Scientists are deciphering what makes a crowds useful and mobs single-minded.

When Does the Wisdom of the Crowds Turn Into the Madness of the Mob?

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 Our collective belief in the wisdom of the crowds is everywhere these days. From the democracies that run our cities, states, and countries to sites like Kickstarter and Reddit where we vote on projects and ideas in the hopes that the best will be rise to the top. But as recent research suggests, there’s a fine line between crowd wisdom and mob madness.
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 This belief in the intelligence of the crowds has some hard numbers to back it up, going back at least a century. In 1907, Francis Galton analyzed the entries from a guessing competition at a farmer’s fair, in which villagers had guessed the weight of a butchered ox to win a prize. Although the nearly 800 guesses varied widely, the median came within nine pounds—and the average within a single pound—of the 1198 lb ox. “This result is, I think, more creditable to the trust-worthiness of a democratic judgment than might have been expected,” Galton wrote.
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 But one look at a riotous mob after a football game or the aftermath of Ireland’s housing bubble will remind you that, collectively, people can often be deeply unwise. So when can we expect a crowd to head us in the right direction, and when can’t we? Recently, researchers have begun to lay out a set of criteria for when to trust the masses.
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 First, as evidenced by Galton’s ox story, democratic decision-making works well when each individual first arrives at his or her conclusion independently. It’s the moment that people start influencing each other beforehand that a crowd can run into trouble.
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 Philip Ball, writing for BBC Future, describes a 2011 study in which participants were asked to venture educated guesses about a certain quantity, such as the length of the Swiss-Italian border:
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 The researchers found that, as the amount of information participants were given about each others guesses increased, the range of their guesses got narrower, and the centre of this range could drift further from the true value. In other words, the groups were tending towards a consensus, to the detriment of accuracy.
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 This finding challenges a common view in management and politics that it is best to seek consensus in group decision making. What you can end up with instead is herding towards a relatively arbitrary position.
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 Independent decision making isn’t everything, though. A crowd’s diversity can be just as important. A 2004 study demonstrated that a group of individuals selected at random from a population outperformed a group of the same population’s best problem solvers, Ball reports. Individual experts may have been smart on their own, but on average, they were too similar, working from a narrower range of problem-solving approaches than the random group. That handicap more than offset their skill.
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 And a paper presented last month at a conference on collective intelligence takes this diversity idea one step further. Here’s Ball again:
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 Previous work might imply that you should add random individuals whose decisions are unrelated to those of existing group members. That would be good, but it’s better still to add individuals who aren’t simply independent thinkers but whose views are ‘negatively correlated’ – as different as possible – from the existing members. In other words, diversity trumps independence.
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 In the days of Facebook filter bubbles and carefully selected TV news pundits, it may now be harder than ever for our ideas to be truly independent, which could hobble our combined intelligence. But fortunately, these results show that we can still harness the wisdom of the crowds, we just need to invite a little dissent into our ranks.
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 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/geezaweezer/7638306424">
  Geraint Rowland/Flickr (CC BY)
 </a>
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<p>Crowdsourcsing the best answer works—but only under the right conditions. Without them, it can go horribly wrong.</p>

What We Mean When We Talk About Net Neutrality

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  A big chunk of the recent debate over net neutrality has centered on the idea that “all bits are created equal”—that data should be treated exactly the same no matter where it comes from. The fear is that without explicit rules preventing them, big internet service providers like Comcast might sell companies like Google and Facebook spots in “internet fast lanes,” giving their data an edge over smaller startups that can’t pony up.
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/fast-lane-internet.width-990_VNOckT9.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Public discussion of net neutrality has focused on internet "fast lanes," but that idea is based on an old model of the internet.
        
