Crowdfunding in the accommodation realm and pandemic times: The resilient case of CleanBnB

Crowdfunding campaigns have recently promoted a range of new business models in different contexts. This study investigates crowdfunding in the accommodation realm from a socio-cultural perspective and across its international dynamics. Drawing on complexity theory, the study explores the successful case of CleanBnb, the leading crowdfunded company in the Italian short-term rental market, and informs hospitality actors on the coping strategies implemented to challenge the Covid-19 pandemic. The study adopts a case study approach, combining primary data collected through an in-depth interview of the CEO and the analysis of secondary data from different company reports. The results highlight the importance of (1) business diversification, (2) grouping opportunities and (3) widening of service range as key factors in pandemic business survival for start-ups operating in the accommodation realm. The study finally discusses post-pandemic scenarios for both the traditional hotel industry and sharing economy operators by offering managerial insight

Crowdfunding in digital humanities: some evidence from Indonesian social enterprises

Purpose – This article aims to understand how social enterprises adopt crowdfunding in digital humanities by investigating the mission drifting, risk sharing and human resource practices. Design/methodology/approach – This exploratory study uses a qualitative method by observing five different social ventures in Indonesia. The case study involves observation of social enterprises that concern digital humanities projects and interviews with those who manage the crowdfunding for financing the projects as the key respondents. The analysis uses an interpretative approach by involving the respondents to explain the phenomena. Findings – (1) Adopting the crowdfunding platform encourages social enterprises to reshape social missions with more responsive action for digital humanities. (2) Crowdfunding allows social enterprises to share the risk with stakeholders who focus on fostering the social impact of digital humanities. (3) Crowdfunding stimulates social enterprises to hire professional workers with flexible work arrangements to attract specific donors and investors. Originality/value – The result extends the principles of social enterprises by introducing some concepts of crowdfunding in digital humanities. This study also explains the boundary conditions of digital humanities projects and how crowdfunding can support the projects by adopting the principles of the social enterprise that works on digital humanities projects

Quality Control in Crowdsourcing: A Survey of Quality Attributes, Assessment Techniques and Assurance Actions

Crowdsourcing enables one to leverage on the intelligence and wisdom of potentially large groups of individuals toward solving problems. Common problems approached with crowdsourcing are labeling images, translating or transcribing text, providing opinions or ideas, and similar - all tasks that computers are not good at or where they may even fail altogether. The introduction of humans into computations and/or everyday work, however, also poses critical, novel challenges in terms of quality control, as the crowd is typically composed of people with unknown and very diverse abilities, skills, interests, personal objectives and technological resources. This survey studies quality in the context of crowdsourcing along several dimensions, so as to define and characterize it and to understand the current state of the art. Specifically, this survey derives a quality model for crowdsourcing tasks, identifies the methods and techniques that can be used to assess the attributes of the model, and the actions and strategies that help prevent and mitigate quality problems. An analysis of how these features are supported by the state of the art further identifies open issues and informs an outlook on hot future research directions.Comment: 40 pages main paper, 5 pages appendi

Change blindness: eradication of gestalt strategies

Arrays of eight, texture-defined rectangles were used as stimuli in a one-shot change blindness (CB) task where there was a 50% chance that one rectangle would change orientation between two successive presentations separated by an interval. CB was eliminated by cueing the target rectangle in the first stimulus, reduced by cueing in the interval and unaffected by cueing in the second presentation. This supports the idea that a representation was formed that persisted through the interval before being 'overwritten' by the second presentation (Landman et al, 2003 Vision Research 43149–164]. Another possibility is that participants used some kind of grouping or Gestalt strategy. To test this we changed the spatial position of the rectangles in the second presentation by shifting them along imaginary spokes (by ±1 degree) emanating from the central fixation point. There was no significant difference seen in performance between this and the standard task [F(1,4)=2.565, p=0.185]. This may suggest two things: (i) Gestalt grouping is not used as a strategy in these tasks, and (ii) it gives further weight to the argument that objects may be stored and retrieved from a pre-attentional store during this task

When in doubt ask the crowd : leveraging collective intelligence for improving event detection and machine learning

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A tale of two anomies: some observations on the contribution of (sociological) criminological theory to explaining hate crime motivation

