There is a saying that human can only organize and manage
human resource up to a certain limit. The limit is about one
hundred thousand owing to the enormous effort required to handle
such amount of data. For some very large projects in history,
such as building the Pyramid, the Hoover Dam, putting a man on the
Moon and even a war, the human resource involved might not exceed
100000. But we have all kinds of wonderful achievements from
human collaboration at this scale.
The scenario changed now that we have the Internet which means the
ability to manage large human resource of hundreds of millions of
online Internet users. Just think what we could achieve with such
manpower potential. You may think that the Internet is in chaos
and it will be impossible to make millions of users do one thing in
common for free. But here come some clever thinking and some
projects have been launched to do just that. I saw this
interesting TED presentation below which introduced how these are
done. Please take a look. This is inspirational for the human
resource managers, resource and system managers and the IT
managers.
Two particular projects are mentioned. One is the digitization of
old books. We all know the limitation of optical character
recognition. This is particular difficult for old books with
strange fonts. Not surprisingly, what the computer cannot do
human brains can. We can read an old book and recognize what the
strange characters are. Digitization by a human with actual
typing work is expensive and time consuming. To engage the human
brains of millions of Internet users, a project makes use of the
security control of some websites where you are asked to input
some strange characters shown on the screen upon logging in. Such
characters are not recognizable by computer. The trick is to use
two such words. While the first is the security code, the second
is an image of a word from an old book which the project needs
you, secretly, to recognize. Millions of people type the security
code everyday and an old book of many characters is digitized in
parallel this way. Now we know this, we may ask the bank to give
us a discount every time we log in.
Another interesting project is the translation of websites into
different languages. Professional translators are expensive and
computer translation is rubbish. The project asks Internet users
to translate one sentence of a webpage at a time. But how can you
make sure the translation is correct and make human do it for
free? First, the sentence is translated many times and the
computer chooses the best translation which most users did.
Second, it uses the project as an education medium where people
can learn another language by participating. Instead of paying
for translation tuition, Internet users pay with their time doing
simple translation and have it corrected by many other users doing
the same translation.
There is already an app in Facebook called Translations. You can
translate some selected sentences from English to Chinese, or vote
on the best among several translated versions. Facebook will then
use it in the Chinese version of the website. I think Facebook is
doing this on several different languages. It will then have
muilti-lingual websites for free.
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