Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Remote crowdworking

As connectivity and technology mean the barriers to outsourcing are beginning to almost disappear entirely, outsourcing is graduating into another trend that is changing how we treat repetitive human work. Crowdworking is growing, fast. Ville Miettinen, chief executive of "human powered document processing" service Microtask, says business at his crowdworking company is increasing at around 400% year-on-year - and his experience is typical of the wider industry.

Heaphy Project
Willow Garage is a robotics company based in California. It pioneers the use of human-in-the-loop systems - that is, actions which robots can't quite manage on their own, but with a simple piece of human intervention can finish the job. By using Mechanical Turk, Amazon's crowdworking platform which allows workers all over the world to remotely carry out small tasks for small cash rewards. Its Heaphy Project is a system which allows a person to control a robot remotely using just a web browser.

Microtask's Mr Miettinen offers a massive workforce available at a company's beck and call without the hassle. "The individual tasks are really small," Mr Miettinen explains. "It can be just a single word out of a document. They're not seeing the entire page, they don't know what the rest of the page contains, and they also don't know who else is working on it." It means several people, in several continents, can all collaborate to process one individual form.

Saturday, June 02, 2012

Paralysed rats 'learn to walk'


An injury to the spinal cord stops the brain controlling the body. The study, in the journal Science, showed injured rats could even learn to sprint with spinal stimulation.

Experts said it was an "exceptional study" and that restoring function after paralysis "can no longer be dismissed as a pipedream".

In 2011, a man from Oregon in the US was able to stand up again while his spinal cord was stimulated with electricity. Rob Summers had been paralysed from the chest down after being hit by a car.

Now researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) say they have restored far more movement in rats which became able to run and climb stairs. The spinal cord of the rats was cut in two places. It meant messages could not travel from the brain to the legs, but the spinal cord was still in one piece.

The lead researcher, Prof Gregoire Courtine, said: "Over time the animal regains the capacity to perform one, two steps, then a long run and eventually we gain the capacity to sprint over ground, climb stairs and even pass obstacles."

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-18257077