Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing

Ever since the term ‘crowdsourcing’ was coined in 2006 by ‘Wired’ writer Jeff Howe, group activities ranging from the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary to the choosing of new colors for M&Ms have been labeled with this most buzz-generating of media buzzwords. In this accessible but authoritative account, grounded in the empirical literature, Daren Brabham explains what crowdsourcing is, what it is not, and how it works. Crowdsourcing, Brabham tells us, is an online, distributed problem solving and production model that leverages the collective intelligence of online communities for specific purposes set forth by a crowdsourcing organization — corporate, government, or volunteer. Uniquely, it combines a bottom-up, open, creative process with top-down organizational goals. Crowdsourcing is not open source production, which lacks the top-down component; it is not a market research survey that offers participants a short list of choices; and it is qualitatively different from predigital open innovation and collaborative production processes, which lacked the speed, reach, rich capability, and lowered barriers to entry enabled by the Internet. Brabham describes the intellectual roots of the idea of crowdsourcing in such concepts as collective intelligence, the wisdom of crowds, and distributed computing. He surveys the major issues in crowdsourcing, including crowd motivation, the misconception of the amateur participant, crowdfunding, and the danger of ‘crowdsploitation’ of volunteer labor, citing real-world examples from Threadless, InnoCentive, and other organizations. And he considers the future of crowdsourcing in both theory and practice, describing its possible roles in journalism, governance, national security, and science and health.

Crowdsourcing

Shakespeares Religious Language

Shakespeares Religious Language

Religious issues and religious discourse were vastly important in the sixteenth and seventeenth century and religious language is key to an understanding of Shakespeare’s plays and poems. This dictionary discusses just over 1000 words and names in Shakespeare’s works that have some religious denotation or connotation. Its unique word-by-word approach allows equal consideration of the full religious nuance of each of these words, from ‘abbess’ to ‘zeal’. It also gradually reveals the persistence, the variety, and the sophistication of Shakespeare’s religious usage.

Shakespeares Religious Language

The Facts On File Dictionary Of Mathematics

The Facts On File Dictionary Of Mathematics

The Facts on File Dictionary of Mathematics, Fourth Edition contains more than 2,000 cross-referenced entries that explain, clearly and concisely, the most frequently used terms in mathematics.

The Facts On File Dictionary Of Mathematics

A Guide to Data Compression Methods, Volume 1

A Guide to Data Compression Methods, Volume 1

Many faces of modern computing – from archiving data to coding theory to image processing rely heavily on data compression. This new and practical guide explains the process of compressing all types of computer data, as well as the use of significant methods and algorithms. Its purpose is to succinctly describe both the principles underlying the field of data compression and how to use the key methods effectively. A Guide to Data Compression Methods concentrates on general concepts and methods and describes them with a minimal amount of mathematical detail. It presents the main approaches to data compression, describes the most important algorithms, and includes straightforward examples. Statistical, dictionary, and wavelet methodologies are addressed in specific chapters, as well as image, video, and audio compression. The reader can expect to gain a basic understanding of the key algorithms and methods used to compress data for storage and transmission. Topics and features: All core methods are clearly explained with realistic examples, and some computer code is included Accessible presentation, with only minimum computer and mathematics technical background Discussion of wavelet methods and JPEG 2000 Appendix lists all algorithms presented in the book This book is an invaluable practical reference and guide for all practitioners and professionals in computer science, software engineering, and programming.

A Guide to Data Compression Methods, Volume 1

Handbook of Energy, Volume II

Handbook of Energy, Volume II

Handbook of Energy, Volume II: Chronologies, Top Ten Lists, and Word Clouds draws together a comprehensive account of the energy field from the prestigious and award-winning authors of the Encyclopedia of Energy (2004), The Dictionary of Energy, Expanded Edition (2009), and the Handbook of Energy, Volume I (2013).

Handbook of Energy, Volume II

The Facts on File Dictionary of Proverbs

The Facts on File Dictionary of Proverbs

‘…an exceptional ready-reference source…conciseness and engaging style…Recommended for all library collections.’ Library Journal

The Facts on File Dictionary of Proverbs

Diagrammatica

Diagrammatica

This book provides an easily accessible introduction to quantum field theory via Feynman rules and calculations in particle physics. The aim is to make clear what the physical foundations of present day field theory are, to clarify the physical content of Feynman rules, and to outline their domain of applicability. The book begins with a brief review of some aspects of Einstein’s theory of relativity that are of particular importance for field theory, before going on to consider the relativistic quantum mechanics of free particles, interacting fields, and particles with spin. The techniques learned in the chapters are then demonstrated in examples that might be encountered in real accelerator physics. Further chapters contain discussions on renormalization, massive and massless vector fields and unitarity. A final chapter presents concluding arguments concerning quantum electrodynamics. The book includes valuable appendices that review some essential mathematics, including complex spaces, matrices, the CBH equation, traces and dimensional regularization. An appendix containing a comprehensive summary of the rules and conventions used is followed by an appendix specifying the full Lagrangian of the Standard Model and the corresponding Feynman rules. To make the book useful for a wide audience a final appendix provides a discussion on the metric used, and an easy to use dictionary connecting equations written with different metric. Written as a textbook, many diagrams and examples are included.

Diagrammatica

Python 3 Text Processing with NLTK 3 Cookbook

Python 3 Text Processing with NLTK 3 Cookbook

This book will show you the essential techniques of text and language processing. Starting with tokenization, stemming, and the WordNet dictionary, you’ll progress to part-of-speech tagging, phrase chunking, and named entity recognition. You’ll learn how various text corpora are organized, as well as how to create your own custom corpus. Then, you’ll move onto text classification with a focus on sentiment analysis. And because NLP can be computationally expensive on large bodies of text, you’ll try a few methods for distributed text processing. Finally, you’ll be introduced to a number of other small but complementary Python libraries for text analysis, cleaning, and parsing.

Python 3 Text Processing with NLTK 3 Cookbook