I work in marketing, I love sports, culture, creativity and enjoy helping people. I am thankful for much of what life offers, and am getting better at dealing with the unexpected :-) This blog is a way to share some of my passions, reads and thoughts. Don't hesitate to reach out to me, on this blog or social media.
People who are interested in cross-cultural behavior and cultural differences between countries (like me) will likely know Hofstede’s work, or the works of Edward T. Hall and Fons Trompenaars. I learned about them in business school, and absolutely loved to think about their frameworks, which are almost mainstream today. In the last years I also discovered the Shalom H. Schwartz, who created, ran, and still runs a very complete survey about the values that individuals from different countries have (achievement, hedonism, power, self-direction…). But recently, I discovered a relatively new cultural theory: the theory of cultural tightness and looseness. Continue reading →
Here’s a great talk by Seth Cooper and Firas Khatib (University of Washington) who describe the massive possibilities of crowdsourced games like Foldit (“Solve Puzzles for Science“) at TEDx Panthéon Sorbonne. Foldit, which results from part of an experimental research project from the University of Washington, is an online puzzle video game about protein folding centered around folding the structure of selected proteins to the best of the player’s ability (see it in action in this video).
It received big coverage recently when Foldit gamers have helped unlock the structure of an AIDS-related enzyme that the scientific community had been unable to unlock for a decade. The resulting research paper, Crystal structure of a monomeric retroviral protease solved by protein folding game players (PDF), has been published in Nature and is co-authored by the participating Foldit teams “Foldit Contenders Group” and “Foldit Void Crushers Group.” A great example of the power of crowd-based collaboration!
Update (Feb 12th 2013): Another research paper has just been published in Nature, showing that using crowdsourcing platforms such as TopCoder, an alternative to Foldit, yields a whopping 970 fold increase in speed for big data genomics sequencing algorithm. Here’s the citation: Lakhani, K. R., Boudreau, K. J., Loh, P.-R., Backstrom, L., Baldwin, C., Lonstein, E., Lydon, M., et al. (2013). Prize-based contests can provide solutions to computational biology problems. Nature biotechnology, 31(2), 108–11. doi:10.1038/nbt.2495
Yannig Roth / This is my personal blog 