Tag Archives: University of Manchester

Economics of crowd-sourcing under spotlight

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A team headed by an economist at the University of Portsmouth has won £750,000 to establish why people give up their time to help scientists better understand some of the biggest mysteries, from searching for the cure for cancer to trying to understand the galaxies that fill our Universe.

Dr Joe Cox, of the Portsmouth Business School, will lead a team from Oxford, Manchester and Leeds Universities and colleagues from Portsmouth’s world-leading Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, to find out more about the people who volunteer to help online science projects.

The grant for the three-year project was awarded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) as part of the Research Councils UK digital economy theme.

Dr Cox said: “Hundreds of thousands of people all over the world are giving their time to help find a cure for cancer, or to better understand the nature of the Universe, or patterns of global warming, but we don’t yet have a detailed understanding of the processes that drive these initiatives, which are more complex than they may first appear.

“The growth of the digital economy has dramatically affected the ways people interact with each other and engage in different activities, but little is known about the changing nature of volunteering and crowd-sourcing in this context.

“This grant will allow us to formulate new economic models to explain the choices, motivations and behaviours of digital volunteers.”

The project will also investigate ways in which volunteering can be optimised and sustained through strategic interactions and interventions on the part of the managers of these resources.

Dr Cox will be working with Dr Karen Masters of the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at Portsmouth to study the Zooniverse (www.zooniverse.org), a highly successful and diverse cluster of online citizen science and crowd-sourcing projects inspired by the success of Galaxy Zoo and now includes more than 20 projects including  Cell Slider  and Seafloor Explorer. Volunteers on these initiatives give up their time to interpret and classify data of scientific interest, ranging from images of distant galaxies to weather patterns and cancer cells.

Dr Masters is project scientist for Galaxy Zoo.

She said: “We hope this grant win will help us to understand how to improve the volunteer experience on Zooniverse projects so that people can feel confident they are contributing to real science when they spend time on our sites, and also gain the maximum enjoyment from the experience.”

Dr Cox said: “Technology has made it possible for the average person on the street to make a real contribution towards our understanding of the universe, the modelling of climate change and the development of a cure for cancer.

“Our research will show how these initiatives can encourage more people to volunteer, as well as enhancing the depth of their engagement, which will help to push the boundaries of scientific knowledge and create significant social value.”

The findings will be of “considerable interest” to web communities and the broader voluntary sector, he said, and is likely to also have significant implications for commercial projects that make use of crowd-sourcing, such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

The research partners include Dr Chris Lintott, Oxford University, Dr Anita Greenhill, University of Manchester, and Dr Gary Graham, University of Leeds.

Is There a Link Between Depression and Guilt?

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It would seem that Sigmund Freud’s theories on depression have been proved right; guilt does play a role in depression, according to MRI scans depressed people respond more strongly to guilt. Dr Sigmund Freud said that depression was characterised by feelings of guilt or self-blame, which made it different from ‘normal’ sadness.

Researchers at the University of Manchester have done brain scans on people with a history of depression and found that the brain scans differed in the regions associated with guilt and knowledge of socially acceptable behaviour from individuals who never get depressed.

The study was published in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry.

Lead researcher Dr Roland Zahn, of the University’s School of Psychological Sciences, said: ‘Our research provides the first brain mechanism that could explain the classical observation by Freud that depression is distinguished from normal sadness by proneness to exaggerated feelings of guilt or self-blame.

‘For the first time, we chart the regions of the brain that interact to link detailed knowledge about socially appropriate behaviour – the anterior temporal lobe – with feelings of guilt – the subgenual region of the brain – in people who are prone to depression.’

Dr Zahn, a MRC clinician scientist fellow, said: ‘The scans revealed that the people with a history of depression did not ‘couple’ the brain regions associated with guilt and knowledge of appropriate behaviour together as strongly as the never depressed control group do.

‘Interestingly, this ‘decoupling’ only occurs when people prone to depression feel guilty or blame themselves, but not when they feel angry or blame others. This could reflect a lack of access to details about what exactly was inappropriate about their behaviour when feeling guilty, thereby extending guilt to things they are not responsible for and feeling guilty for everything.’

The research team is now investigating whether the results from the study can be used to predict depression risk after remission of a previous episode.