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Crowd-Sourced Experiment To Map All Human Skills
spadadot writes French-based startup has just launched a website that will let you add your skills to a comprehensive map of human skills. As quoted from their website "We aim to build the largest, most accurate, multilingual skills database ever made, by allowing a diverse and skillful community to contribute their individual skills to the global map." The ontology is simple: skills can have zero or more sub-skills. Every new skill is available in all supported languages (only English and French at the moment). The crowdsourced data is free for non-commercial use."
Masturbation, that's a skill. Finding good porn, another skill.
i like that system best.
Is "tomfoolery" on the list yet?
they make me a nightmare for people like you.
I am very good at this. So good, someone is actually paying me real good money, actual money with which you could buy other stuff, for this obscure skill. This is a great country, or what!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
They will very soon have a comprehensive database of the very best automated troll entry coding skillsets that GNAA and other such groups can muster.
Or didn't they get the memo that Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf won man of the year over a decade ago?
I'm not convinced that *all* human skills can be categorized in a tree structure. Shouldn't this be some sort of graph?
Also "Programming Languages" being divided between interpreted or compiled languages might have been a meaningful distinction back when lexical versus dynamic scope was a thing, but today anything worth using has a spec that can be implemented however you like. Somehow I think this start doesn't bode well.
Is that one of them?
my text:
"I have a bit of trouble with Architecture being under Art."
translation:
"I have a bit of trouble with being white Architecture under Art."
lolwut.
does the 4chan crowd know about this?
That is going to make for a very large and weird collection of skills.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
odd, couldnt find murder, torture, or rape.
i see all sorts of problems with this, namely that there are very blurry lines between skills and disciplines (or "jobs").
and also, it seems that you would need to build from the grain up, not the way they're doing it. tons of discrete skills overlap their higher level classes, so do you add the same skill all over the place?? i think the structure is not correct for the model.
While composing a pstt Slahsot
oh shit
Well I can do 3.
Shaving, cooking, gardening, driving and a vast host of other life skills seem totally off the radar here. Arguably, these skills are more important to an individuals existence than most of the ones being considered.
better way both to organize and map skillsets is through understanding how the brain works and data crunching differences.
Every rapper and wannabe baller ever: "I gots the skills."
We're sorry. No skills detected. Please submit yourself to a euthanization clinic.
Comprehensive list of skills, in multiple languages, free to use for non-commercial purposes... So will the RPG they're making with this be a purely skill based system, or will it be tied to attributes and levels? Will there be perks available?
Where do sex workers fit in? "Performing arts"? I would add it myself, but IANASW....
The skill tree is desparately lacking in the intensive field of Masturbation and Masturbation-related activities.
largest arbitrary sub-list of a near infinite list will be crowdsourced.
Many obscure never before mentioned items included. ... and it is done in DIFFERENT LANGUAGES!!!1111 OMG (just to increase duplication, misunderstanding and general uselessness)
Many important items left off.
Much self flagellation had by those in charge.
where have all the real articles gone?
Great, are people being trusted to report what they think are real skills? What could go wrong?!...
Not that I achieved it yet but:
1) first slashdot post
2) get modded down on slashdot
3) get modded up on slashdot
4) post anonymous coward on slashdot
5) get modded funny for serious comment on slashdot
6) waste time at work
7) waste time on Slashdot
8) Check on slashdot status before waking on wife in the morning
The crowdsourced data is free for non-commercial use.
Yes, but that makes it "free as in beer", not "free as in data-wants-to-be".
I can see practically no useful non-commercial purpose for such data, as the only sensible use for it is in recruitment, which is a decidedly non-non-commercial use.
As it's a startup, I'm assuming they're aiming to make a profit which means they want to sell the data to firms in and around the recruitment sector. And they want the public to do lots and lots of unpaid work so that they can datamine lots of data that no-one else will be able to work with. I'm guessing they don't want a single "correct" tree, but will be explicitly looking for the various repetitions and redundancies, so that they can map out equivalences both across languages and within languages. That data will be used to inform automated CV readers and datamine applicant databases and job databases not just by exact keyword matches, but by related matches.
It sounds like a brilliant machine learning project, but it relies on the public donating millions of man-hours to a for-profit company, with no direct benefit to the donors.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Some of those are in here. Shaving and gardening I don't see, but there is Technical-->Kitchen. And there is Technical-->Wheel vehicule[sic] handling-->Land vehicles-->Car driving. Which is then helpfully subclassified into Volvo, Ford, Chrysler, General Motors and Subaru, because of course you have to retrain before you change car brands. And the world's largest car manufacturer (Toyota) doesn't rate a mention.
