title: Imran Khan (film actor)

text: Khan then moved to Sunnyvale, California, where he lived with his father and attended Fremont High School. Upon graduation, he aspired to become a film director, and went to Los Angeles to pursue a degree in filmmaking at the Los Angeles branch of the New York Film Academy. Studying direction, writing and cinematography, Khan was inspired by writer Roald Dahl. After receiving his degree, he ventured into market research and advertising. He eventually returned to Mumbai and trained at the Kishore Namit Kapoor Acting Institute.


title: Imran Khan (film actor)

text: Khan appeared in the films "Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak" (1988) and "Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar" (1992) as a child artist, both times playing the role of a young Aamir Khan.


title: Imran Khan (film actor)

text: While training at the acting institute, Khan began networking and met writer-director Abbas Tyrewala, who offered him the lead role in "Jaane Tu... Ya Jaane Na" (2008). After producer Jhamu Sugandh experienced financial difficulties they offered the script to Aamir Khan, who agreed to finance the film. The romantic comedy received positive reviews and was a commercial success, earning worldwide. Khan's portrayal of Jai Singh Rathore (Rats)—a boy who does not believe in violence—was praised by critics. Khalid Mohammed mentioned that "the enterprise belongs to debutant Imran Khan who comes up with an intelligent and restrained performance." Rajeev Masand of CNN-IBN called him "the best young actor" of the time, describing his performance as "unconventional and vulnerable" and stating that it created "a lasting impression." Khan won the Best Male Debut at the 54th Filmfare Awards, sharing the award with Farhan Akhtar.


title: Imran Khan (film actor)

text: Following "Jaane Tu... Ya Jaane Na", Khan starred in Sanjay Gadhvi's thriller "Kidnap", produced by Ashtavinayak head honcho Dhilin Mehta. He was cast as Kabir Devendra Sharma, a kidnapper who abducts a girl to settle an old score with her father, played by Minissha Lamba and Sanjay Dutt, respectively. The actor was initially hesitant to play the part (calling it "tricky and tough") because he couldn't relate to the character; according to him, he would not have been able to do it without Gadhvi's support and backing. In preparation for his role, Khan listened to metal and rock music for a year to become aggressive. While the film was a critical failure, his performance was generally well received by critics. Gaurav Malani, in a review for "The Economic Times", wrote: "Imran Khan is effective as the intelligent abductor who's always two steps ahead of his opponent. However, the natural actor could go easy on his lip movements that appear synthetic at times." "Kidnap" was also a commercial failure.


title: Imran Khan (film actor)

text: Khan next featured alongside an ensemble cast including Dutt, Shruti Haasan, Mithun Chakraborty and Danny Denzongpa in Soham Shah's 2009 action thriller "Luck", again produced by Mehta, playing Ram Mehra—an average middle-class man in dire need of money and ready to do anything for it. In an interview he said that the stunts (and the "unusual" concept of human betting) inspired him to sign the film. He burnt his eyelashes while shooting the climax scene. Loosely inspired by the 2001 Italian film "Intacto", it was a commercial failure and generated negative reviews from critics, as did Khan's performance. Rediff.com's Raja Sen stated that the performance lacked the charm of his earlier ones.


title: Imran Khan (film actor)

text: After the failure of "Kidnap" and "Luck", Khan received fewer film offers, until Karan Johar approached him for the lead role in "I Hate Luv Storys" (2010). Written and directed by debutante Punit Malhotra, the romantic comedy saw him portray Jay "J" Dhingra, a young Casanova who does not believe in the concept of love and romance. The film garnered mixed reviews from critics; Khan's performance was generally well received. Komal Nahta wrote, "Imran Khan is endearing and does well for a good part of the film. But he does need to improve in emotional scenes. [He] is free and lovable in the light scenes. "I Hate Luv Storys" was a domestic and international box-office success, earning . Khan expressed his gratitude that Johar gave him the opportunity. His next appearance was in Danish Aslam's coming-of-age romantic comedy "Break Ke Baad". A commercial failure, the film (and his performance) received mixed reviews; while Namrata Joshi of "Outlook" labelled his performance "earnest", Anupama Chopra said that "Imran is saddled with a bland, supporting role".


