA turns 10 seconds of “wasted” time into endless applications of productivity.
How I intend to use it: The provided page is chock-full of evidence supporting my topic’s idea and can be used to further strengthen the argument for these projects.
3. “FAQs About Online Collaboration”
Background: This is a FAQ page which sheds some light on general online-collaboration. While not focusing on massive-scaled collaborations, it describes with detail the benefits and advantages of online collaboration.
How I Intend to use it: This page can help me address the finer points of the perks massive online collaboration has to offer by proving that even a smaller-scaled online collaboration has heaps of benefits.
4. “Collaboration project defeats explosives threats through enhanced detection technologies”
Background: Los Alamos launched a new collaborative program called LACED to provide a better and move advanced detection of explosives. They plan to use the collaboration of industry and federal government to achieve the common goal.
How I Intend to use it: This is solid evidence in the making that massive collaboration poses a great advantage when dealing with either an ever changing/evolving environment or time sensitive-goal; just like bombs becoming more compact/devastating and the possibility for the next attack being now.
5. “How online gamers are solving science’s biggest problems”
Background: As off-topic as it sounds, this is an article useful to my cause. The linked page gives way to a few “sub-articles” or pages where the reader can participate in any mentioned projects. The projects described in this article all use the guise of gaming to “coax” users and/or gamers into solving “real world” problems.
How I Intend to use it: Although the article never explicitly praises “massive online collaboration”, what it describes is the same exact thing and can be used to further press the importance of using the resources of millions of people and the single-most important tool, the internet, to complete monumental projects for the better of humanity and the rest of the world.
6. “Seven Wonder of the Ancient World: Khufu’s Great Pyramid.”
Background: A reliable source proving and supporting the fact that an amazing feat such as the pyramids could only be done with a massive worker-base, and even with such workers the pyramids took long periods of time.
How I Intend to use it: This source will be used to reinforce the hypothesis that massive collaborations have been beneficial throughout human history. The pyramids, among other architectural and engineering wonders, would never have been completed if it weren’t for large work forces. It further helps that aforementioned work forces barely had any incentive, if at all, and were almost always oppressed and unpaid workers.
7. “Number of worldwide internet users from 2000 to 2014 (in millions)”
Background: A precise graphic displaying the amount of internet users over the years. It provides us with not only how many users are surfing the web today, but how many have been surfing over the years. This is used to further prove that the amount of people who use the internet increases exponentially.
How I Intend to use it: With this statistic, I can make my argument more sound by putting a number to the “limitless” workforce of internet users.
8.“Google Finally Puts Captchas to Good Use”
Background: A source to further solidify a previous source (see “reCAPTCHA”) with actual writing. This article discusses Google’s use of Street View images in the reCAPTCHA programs.
How I Intend to use it: The previously stated source is only the introduction of Google’s plans for reCAPTCHA. This article further solidifies Google’s intended application for the human-verifying software.
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How I Intend to use it:
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How I Intend to use it:
The Gamer 2.0
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Counterintuitive Spring 2024 
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🙂
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Indubitably so. However, during my writing I have reached a logic error. I feel that what I’m writing about (or what I plan on writing about) is not counter-intuitive at all, rather it is genius and economically just. I have a hard time seeing what about it exactly is counter-intuitive. Should I change my topic?
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Not at all.
Your reading has already led you to a new, narrower, more focused topic you can easily turn into a counterintuitive hypothesis. Far from being off topic, the Gamers Do Science article is precisely what you’re looking for, it seems to me.
YOU see the idea of gamers engaging in useful work as genius, but you had to prepare yourself for that conclusion. What first strikes a listener who hears the proposition that “In 2011, people playing Foldit, an online puzzle game about protein folding, resolved the structure of an enzyme that causes an Aids-like disease in monkeys” is that you have to be kidding.
Essays that resolve that initial reluctance to accept the crazy idea are the essence of what we’re hoping to achieve here, Capt.
Now, what I suggest, is that you use your increasingly sophisticated understanding of the value and viability of massive collaboration to propose a problem-solving game of your own. Can we use gamers (or any other category of online collaborators) to end a disease, resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, end homelessness? There must be millions of vacant homes or apartments in the country at any one time, right?
Start with a proposition that seems impossible. Apply what you learn about what IS possible to your unsolvable problem. One by one eliminate the obstacles. You may not get the problem solved in 10 weeks, but any progress you make will be valuable enough for one short paper. And, who knows, a few hundred college students all working on the same problem with the payoff being finished research papers might be all it takes to resolve a thorny issue. Theoretically, of course.
I await your reactions.
By the way: “Massive-Scale Online Collaboration” is the text of Luis von Ahn’s TED talk, if you’d like to see/hear it instead of, or in addition to, reading it.
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