Swarm Creativity Blog

Polls about US Presidential elections are notoriously inaccurate - that's what Swiss newspaper NZZ (Neue Zuercher Zeitung) says in an article in yesterday's issue. While Barack Obama is still leading his competitor John McCain in the polls by 3 to 6 percentage points, this is far less than the 15 points with which the Democrats lead the Republicans in the senatorial elections. According to many analysts, one hidden reason for the low-digit lead of Barack is the issue of race. This is an issue that Americans are afraid to admit to pollsters. This is why they lie to the pollster, similarly to how they lied when asked about going to church, doing sport, and drinking alcohol. When asked in person about whether they'd go to church regularly, 56% answered yes. When asked anonymously, it only were 25%. When personally asked if they did sports regularly, 58% claimed they did. When asked anonymously, this number dropped to 35%. When asked about drinking alcohol regularly, anonymous ...

Coolhunt Log #7 Tuesday, April 24, 2007 On Stage: Scott Cooper, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Peter Gloor, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Steve O'Keefe, moderator Leading the Coolhunt today is Peter Gloor. PETER: There was a New York Times article yesterday documenting Wikipedia's coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting. I find the article really inspiring. WEB: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/23/technology/23link.html The story begins: IMAGINE a newspaper with more than 2,000 writers, researchers and copy editors, yet no supervisors or managers to speak of. No deadlines; no meetings to plan coverage; no decisions handed down through a chain of command; no getting up on a desk to lead a toast after a job well done. PETER: Further down in the article, there is a quote: "The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work." Let's now move...

Coolhunt Log Monday, April 16, 2007 On Stage: Peter Gloor, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Scott Cooper, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Steve O'Keefe, moderator Leading the Coolhunt today is Peter Gloor. PETER: I start my day with the New York Times online to sniff the latest trends. WEB: http://www.nytimes.com PETER: On the right side of the home page, scroll down until you see a box entitled "Most Popular." Today's most emailed article is "The Power of Green" by Thomas L. Friedman. [Note: You must register at the New York Times Online to access some articles. Registration is free and fairly simple. Recent articles can often be viewed without registration--as was the case with the Friedman article on our coolhunt." PETER: The article is about a cool trend: green technology. Quote from Article: ". . . projecting America in a green way can be t...

...while you shop. For avid clothing shoppers, todays New York Times describes the latest virtual/real mirror at Bloomingdale's in Manhattan. A shopper stands in front of the mirror situated in the store, which doubles up as a large computer monitor. While the person looks in the mirror, other people make suggestions from an online dress inventory over the internet. The live shopper at Bloomingdale's can then view the suggested piece of clothing in the mirror, overlaid with her/his own image. It seems it has become popular to ask for shopping advice by snapping a picture with a mobile phone camera and sending it to friends, before buying that expensive Gucci handbag. This virtual mirror takes the shopping experience one step further, blurring together the real and the virtual world. Shopping still is a social experience, even in the virtual world.

I stumbled into this NYT article about Danny Hillis – of Thinking Machines fame – latest startup, Metaweb Technologies. His goal is to create Freebase, a database that will describe things “how they are”. He wants, for example, to describe Arnold Schwarzenegger with different views as a bodybuilder, a movie actor, and a politician. I am wondering if the approach of having a centralized system to describe "things how they are" will ever work. The point is that the same things can have very different meanings for different people. I just think back to the only time I visited East Berlin before the wall came down. I went to a bookstore and looked at schoolbooks talking about the second world war. The books were telling how the great and wonderful Soviet Union liberated Germany from the Nazi dictatorship. The US was barely mentioned. In the meantime I have been in now unified Berlin many times. But I can not find these books anymore in the regular bookstores. The point is that ...

Thanks to Ken Zolot for pointing me to this post by Henry Jenkins on "Collective Intelligence vs the Wisdom of Crowds" . Henry Jenkins rightly differentiates between the wisdom of crowds such as in prediction markets, and a more sophisticated way of working together through collective intelligence such as in Wikipedia, where people instantly get access to and can build upon each other's knowledge. In particular he talks about tapping into the wisdom of crowds through using online computer games to predict and make complex decisions. I think using multiplayer online computer games to predict and analyze the real world is a great idea. If this idea is taken seriously, developers of such predictive games might find our research results of interest, where we correlated social networking structures of gamers with their success in the game. What we found was that differently from the real world, the most successful gamers were the ones with the highest degree of connectivity,...