title: Imran Khan (film actor)

text: In 2011, Khan earned positive reviews for his role in Abhinay Deo's English language black comedy "Delhi Belly". He was cast as Tashi, a journalist caught up in a hunt for diamonds—smuggled for a crime boss in Delhi—he and his roommates (Kunaal Roy Kapur and Vir Das) have mistakenly taken. The film opened to critical acclaim and was a commercial success, with a domestic revenue of over . A review in "Mid-Day" described his performance as "refreshingly good" and Nikhat Kazmi of "The Times of India" called it his best work to date. Khan said "It is the kind of film that I have always wanted to do, and it is very different to what has been done before in Hindi cinema." Later that year, Khan acted in Ali Abbas Zafar's romantic comedy "Mere Brother Ki Dulhan". It received mixed reviews, but was a box-office success, with domestic earnings of over . Khan played Kush Agnihotri, a man who falls in love with his brother's bride, played by Ali Zafar and Katrina Kaif, respectively. His performance was praised by critics; Sify's Sonia Chopra referred to him as "instantly likeable".


title: Imran Khan (film actor)

text: For his next feature film, Khan starred as Rahul Kapoor, an uptight architect, in Shakun Batra's directorial debut "Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu" (2012) with Kareena Kapoor. The romantic comedy, set in Las Vegas, is the story of two strangers who get married one night after they get drunk. Khan described his character as "a guy who lives his life according to his parents' wishes." Critical reaction to the film and his performance was positive, with Rajeev Masand writing that "Imran Khan slips comfortably into his role". Karan Anshuman of "Mumbai Mirror" opined, "Imran Khan is superbly cast and he doesn't let down. His body language slackens in progression as the script demands and he is absolutely spot on with his comic timing." "Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu" was a modest commercial success, earning a total of in India and abroad.


title: Imran Khan (film actor)

text: In 2013, Khan appeared in three films, the first being Vishal Bhardwaj's "Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola", a political satire set in the rustic surroundings of a village in Haryana. Co-starring with Pankaj Kapur, Anushka Sharma and Shabana Azmi, Khan played Hukum Singh Matru, an educated community activist and Kapur's right-hand man. To prepare for the role, he lived in Delhi for three months and learned to speak Haryanvi from theatre group Act One. The film (and his performance) generated mixed reviews from critics, and its eventual box-office profit was poor. Reuters Shilpa Jamkhandikar wrote, "Imran Khan goes red in the face trying to muster up a Haryanvi accent and act tough. You can actually see the effort in his acting and that's why it jars all the more." Subhash K Jha described it as a good effort, at best. Khan also sang for the film's soundtrack in "Chaar Dina Ki".


title: Imran Khan (film actor)

text: Khan's next film role was alongside Akshay Kumar and Sonakshi Sinha in Milan Luthria's period romantic-drama "Once Upon A Time in Mumbai Dobaara!" (a sequel to 2010's "Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai"). Critical reaction to the film and Khan's portrayal of a gangster was mixed. While Shubhra Gupta of "The Indian Express" found him unconvincing, NDTV's Saibal Chatterjee wrote, "He provides evidence that he can handle a wider range of roles than he is usually allowed to play." Also that year, he starred opposite Kareena Kapoor in Punit Malhotra's romantic comedy "Gori Tere Pyaar Mein", a critical and commercial failure.


title: Imran Khan (film actor)

text: In 2015, Khan acted in Nikhil Advani's romantic comedy "Katti Batti", opposite Kangana Ranaut. The film opened to mixed reviews and was another box-office failure for him; it has been his last release to date.