Actually, for shaving, there is Technicals-->Beauty-->Body Care-->hair removal. And for gardening, there's Technicals-->Agriculture-->Floriculture-->Gardening
Not on the list: map all human skills.
They're trying to model a database of human skills as a hierarchy. That's the most common sort of categorization system we design, because it's simple and logical, but there are lots of things that simply don't fit such a model. Arguably, it's not even a particularly natural model for humans since our internal category systems are generally prototype-based.
But in this case, the real problem is that whatever clear divisions you try to define to segregate skills into classes will be essentially arbitrary. Skills shade into one another based on various common elements. Some pairs of skills are deeply similar because they involve the same sorts of processes, so a person who knows one can easily learn the other even if they're used in completely different contexts, so the taxonomy as-is will incorrectly separate them. Ideally, you really want a skill map that identifies skills that have high degrees of similarity, and between which people can transition easily, regardless of context (I suppose I'm presuming an application of the map which may not be intended, but it seems like a pretty darned valuable application).
There are also real issues of granularity. Take C++ programming... you can be a competent programmer without knowing anything about template metaprogramming, and you can be an expert metaprogrammer without being able to write useful code. Think about it for a moment and you can come up with a hundred examples of sub-skills for any skill. Of course, you can just decide to arbitrarily cut it off at a particular level, and sometimes that level is obvious... but I have a strong suspicion that different people will disagree on the where those "obvious" cut-offs are.
Building the data up the ad-hoc way they're going about it is going to lead to lots of other strangenesses. For example, right now under "Technology" there are three categories "Computer Science", "Aerospace" and "Engineering". Umm, what? We can argue about whether or not software engineers are real engineers, but aerospace engineers definitely are. Do those three things really belong at the same level? Clearly not, and no individual taxonomist would put them there. I hope they have some way for the crowd (or someone) to restructure or the inevitably-flawed and inconsistent hierarchical taxonomy is also going to be silly.
I'm not saying that their idea is impossible, I'm saying that it doesn't fit within a structure of classical categories. Instead it should be modeled as a graph, with multiple relationships between nodes, and the edges labeled to indicate the nature of the relationship. Of course, this will make it impossible to find a skill in the graph except by searching, but that's going to be the case anyway. Except in the most obvious cases people won't know which branches of the tree to follow to find a given skill, and if you're going to start by searching anyway a graph facilitates finding what you want, because you can search for something related and then from there navigate to precisely what you wanted (assuming it's present and properly-connected).
I think there'd also be a lot of value in jump-starting (or perhaps refining) crowd-sourced data with automated analysis and clustering, derived from relevant documents. But the approach to collecting and building the data is less important than getting the data model right.
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I just can't wait for this tree to get incorporated into a MMORPG so I can grind away to master real human skills without actually learning those skills.
I must be losing it, as earlier today I interpreted at first glance "Study Shows How Humans Can Echolocate" as "Study Shows How Humans Can Eat Chocolate" and now "Crowd-Sourced Experiment To Map All Human Skills" as "Crowd-Sourced Experiment To Map All Human Skulls". Haven't even cracked my first beer yet...maybe that's the problem.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
well, I think it's a ploy by french unions.
not onions, but labor unions.
only french labor unions could come up with something as stupid as this, to prove why individual shouldn't be fired or why the employer shouldn't expect their permanent employee to be able to drive a subaru if he can only drive a citroen.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
girls like guys with a lot of SKILLS
All I see is a blank page. Is having your server slashdotted a skill?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's ironic that spelling is problematic in the one area where it should matter most .
They need to fork Wikipedia, and add some directed tree flags to it. Skill META can be considered to belong to multiple parent categories, and has multiple meanings because of the vagaries of language META.
Any attempt to shoe-horn this into a tree is going to fail. Oh... and their search function is dead.
I'd like to add my bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills, nun-chuck skills,...Gosh!
Because as far as I can tell, a skill can quite literally be anything that people can do... which I'd guess is going to be an infinitely large set, and any list they come up with will never be exhaustive... at best only complete for all practical purposes.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The top level of their ontology names categories in Science & Technology, Sports, Social Sciences, Arts, Business, and "Technicals" and claims that "all skills" come under this tree. Well, I can name a node "everything", put everything under that and say that "all skills" come under that tree, too. It doesn't really make the classification useful.
So, what I see here are idiots who think that crowd sourcing ontologies work. Note - it doesn't. At least not very well.
That is all.
The Library of Congress Classification system might be a good place to start. In fact, isn't it designed specifically to include all subjects which anyone might write about? Simply remove the categories which aren't skills. Which ones are those?
Or, the dictionary. Every noun (object) and action verb involves a skill.
I'm curious to see where this goes.