New blog-posts around the web: Crowdsourcing and Alan Turing

This blog has been quiet for a while but I had two posts at the CASTAC blog in the past two months.

The first one, titled Crowdsourcing the Expert, points out that computer scientists have now turned their attention to more sophisticated forms of crowdsourcing: not just crowds of uniform homogeneous click-workers, but also crowds of experts.  The crowdsourcing platform is now seen as a manager, not just for the unskilled worker, but also for the creative classes?   And what about the expertise of computer scientists themselves which is left fairly undefined? Anyway, read the whole thing if it strikes your interest.

The second one is about Alan Turing.  I summarize some recent articles on Alan Turing and computer science published by historians Thomas Haigh and Edgar Daylight,  where they suggest that some of the recent commemorations of Alan Turing are not quite historically accurate.  But fascinating nonetheless because they show us how computer science, as a discipline, was constituted.

Is there social science research on the habits of movie-renters?

I've just started exploring the Netflix data -- and want to use it to look into the habits of folks who rent movies regularly. There's a lot of work on collaborative filtering algorithms and other "recommendation" systems that goes on in Computer Science departments.

But does anyone know of any academic work that was done documenting the behavior patterns exhibited by movie-renters? Questions such as:

• Is the renting behavior exhibited by families different from that of individuals?
• How does liking or disliking a movie affect the next movie that person or family rents?
• What role does the social network play? What about advertisements?

Anything that anyone knows will be much appreciated.