title: Imran Khan (film actor)

text: In 2009, he participated in Eve Ensler's play "The Vagina Monologues" in celebration of completing 200 shows in India and V-Day. The event was a fundraiser whose beneficiaries included Haseena Hussein (a girl who was blinded and disfigured in an acid attack in Bangalore in 1999), and several other NGOs. Khan endorses People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and has appeared in a number of advertisements in support of the organisation. In 2010 he appeared with his dog, Tony, urging viewers to adopt stray dogs instead of buying purebred animals. Khan filmed a second advertisement in 2011, titled "Tony Changed My Life. You Can Change a Homeless Dog's Life. Please Adopt", after Tony's death in which he continued to advocate for the adoption of animals and not treating them as fashion statements.


title: Imran Khan (film actor)

text: In 2011, Khan and his brother-in-law, Vedant Malik, opposed the Maharashtra state government's new law raising the drinking age to 25 by filing a public-interest litigation (PIL) against it. In an interview given to "The Times of India" he said; "It's completely unfair to expect that one has to wait till 25 years to exercise his freedom of choice regarding one's lifestyle. Young India is not as irresponsible as the older establishment assumes it to be." He walked the ramp to support Shabana Azmi's charitable initiative, Mijwan Welfare Society, an NGO dedicated to empowering girls. He said that he feels privileged to have been brought up in a family surrounded by strong women. In 2013, Khan along with his wife Avantika Malik and mother Nuzhat Khan, purchased a four-acre land which will be converted into an animal shelter with veterinary doctors and staff who will attend to the rescued animals until they are adopted.


title: Imran Khan (film actor)

text: In December 2013, it was announced that Khan, along with famed comedy group All India Bakchod, will be heading up a campaign against the recently reinstated ban on gay sex in India through a satirical video highlighting ignorance around gay issues. Speaking to "Hindustan Times", Khan said: "I’ve always been involved with gay rights. The scenario in this country is disheartening and depressing. These are basic human rights that people are being denied of; they’re no minority. The idea of this initiative is to show those who do not support homosexuality, how ridiculous their thinking is". Other Bollywood stars have spoken out to condemn the reintroduction of the law.


title: Imran Khan (film actor)

text: In 2014, it was announced that he had joined other Bollywood and international celebrities in the TeachAids initiative, a state-of-the-art approach to worldwide HIV prevention, developed at Stanford University.


title: Imran Khan (film actor)

text: Khan became a columnist for the "Hindustan Times" in March 2009, and continues contributing occasionally to the paper. Khan has refused to promote alcohol and tobacco products, condemning such products instead, by saying that he only represents brands he can relate to. He has endorsed several products (including Coca-Cola, Levis, MTS India, Maaza, Bru and Lux), having appeared in television and print advertisements.


title: Imran Khan (film actor)

text: Khan's parents divorced when he was a year and a half old. His mother then married actor Raj Zutshi; they divorced in 2006. Khan says that they remained cordial and that he felt supported by all three of his parents. He retained his mother's maiden name as a tribute to her because she raised him on her own. The actor lives with his family in Pali Hill, a suburban neighbourhood in Mumbai.


title: Imran Khan (film actor)

text: Khan began dating Avantika Malik (daughter of Vandana Malik and niece of Raghav Bahl, the founder of the Network18 Group), at age 19. He later attributed his personal growth to his relationship with Malik: "I have learned a lot about myself and become a more balanced person." His openness about their relationship at an early stage of his career received much press coverage; Sitanshi Talati-Parikh of "Verve" commented, "he does not see any danger in tagging himself as 'unavailable'". Khan later explained that he did not believe in hiding their relationship; he cited Aamir Khan, Shahrukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan, all of whom married early in their careers and remained popular. The couple was engaged on 16 January 2010, in a farmhouse owned by Avantika's family in Karjat (near Navi Mumbai). They married a year later (on 10 January 2011) in a private civil ceremony at Aamir Khan's home in Pali Hill. On 6 December 2013, it was announced that the couple were expecting their first child and on 9 June 2014, Malik gave birth to a baby girl, Imara Malik Khan. In May 2019, the couple started living separately, and Avantika left Khan’s home with their daughter. The couple decided to separate due to irreconcilable differences after an eight-year-long marriage.


