The Design of Creative Crowdwork – From Tools for Empowerment to Platform Capitalism

The thesis investigates the methods used in the contemporary crowdsourcing of creative crowdwork and in particular the succession of conflicting ideas and concepts that led to the development of dedi- cated, profit-oriented, online platforms after 2005 for the outsourcing of cognitive tasks and creative labour to a large and unspecified group of people via open calls on the internet. It traces the historic trajectory of the notion of the crowd as well as the development of tech- nologies for online collaboration, with a focus on the accompanying narratives in the form of a dis- course analysis. One focus of the thesis is the clash between the narrative of the empowerment of the individual user through digital tools and the reinvention of the concept of the crowd as a way to refer to users of online platforms in their aggregate form. The thesis argues that the revivification of the notion of the crowd is indicative of a power shift that has diminished the agency of the individual user and empowered the commercial platform providers who, in turn, take unfair advantage of the crowdworker. The thesis examines the workings and the rhetoric of these platforms by comparing the way they address the masses today with historic notions of the crowd, formed by authors like Gustave Le Bon, Sigmund Freud and Elias Canetti. Today’s practice of crowdwork is also juxtaposed with older, arguably more humanist, visions of distributed online collaboration, collective intelligence, free soft- ware and commons-based peer production. The study is a history of ideas, taking some of the utopian concepts of early online history as a vantage point from which to view current and, at times, dystopian applications of crowdsourced creative labour online. The goal is to better understand the social mech- anisms employed by the platforms to motivate and control the crowds they gather, and to uncover the parameters that define their structure as well as the scope for their potential redesign. At its core, the thesis offers a comparison of Amazon Mechanical Turk (2005), the most prominent and infamous example for so-called microtasking or cognitive piecework, with the design of platforms for contest-based creative crowdwork, in particular with Jovoto (2007) and 99designs (2008). The crowdsourcing of design work is organised in decidedly differently ways to other forms of digital labour and the question is why should that be so? What does this tell us about changes in the practice and commissioning of design and what are its effects on design as a profession? However, the thesis is not just about the crowdsourcing of design work: it is also about the design of crowdsourcing as a system. It is about the ethics of these human-made, contingent social systems that are promoted as the future of work. The question underlying the entire thesis is: can crowdsourcing be designed in a way that is fair and sustainable to all stakeholders? The analysis is based on an extensive study of literature from Design Studies, Media and Cul- ture Studies, Business Studies and Human-Computer Interaction, combined with participant observa- tion within several crowdsourcing platforms for design and a series of interviews with different stake- holders

DenoiSeg: Joint Denoising and Segmentation

Microscopy image analysis often requires the segmentation of objects, but training data for this task is typically scarce and hard to obtain. Here we propose DenoiSeg, a new method that can be trained end-to-end on only a few annotated ground truth segmentations. We achieve this by extending Noise2Void, a self-supervised denoising scheme that can be trained on noisy images alone, to also predict dense 3-class segmentations. The reason for the success of our method is that segmentation can profit from denoising, especially when performed jointly within the same network. The network becomes a denoising expert by seeing all available raw data, while co-learning to segment, even if only a few segmentation labels are available. This hypothesis is additionally fueled by our observation that the best segmentation results on high quality (very low noise) raw data are obtained when moderate amounts of synthetic noise are added. This renders the denoising-task non-trivial and unleashes the desired co-learning effect. We believe that DenoiSeg offers a viable way to circumvent the tremendous hunger for high quality training data and effectively enables few-shot learning of dense segmentations.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, 2 pages supplement (4 figures

Longitudinal Testing of Olfactory and Gustatory Function in Patients with Multiple Sclerosis

Background The aim of the study was to investigate changes of the olfactory and gustatory capacity in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). Methodology 20 MS patients were tested longitudinally for 3 years after initial testing. The Threshold Discrimination Identification test (TDI) was used for subjective olfactometry. Objective olfactometry was performed by registering olfactory evoked potentials (OEP) by EEG. The Taste Strip Test (TST) was used for gustatory testing. Results 45% of the patients showed olfactory dysfunction in the follow-up TDI test and 50% showed delayed OEP´s. 20% of the patients showed gustatory dysfunction on follow-up visit. The patients showed mild disease activity with 0,3 ± 0,5 relapses over the testing period and no significant change of their olfactory and gustatory capacity. The olfactory capacity for the discrimination of odors correlated inversely with the number of relapses (r = -0.5, p ≤ 0.05). The patients were aware of their olfactory deficit. Conclusions Olfactory and gustatory dysfunction is a symptom in MS patients and may be a useful parameter to estimate disease progression in MS patients. As the discrimination of odors is processed in higher central regions of the central nervous system (CNS), the results suggest that olfactory dysfunction could be due to CNS damage

