Turn your personal mob into an army

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Turn your personal mob into an army


The startup team behind Human.io.

Human.io is the new thing from Joshua Schachter, founder of bookmarking site del.icio.us. This time, however, he’s not suggesting you share your travels with a few friends—he’s suggesting that you turn them into an army.

“If you want to build a flash mob, but have it actually do something useful, this is your API,” Schachter said. “It lets you invite your audience to become part of the action.”

The concept—developed by Paul Rademacher, creator of legendary Craigslist/Google Maps mashup Housingmaps, and Nick Nguyen, formerly of Yahoo and Mozilla—is straightforward enough: Human.io is a platform for performing “micro-tasks”.

First, you publish a simple, crowdsourceble activity, such as voting on something, going to a particular location, or taking photos—anything that might be accomplished with a smartphone’s UI and its sensors. Then you tell your readers, followers or friends about it. They start the app, get cracking, and, finally, the results are sent back to you.

Human.io can be scripted in Python and PHP, languages easy enough for laypeople to create basic tasks, but powerful enough to set up more complex and rewarding interactions. Writes Schachter: “missions and activities to get people involved more directly than just reading stuff on a screen.”

To illustrate how the platform works, Human.io developed an app for us aimed at benefiting the Creative Commons, and Wiki Loves Monuments in particular: wikipedia.human.io.

The idea is to help Wikipedia’s project to improve public access to photography of the world’s architectural and local heritage. If you want to participate, install the free Human.io app (iOS, Android) and select the “Photograph a historic place” task. It’ll cough up a list of anything nearby that’s in the online encyclopedia’s monument hit list. All you have to do is head out, take a shot, and let Human.io do the rest. It’ll show up immediately at wikipedia.human.io, released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

It bridge…

Free/open math textbook written in three days

Free/open math textbook written in three days: Here is a free/open upper secondary mathematics textbook written in a single daythree days by a group of Finnish math teachers, working together in a “booksprint.” Related news: California’s passed a bill establishing 50 “open source” (CC-BY) textbooks for core lower-division college courses (though, as a poster on Slashdot notes, this still has to be funded in the California budget, which is a place where many good ideas go to die).

(via Hacker News)


Why can’t pacemaker users read their own medical data?

Why can’t pacemaker users read their own medical data?:

In this ten minute TEDx talk, Hugo Campos explains his frustration with the fact that his pacemaker is designed to let his doctor read his biometric status, but to stop the patient from doing the same. As a result, Campos isn’t able to use his pacemaker as a diagnostic tool to help make good choices about eating, exercise and other activities. He writes,


I have an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) for primary prevention of sudden cardiac arrest. I have been fighting for my right to access the data collected by the ICD for about 3 years now, without much success. Data about my heart is regularly collected from the implanted device by its manufacturer over remote monitoring.

The modern ICD is a sophisticated computer capable of detecting and treating malignant arrhythmias. It is also capable of wireless telemetry, a feature that is used by all device manufacturers for remote patient monitoring. Today, there are about 5 top manufacturers of pacemakers and ICDs and 1MM patients being remotely monitored on a regular basis. Not a single one of these patients is allowed access to their device’s data.

I am sure you’d agree that this is an objectionable practice and it must be stopped.

TEDxCambridge – Hugo Campos fights for the right to open his heart’s data