title: Imran Khan (film actor)

text: Khan's non-controversial lifestyle has generated speculation in the mass media. During an interview, he said he does not rely on controversy and rumours to stay in the news. The actor also asserted that he prefers to stay away from the limelight when not promoting his films.


title: Imran Khan (film actor)

text: Imran Khan's eyes and lips have been mentioned as his most distinctive physical features. In 2011, "Bombay Dost", India's first legal gay magazine, labelled him a "gay icon". The following year he was featured on "GQ India"s list of "Bollywood's 11 Best-Dressed Actors", which described his style sense: "grown and matured into an irresistible combination of goody-two-shoesness and an urbane sophistication."


title: Imran Khan (film actor)

text: In 2013, he ranked fortieth on Forbes' "Celebrity 100", a list based on the income and popularity of India's biggest entertainers.


title: Imran Khan (film actor)

text: After moving from his "lover boy" image in "Delhi Belly" and "Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola", Khan was noted for experimenting with different genres and character types. "The Hindu"s Vijay Nair labelled him as "unconvincing" and said that he "[delivers] performances that suffer in comparison to what his co stars bring to the film." Khan has been compared to his uncle Aamir Khan, whom he describes as a major influence on his life.


title: Estella Sneider

text: Estella Sneider (also known as Dr. Estella, born September 3, 1950) is a Mexican television and radio personality, sex therapist, psychologist, author, and socialite. She is also known for her appearances on the "Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" with her son Mauricio Umansky and daughter-in-law actress Kyle Richards.


title: Estella Sneider

text: Sneider was nominated for a Shorty Award for her podcasting experience in 2014, a result of her being very active in the entertainment and charity scenes in Los Angeles as well as maintaining an active web presence.


title: Estella Sneider

text: Sneider was born on September 3, 1950 in Mexico City, Mexico, as the youngest child and only daughter of Simon Sneider and Esther Bessudo Perez. Her four older brothers, three of whom are still living, are Ruben Sneider Bessudo (b. October 31, 1936 - d. January 3, 2009), Luis Sneider Bessudo, Jorge Sneider Bessudo, and Guillermo Sneider Bessudo. She attended Escuela Secundaria y Preparatoria de la Ciudad de Mexico for junior high school, moving to Colegio Hebreo Tarbut for high school. The high school belonged to the Tarbut movement. After getting pregnant, she finished out her high school career at Instituto Superior Abierto.


title: Estella Sneider

text: In 1968, at the age of 18, Sneider married Eduardo Umansky. Together they had two children: Mauricio Simon Umansky and Sharon Umansky. In 1976, the family moved to the United States so that Sneider could pursue higher education. She earned a Bachelor's in Psychology in 1980 from the University of Southern California, followed by a Master's (1984) and then PsyD (1986) in Psychology from the California Graduate Institute. Following her PsyD, Sneider attended the University of California Los Angeles for a year of training in Sexology and Sexual Therapy.


title: Estella Sneider

text: In 1996, her son Mauricio married American actress Kyle Richards as her second husband. Together, the couple have three daughters, namely Alexia Simone, Sophia, and Portia Umansky. Mauricio works as a high end real estate agent, focusing on properties around Beverly Hills and Bel Air, and has a net worth of approximately $30 million. Mauricio's marriage to Kyle was the vehicle for Sneider appearing on "RHOBH". Of her relationship with Kyle, Sneider stated, "She is a wonderful wife to my son Mauricio Umansky for 17-plus years, a fabulous mother to my granddaughters and the best daughter-in-law any mother could have."


