Do Meta-Shopping Engines Find Better Deals?

Posted by & filed under Miscellaneous.

I always shop on Amazon, but for big purchases I wonder if I should use a shopping meta-search engine like pricegrabber.com or shopping.com. Theoretically they should always be at least as good as Amazon, but how are they in reality? And does it make sense to look on more than one? It’s very tricky to… Read more »

EMNLP Slides

Posted by & filed under Miscellaneous, Wisdom of Small Crowds.

Rion Snow presented the paper, “Cheap and Fast – But is it Good?” at EMNLP last week. Here are the slides from the talk: Rls For Emnlp 2008 View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

CrowdSifter

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One thing we learned from launching FaceStat is that if you let users upload images, they will upload something inappropriate. It’s not a trivial problem to solve. Machine learning algorithms aren’t good enough to be trustworthy, but users expect their images to be available immediately. FaceStat doesn’t have enough volume to justify hiring a person… Read more »

Fleshmap: crowdsourcing sex

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We all know crowds can tell us the weight of an ox, but can they help us in bed? With artists Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, we took pictures of the nude human body, and asked people online to rate how much they’d like to touch, or be touched at, different positions all over the… Read more »