This paper argues that hate crime is simply an inherent and normal component of contemporary society. Regardless of a concerted intervention – legislative, situational and social crime prevention – against this significant social problem in the USA and Europe in recent years, there remains a ubiquitous, albeit often latent, continued existence of hate motivation throughout society which remains at a considerable and increasing risk of actualisation as individuals come into contact with other likeminded individuals. This is particularly an issue in the information age which has greatly enhanced the spatial proximity of these hate-minded people to each other. It is shown that an established body of sociologically informed criminological theory – in particular that founded on the European and US anomie traditions – can be adapted to explain and understand the existence and persistence of hate motivation at all levels of the social world. This provides the basis for an extensive educative - and thus preventive - programme to tackle pervasive cultures of hate

NeuroComparatives: Neuro-Symbolic Distillation of Comparative Knowledge

Comparative knowledge (e.g., steel is stronger and heavier than styrofoam) is an essential component of our world knowledge, yet understudied in prior literature. In this paper, we study the task of comparative knowledge acquisition, motivated by the dramatic improvements in the capabilities of extreme-scale language models like GPT-4, which have fueled efforts towards harvesting their knowledge into knowledge bases. While acquisition of such comparative knowledge is much easier from models like GPT-4, compared to their considerably smaller and weaker counterparts such as GPT-2, not even the most powerful models are exempt from making errors. We thus ask: to what extent are models at different scales able to generate valid and diverse comparative knowledge? We introduce NeuroComparatives, a novel framework for comparative knowledge distillation overgenerated from language models such as GPT-variants and Llama, followed by stringent filtering of the generated knowledge. Our framework acquires comparative knowledge between everyday objects, producing a corpus of up to 8.8M comparisons over 1.74M entity pairs - 10X larger and 30% more diverse than existing resources. Moreover, human evaluations show that NeuroComparatives outperform existing resources (up to 32% absolute improvement). We also demonstrate the utility of our distilled NeuroComparatives on three downstream tasks. Our results show that neuro-symbolic manipulation of smaller models offer complementary benefits to the currently dominant practice of prompting extreme-scale language models for knowledge distillation

Collective innovation

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 178-179).The ability to innovate sits at the heart of an organization's ability to succeed in a competitive environment. An organization can innovate by improving existing products, services, or processes or by generating new products, services, or processes. Achieving successful, repeated organizational innovation, however, is a significant challenge. The hurdles to such innovation run the gamut from psychological to structural to procedural. Managers can fall victim to myopia and other human level challenges. Organizational processes, structures, and values can short circuit innovation as well. Given these challenges, we posit that an innovation strategy embracing the concepts of collective intelligence and openness may enable organizations to surmount these hurdles. We refer to this approach as Collective Innovation and define it as a connected, open, and collaborative process that generates, develops, prioritizes, and executes new ideas. To develop our argument, we surveyed literature from a wide array of disciplines including economics, organizational behavior, social psychology, and organizational change.(cont.) We begin this thesis by drawing a connection between the economic theories of Adam Smith and Ronald Coase and research into the changing workplace by Thomas Malone. We then introduce the concepts of collective intelligence and openness, core tenets of Collective Innovation. After introducing Collective Innovation, we examine its place in the history of innovation strategy. Next, we outline and describe the four stages of the Collective Innovation process. Having dealt mainly in theory, we then turn to the application of Collective Innovation and the myriad challenges that managers will face when attempting to implement such a strategy. Keeping in mind these challenges, we outline four ways in which organizations might use Collective Innovation to power the exploration-side of their operations. Finally, we revisit several remaining questions before concluding our analysis.by Alex Slawsby [and] Carlos Rivera.M.B.A

An Exploration Using Narrative Analysis of How Employers and College Student Interns View and Explain the Development of the Career Readiness Competency, Leadership

According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), career readiness “has been undefined, making it difficult for leaders in higher education, workforce development, and public policy to work together effectively to ensure the career readiness of today’s graduates” (2016, p. 1). Students rate themselves high for each of the career competencies and believe they are ready for the workforce. Employers disagree and state that students need more competency development during college. Exploring the misconceptions and miscommunications about the leadership competency could be a first step in closing the gap for all of the career readiness competencies. By determining what leadership type best aligns with internship experiences from a college student’s perspective and an employer’s perspective could help in developing more productive and intentional learning opportunities. In this study, I compare the transactional leadership, transformational leadership, and servant leadership types as they relate to the internship experience. I find that students frequently describe leadership experiences using language aligning with transactional and transformational leadership, while mentors use language that does not align with any of the leadership types chosen. As Strong et al. (2013) point out in their encouragement for more leadership-oriented research, “faculty would gain a better understanding of their students and may better understand the leadership experience” (p. 182). As next steps, further research should be completed to see if other leadership types better align with the mentor comments