R2 Blog Response

      Crowdsourcing can be defined as the process of getting work or funding from a "crowd" of people, usually done on the internet. One of the famous examples is Wikipedia, where instead of creating an encyclopedia on their own, they gave the actual crowd of commoners their own ability to create the information themselves. Different types of Crowdsourcing  includes: Crowdsource Design, Crowd funding, Microtasks, an open innovation.

      Aaron Koblin explains how crowdsourcing relates to projects he worked on including one called Flight Patterns. He shows a beautifully aesthetic display of flight pattern information which showed data from West coast planes moving across, the red-eye flights to the East coast. By being able to visualize crowdsourcing Aaron Koblin says that we can reflect on our own lives and systems.

     Jimmy Wales goes into detail about the birth of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. He explains how the overall goal is about empowerment and making a free licensing model which allows anyone to copy and redistribute information globally. He goes into the detailed statistics on who uses Wikipedia and surprisingly only 1/3 of the total traffic is to the English Wikipedia. The website itself is generally a true global model where expansion has allowed them to become even more popular than the New York Times.

     

r1 response

  Through each of the posts explored through R1, one of the topics covered is known as cymatics. Evan Grant comes with the information with his powerful TED talk which gives a new perspective on the idea of sound. Cymatics is a process of visualizing sound, by basically vibrating a medium such as water.  The history of cymatics goes back to Earnest Clavney. He created an experiment using a metal plate  covering it with sound and bowing it to create the patterns that are known as the "Clavney Patterns".  Cymatics explores the ways of how we can explore the substance of things not seen. Devices such as the cymascope, have been used to observe cymatic patterns. Cymatics is also vitally important for healing and education.

  In another talk by, Daniel Tammet, he ties in the ideas circulating around perception and how Anton Chekhov was able to inspire him to write about this. He talks about how his world of words and numbers blur with color, emotion and personality. It's a condition known as Synesthesia which can be defined as  in which stimulation of one sensory of cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. Little has been discovered and known about synesthesia and has been suggested that it begins to develop during childhood when children are most intensively engaged with abstract concepts for the first time.