Towards Probing Conformational States of Y2 Receptor Using Hyperpolarized 129Xe NMR

G protein-coupled receptors can adopt many different conformational states, each of them exhibiting different restraints towards downstream signaling pathways. One promising strategy to identify and quantify this conformational landscape is to introduce a cysteine at a receptor site sensitive to different states and label this cysteine with a probe for detection. Here, the application of NMR of hyperpolarized 129Xe for the detection of the conformational states of human neuropeptide Y2 receptor is introduced. The xenon trapping cage molecule cryptophane-A attached to a cysteine in extracellular loop 2 of the receptor facilitates chemical exchange saturation transfer experiments without and in the presence of native ligand neuropeptide Y. High-quality spectra indicative of structural states of the receptor–cage conjugate were obtained. Specifically, five signals could be assigned to the conjugate in the apo form. After the addition of NPY, one additional signal and subtle modifications in the persisting signals could be detected. The correlation of the spectroscopic signals and structural states was achieved with molecular dynamics simulations, suggesting frequent contact between the xenon trapping cage and the receptor surface but a preferred interaction with the bound ligand

The Gcn4 transcription factor reduces protein synthesis capacity and extends yeast lifespan

In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, deletion of large ribosomal subunit protein-encoding genes increases the replicative lifespan in a Gcn4-dependent manner. However, how Gcn4, a key transcriptional activator of amino acid biosynthesis genes, increases lifespan, is unknown. Here we show that Gcn4 acts as a repressor of protein synthesis. By analyzing the messenger RNA and protein abundance, ribosome occupancy and protein synthesis rate in various yeast strains, we demonstrate that Gcn4 is sufficient to reduce protein synthesis and increase yeast lifespan. Chromatin immunoprecipitation reveals Gcn4 binding not only at genes that are activated, but also at genes, some encoding ribosomal proteins, that are repressed upon Gcn4 overexpression. The promoters of repressed genes contain Rap1 binding motifs. Our data suggest that Gcn4 is a central regulator of protein synthesis under multiple perturbations, including ribosomal protein gene deletions, calorie restriction, and rapamycin treatment, and provide an explanation for its role in longevity and stress response

Observation of enhanced chiral asymmetries in the inner-shell photoionization of uniaxially oriented methyloxirane enantiomers

Most large molecules are chiral in their structure: they exist as two enantiomers, which are mirror images of each other. Whereas the rovibronic sublevels of two enantiomers are almost identical, it turns out that the photoelectric effect is sensitive to the absolute configuration of the ionized enantiomer - an effect termed Photoelectron Circular Dichroism (PECD). Our comprehensive study demonstrates that the origin of PECD can be found in the molecular frame electron emission pattern connecting PECD to other fundamental photophysical effects as the circular dichroism in angular distributions (CDAD). Accordingly, orienting a chiral molecule in space enhances the PECD by a factor of about 10

Conquering the Jet Lag Era: Experiences from Virtual Interdisciplinary Collaboration across Continents

Mit der Ausschreibung International Virtual Academic Collaboration (IVAC) verfolgt der Förderträger DAAD die Ziele, die Studienangebote an deutschen Hochschulen und deren ausländischen Kooperationshochschulen zu flexibilisieren und den Studierenden einen erweiterten Zugang zur internationalen Hochschulbildung zu ermöglichen. In dem geförderten Projekt Collaborative International, Intercultural & Interdisciplinary Learning (COIIIL) zwischen den Partnerinstitutionen Technische Universität Dresden, Stellenbosch University, Shiraz University und Bucknell University wurden diese Ziele adressiert

Interactions between temperature and energy supply drive microbial communities in hydrothermal sediment

Temperature and bioavailable energy control the distribution of life on Earth, and interact with each other due to the dependency of biological energy requirements on temperature. Here we analyze how temperature-energy interactions structure sediment microbial communities in two hydrothermally active areas of Guaymas Basin. Sites from one area experience advective input of thermogenically produced electron donors by seepage from deeper layers, whereas sites from the other area are diffusion-dominated and electron donor-depleted. In both locations, Archaea dominate at temperatures >45 °C and Bacteria at temperatures <10 °C. Yet, at the phylum level and below, there are clear differences. Hot seep sites have high proportions of typical hydrothermal vent and hot spring taxa. By contrast, high-temperature sites without seepage harbor mainly novel taxa belonging to phyla that are widespread in cold subseafloor sediment. Our results suggest that in hydrothermal sediments temperature determines domain-level dominance, whereas temperature-energy interactions structure microbial communities at the phylum-level and below