title: Estella Sneider

text: In 2014, a number of celebrities nominated Sneider for a Shorty Award, including Camille Grammer, Ann Wilson, Kyle Richards, Cristian Solis (wife of Marco Antonio Solís), and others, resulting in about 50 nominations overall.


title: Estella Sneider

text: When WIZO named Sneider a Gala Honoree in 2013, she was thanked for her work in the organization by Californian politicians Brad Sherman, Adam B. Schiff, Zev Yaroslavsky, Bernard C. Parks, Bob Blumenfield, Curren D. Price, Jr., Eric Garcetti, Nury Martinez, and the Beverly Hills city council.


title: Estella Sneider

text: Sneider has been open about having had plastic surgery. On season 2, episode 9 of "RHOBH", Sneider underwent a facelift. During healing, Sneider did not appear on the show until episode 14, at which time her daughter-in-law Kyle stated "Only in Beverly Hills can your mother-in-law look younger than you".


title: Estella Sneider

text: In 2011, Sneider sent her condolences to fellow "RHOBH" alum Taylor Armstrong after her estranged husband, Russell Armstrong, committed suicide. "E! News" interviewed Sneider, where she talked about dealing with suicidal patients. "When I see general patients who have been suicidal, I ask what their plans are, why did they choose that. Explain the plans such as who will find them and what do they think people will think? It's amazing when people start exploring, they get to the message and the real pain that they're feeling. They let it go. Unfortunately, I wish more people would reach out and more professionals are there."


title: Estella Sneider

text: Along with psychology, sexology, charity work, and writing, Sneider is also a property photographer and runs Luxury Style Photography. The business is built around photographing upscale properties and homes which are being put on the market.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Collective intelligence (CI) is shared or group intelligence (GI) that emerges from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making. The term appears in sociobiology, political science and in context of mass peer review and crowdsourcing applications. It may involve consensus, social capital and formalisms such as voting systems, social media and other means of quantifying mass activity. Collective IQ is a measure of collective intelligence, although it is often used interchangeably with the term collective intelligence. Collective intelligence has also been attributed to bacteria and animals.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Or it can be more narrowly understood as an emergent property between people and ways of processing information. This notion of collective intelligence is referred to as "symbiotic intelligence" by Norman Lee Johnson. The concept is used in sociology, business, computer science and mass communications: it also appears in science fiction. Pierre Lévy defines collective intelligence as, "It is a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills. I'll add the following indispensable characteristic to this definition: The basis and goal of collective intelligence is mutual recognition and enrichment of individuals rather than the cult of fetishized or hypostatized communities." According to researchers Pierre Lévy and Derrick de Kerckhove, it refers to capacity of networked ICTs (Information communication technologies) to enhance the collective pool of social knowledge by simultaneously expanding the extent of human interactions. A broader definition was provided by Geoff Mulgan in a series of lectures and reports from 2006 onwards and in the book Big Mind which proposed a framework for analysing any thinking system, including both human and machine intelligence, in terms of functional elements (observation, prediction, creativity, judgement etc.), learning loops and forms of organisation. The aim was to provide a way to diagnose, and improve, the collective intelligence of a city, business, NGO or parliament.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Collective intelligence strongly contributes to the shift of knowledge and power from the individual to the collective. According to Eric S. Raymond in 1998 and JC Herz in 2005, open source intelligence will eventually generate superior outcomes to knowledge generated by proprietary software developed within corporations. Media theorist Henry Jenkins sees collective intelligence as an 'alternative source of media power', related to convergence culture. He draws attention to education and the way people are learning to participate in knowledge cultures outside formal learning settings. Henry Jenkins criticizes schools which promote 'autonomous problem solvers and self-contained learners' while remaining hostile to learning through the means of collective intelligence. Both Pierre Lévy and Henry Jenkins support the claim that collective intelligence is important for democratization, as it is interlinked with knowledge-based culture and sustained by collective idea sharing, and thus contributes to a better understanding of diverse society.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Similar to the "g" factor ("g") for general individual intelligence, a new scientific understanding of collective intelligence aims to extract a general collective intelligence factor c factor for groups indicating a group's ability to perform a wide range of tasks. Definition, operationalization and statistical methods are derived from "g". Similarly as "g" is highly interrelated with the concept of IQ, this measurement of collective intelligence can be interpreted as intelligence quotient for groups (Group-IQ) even though the score is not a quotient per se. Causes for "c" and predictive validity are investigated as well.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Writers who have influenced the idea of collective intelligence include Francis Galton, Douglas Hofstadter (1979), Peter Russell (1983), Tom Atlee (1993), Pierre Lévy (1994), Howard Bloom (1995), Francis Heylighen (1995), Douglas Engelbart, Louis Rosenberg, Cliff Joslyn, Ron Dembo, Gottfried Mayer-Kress (2003), and Geoff Mulgan.