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  This original concept of net neutrality was thought up back in the days when data from content providers went straight into a giant “internet backbone” of data centers. From there, thousands of competing ISPs carried that data out to computers around the world. The problem is that this model of the internet stopped being accurate around the turn of the century. And understanding how the net actually works these days is the first step in figuring out how to deal with it.
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  Here’s Robert McMillan,
  <a href="http://www.wired.com/2014/06/net_neutrality_missing/">
   writing
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  for Wired:
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   “Here in the year 2014, complaints about a fast-lane don’t make much sense. Today, privileged companies—including Google, Facebook, and Netflix—already benefit from what are essentially internet fast lanes, and this has been the case for years. Such web giants—and others—now have direct connections to big ISPs like Comcast and Verizon, and they run dedicated computer servers deep inside these ISPs. In technical lingo, these are known as “peering connections” and “content delivery servers,” and they’re a vital part of the way the internet works.”
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   “Fast lane is how the internet is built today,” says Craig Labovitz, who, as the CEO of DeepField Networks, an outfit whose sole mission is to track how companies build internet infrastructure, probably knows more about the design of the modern internet than anyone else. And many other internet experts agree with him. “The net neutrality debate has got many facets to it, and most of the points of the debate are artificial, distracting, and based on an incorrect mental model on how the internet works,” says Dave Taht, a developer of open-source networking software.
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  In short, the whole reason you can stream an uninterrupted House of Cards marathon is because Netflix has effectively set up a “fast lane” between itself and your ISP. That, by itself, isn’t necessarily a problem—in theory, any company that is big enough to really need a peering connection would have the money to build one.
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  But, if you’re like 96% of Americans, you have access to only one or two internet service providers. That means Netflix has no choice but to peer with those ISPs in order to reach your computer, meaning the IPSs could exert a disconcerting
  <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/14/5613280/netflix-streaming-speeds-on-comcast-65-percent-faster">
   amount of control
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  over Netflix’s connection speeds.
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  The takeaway, McMillan writes, is that we need to shift our attention from over-simplified and outdated models of the internet and focus on promoting healthy competition among internet service providers, helping to preserve the spirit of net neutrality. Which is what people are really fighting for, anyway.
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 Photo Credit:
 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/aldovanzeeland/4211801466">
  Aldo van Zeeland / Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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</p>

An octopus's arms repel each other in order to avoid getting tangled.

Octopus-Inspired Phase-Changing Material Can Slip Through Tiny Spaces

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 The future of robotics might have just gotten squishier, thanks to a new phase-changing material from MIT. Made cheaply from items you could buy at a craft store, the material can shift between rigid and soft states on command—meaning it may one day be used to create robots that can squeeze underneath collapsed buildings, or even travel through your blood stream.
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 Annette Hosoi of MIT and her former engineering graduate student, Nadia Cheng, initially set out in hopes of finding a material that could act like an octopus—capable of deforming itself to pass through through tight crevasses, but still strong enough to exert a force on its environment.
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 Up until now, the right material had been elusive. Take a bowl of Jell-O, as Hosoi uses to explain the problem: you can squeeze Jell-O into just about anything, but good luck using it to pick up a hammer, or to open a window. But with a little of foam and wax, Hosoi and her colleagues were able to squeeze past the problem.
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 Here’s Evan Ackerman, writing for IEEE Spectrum:
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 The MIT approach (which we like to call on-demand squishiness) involves taking a material or structure that’s inherently soft and modifying it with another material that can phase change between hard and soft states. In this case, MIT is using a scaffold made of foam that’s been coated with wax. Wax, being wax, transitions between solid and liquid at a relatively low temperature. When the wax is cold and solid, the foam structure is rigid, but if the wax is heated to soften it, the entire foam structure becomes soft as well.
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 The researchers also demonstrated that by selectively deforming parts of a structure, they could create joints and make the structure move using a cable (as seen in the video). We’re guessing that as a next step several of these deformable structures could be combined to create a robot that can crawl and squeeze into tight spaces.
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 Another big advantage of the wax/foam composite material is that it heals itself. If it fractured, an operator could simply target the affected area with heat, and the break would smooth right over.
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 Tiny, squishy robots might one day be able to navigate through the human body, administering medicine without causing damage to other tissues. Swap out the wax for something a bit stronger, like solder, and a phase-changing robot could be indispensible in rescue situations—deforming to crawl under piles of wreckage, then springing back to a rigid state to clear the rubble from the inside.
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<p>
 Photo credit: MIT
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<p>The future of robotics might have just gotten squishier, thanks to a new phase-changing, octopus-inspired material from MIT.</p>

Kristen Clark

Articles

When Does the Wisdom of the Crowds Turn Into the Madness of the Mob?

What We Mean When We Talk About Net Neutrality

Octopus-Inspired Phase-Changing Material Can Slip Through Tiny Spaces

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