The Daemo crowdsourcing marketplace

The success of crowdsourcing markets is dependent on a strong foundation of trust between workers and requesters. In current marketplaces, workers and requesters are often unable to trust each other’s quality, and their mental models of tasks are misaligned due to ambiguous instructions or confusing edge cases. This breakdown of trust typically arises from (1) flawed reputation systems which do not accurately reflect worker and requester quality, and from (2) poorly designed tasks. In this demo, we present how Boomerang and Prototype Tasks, the fundamental building blocks of the Daemo crowdsourcing marketplace, help restore trust between workers and requesters. Daemo’s Boomerang reputation system incentivizes alignment between opinion and ratings by determining the likelihood that workers and requesters will work together in the future based on how they rate each other. Daemo’s Prototype tasks require that new tasks go through a feedback iteration phase with a small number of workers so that requesters can revise their instructions and task designs before launch

Boomerang: Rebounding the consequences of reputation feedback on crowdsourcing platforms

Paid crowdsourcing platforms suffer from low-quality workand unfair rejections, but paradoxically, most workers and requesters have high reputation scores. These inflated scores, which make high-quality work and workers difficult to find,stem from social pressure to avoid giving negative feedback. We introduce Boomerang, a reputation system for crowdsourcing that elicits more accurate feedback by rebounding the consequences of feedback directly back onto the person who gave it. With Boomerang, requesters find that their highly rated workers gain earliest access to their future tasks, and workers find tasks from their highly-rated requesters at the top of their task feed. Field experiments verify that Boomerang causes both workers and requesters to provide feedback that is more closely aligned with their private opinions. Inspired by a game-theoretic notion of incentive-compatibility, Boomerang opens opportunities for interaction design to incentivize honest reporting over strategic dishonesty

Sonic diaspora, vibrations and rhythm: thinking through the sounding of the Jamaican dancehall session

The propagation of vibrations may provide a better way of understanding diasporic spread than the conventional focus on the circulation of products (Hall 1980, Appadurai 1986, 1996, Gilroy 1993a, Brah 1996). Jamaican sound systems operate as a broadcast medium and a source of CDs, DVDs and other commercial products (Henriques 2007a). But the dancehall sound system session also propagates a broad spectrum of frequencies diffused through a range of media and activities - described as “sounding” (following Small’s 1998 concept of “musicking”). These include the material vibrations of the signature low-pitched auditory frequencies of Reggae as a bass culture (Johnson 1980), at the loudness of “sonic dominance” (Henriques 2003). Secondly a session propagates the corporeal vibrations of rituals, dance routines and bass-line “riddims” (Veal 2007). Thirdly it propagates the ethereal vibrations (Henriques 2007b), “vibes” or atmosphere of the sexually charged popular subculture by which the crowd (audience) appreciate each dancehall session as part of the Dancehall scene (Cooper 2004). The paper concludes that thinking though vibrating frequencies makes it easier to appreciate how audiences with no direct or inherited connection with a particular music genre can be energetically infected and affected - to form a sonic diaspora

Decreased bacterial growth on titanium nanoscale topographies created by ion beam assisted evaporation

Michelle Stolzoff,1 Jason E Burns,2 Arash Aslani,2 Eric J Tobin,2 Congtin Nguyen,1 Nicholas De La Torre,3 Negar H Golshan,3 Katherine S Ziemer,3 Thomas J Webster1,3,4 1Department of Bioengineering, Northeastern University, Boston, 2N2 Biomedical, Bedford, MA, 3Department of Chemical Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA; 4Center of Excellence for Advanced Materials Research, University of King Abdulaziz, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia Abstract: Titanium is one of the most widely used materials for orthopedic implants, yet it has exhibited significant complications in the short and long term, largely resulting from poor cell–material interactions. Among these many modes of failure, bacterial infection at the site of implantation has become a greater concern with the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Nanostructured surfaces have been found to prevent bacterial colonization on many surfaces, including nanotextured titanium. In many cases, specific nanoscale roughness values and resulting surface energies have been considered to be “bactericidal”; here, we explore the use of ion beam evaporation as a novel technique to create nanoscale topographical features that can reduce bacterial density. Specifically, we investigated the relationship between the roughness and titanium nanofeature shapes and sizes, in which smaller, more regularly spaced nanofeatures (specifically 40–50 nm tall peaks spaced ~0.25 µm apart) were found to have more effect than surfaces with high roughness values alone. Keywords: titanium, nanostructures, bacteria, bone ingrowth, surface roughness, IBAD&nbsp

'The industry's the new road': Crime, commodification and street cultural tropes in UK urban music

With original authors and audiences from the most disadvantaged and excluded communities across Western society, urban music has been equally scorned and sought out for its referencing of, and/or association with, criminal activity. Urban music (such as rap from the United States) can be understood as generating both 'respectable fears' and 'subcultural capital', appealing to youthful consumers who are seduced by its ostensibly transgressive character. This appeal is linked to the urban communities which incubated and popularised both the music and the 'street culture' of its underprivileged population. The wisdom has followed that the more 'ghetto' the music, the greater its ability to court controversy and generate record sales. Interestingly, the latest generation of UK urban artistes has bucked this trend, eschewing violent imagery and metaphor, courting a 'mainstream' aesthetic and actively referencing 'respectable' routes to inclusion such as engaging with education and running small businesses. This paper reflects on British 'grime' music, demonstrating that new media and music industry democratisation can alter the manner by which crime and street culture are commodified. It argues that where there is a perception of threat connected to street-level urban music authored by those with supposed links to criminality, the lines between real crime and its mediated representation can become blurred. The authorities and the music industry may respond by effectively criminalising and excluding an entire genre. In the case of UK urban music, artistes have adopted a strategy to succeed within the mainstream industry which, as opposed to US rappers, involves muting their links to street culture. © 2012 The Author(s)

World-culture and the neoliberal world-system : an introduction

Arguing for the continued utility of the keyword neoliberalism, this introduction contends that it must, however, be viewed through an awareness of historical transformations throughout the longer duration of the capitalist world-system. We seek to rehistorize neoliberal transformations within a world-systems perspective that enables a more comprehensive understanding of the ways in which capitalism requires structural inequalities that are produced through the constellation of cores, semiperipheries, and peripheries. Such a comparative perspective has the salutary benefit of overcoming the Euro-American-centrism that has constrained many discussions of neoliberalism that only concentrate on the experiences of northern capitalist cores. Elaborating the basic elements of world-systems and world-ecology perspectives and their utility for criticism of neoliberal world-culture, this chapter also insists on the constitutive role of culture in the rise of neoliberalism, using illustrations from US-dominant financial derivatives and hip-hop culture and Jamaican music. Finally, we seek to differentiate the neoliberal world-system from prior periods in capitalism’s history. We argue that a concept of capitalist periodicity and a better understanding of the nested temporalities of the expanded reproduction of capital are beneficial to a more satisfying periodization of the unfolding of neoliberalization