Click!

Taking its inspiration from the critically acclaimed book The Wisdom of Crowds, in which New Yorker business and financial columnist James Surowiecki asserts that a diverse crowd is often wiser at making decisions than expert individuals, Click!explores whether Surowiecki’s premise can be applied to the visual arts—is a diverse crowd just as “wise” at evaluating art as the trained experts?

The Brooklyn Museum's upcoming Click! exhibition sounds interesting. The museum has an open call for photo submissions with the theme of Changing Faces of Brooklyn. The general public will be asked to rate the photos (and their own knowledge of art). Finally the photos are installed in the museum based on their rankings with a breakdown of how different groups evaluated the same photo. The results will be analyzed and discussed by experts in the fields of art, online communities, and crowd theory.

One Million Random Digits

In my research I came across references to the Rand Corporation's A Million Random Digits With 100,000 Normal Deviates. It's a 600 page tome of random numbers for use in scientific and mathematical research (for example, running a simulation might require rigorously random numbers). It's available for free online or as a paper back book (it was original published in hardback in 1955).

Out of idle curiosity, I checked Amazon to see if it's available as a reprint, and sure enough it is... and there are 97 reviews of it. For example:

Sloppy., July 27, 2005

By	B. MCGROARTY (United States) - See all my reviews

The book is a promising reference concept, but the execution is somewhat sloppy. Whatever algorithm they used was not fully tested. The bulk of each page seems random enough. However at the lower left and lower right of alternate pages, the number is found to increment directly.

and

The most amazing book I have ever come across, January 16, 2005

By	Jamie R. Wilson (Knoxville, TN USA) - See all my reviews

A truly amazing genre-breaking work of art unlike any that has ever been or ever will. I was captivated from the moment I opened the cover until the extremely suspenseful moment I turned the last page. With that said, I was a little disappointed that 71602 was knocked off by 92937 just as the plot was unfolding, but the arrival of 96240 really got my blood pumping and I just couldn't put the book down from that moment on.

I am so glad that Amazon.com is offering the "Search Inside This Book" option for this book so that it can be enjoyed by countless other avid readers who otherwise may not have come across it. I wait, impatiently, for the audio CD version of this fine book.

A more serious review is available here.

[citation needed]

Citation needed is a link added to Wikipedia articles when someone thinks a particular statement needs a third party source to back it up (or someone just wants to imply a statement is false).

Matt at biphenyl.org created citation needed stickers to add to posters that make dubious claims. Read about it here.

Update: PO8 pointed out that this idea was borrowed from xkcd