title: Collective intelligence

text: The concept (although not so named) originated in 1785 with the Marquis de Condorcet, whose "jury theorem" states that if each member of a voting group is more likely than not to make a correct decision, the probability that the highest vote of the group is the correct decision increases with the number of members of the group (see Condorcet's jury theorem). Many theorists have interpreted Aristotle's statement in the Politics that "a feast to which many contribute is better than a dinner provided out of a single purse" to mean that just as many may bring different dishes to the table, so in a deliberation many may contribute different pieces of information to generate a better decision. Recent scholarship, however, suggests that this was probably not what Aristotle meant but is a modern interpretation based on what we now know about team intelligence.


title: Collective intelligence

text: A precursor of the concept is found in entomologist William Morton Wheeler's observation in 1910 that seemingly independent individuals can cooperate so closely as to become indistinguishable from a single organism. Wheeler saw this collaborative process at work in ants that acted like the cells of a single beast he called a superorganism.


title: Collective intelligence

text: In 1912 Émile Durkheim identified society as the sole source of human logical thought. He argued in "The Elementary Forms of Religious Life" that society constitutes a higher intelligence because it transcends the individual over space and time. Other antecedents are Vladimir Vernadsky and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's concept of "noosphere" and H.G. Wells's concept of "world brain". Peter Russell, Elisabet Sahtouris, and Barbara Marx Hubbard (originator of the term "conscious evolution") are inspired by the visions of a noosphere – a transcendent, rapidly evolving collective intelligence – an informational cortex of the planet. The notion has more recently been examined by the philosopher Pierre Lévy. In a 1962 research report, Douglas Engelbart linked collective intelligence to organizational effectiveness, and predicted that pro-actively 'augmenting human intellect' would yield a multiplier effect in group problem solving: "Three people working together in this augmented mode [would] seem to be more than three times as effective in solving a complex problem as is one augmented person working alone". In 1994, he coined the term 'collective IQ' as a measure of collective intelligence, to focus attention on the opportunity to significantly raise collective IQ in business and society.


title: Collective intelligence

text: The idea of collective intelligence also forms the framework for contemporary democratic theories often referred to as epistemic democracy. Epistemic democratic theories refer to the capacity of the populace, either through deliberation or aggregation of knowledge, to track the truth and relies on mechanisms to synthesize and apply collective intelligence.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Collective intelligence was introduced into the machine learning community in the late 20th century,<ref name="Wolpert arXiv:cs/9905004"></ref> and matured into a broader consideration of how to design "collectives" of self-interested adaptive agents to meet a system-wide goal. This was related to single-agent work on "reward shaping" and has been taken forward by numerous researchers in the game theory and engineering communities.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Howard Bloom has discussed mass behavior – collective behavior from the level of quarks to the level of bacterial, plant, animal, and human societies. He stresses the biological adaptations that have turned most of this earth's living beings into components of what he calls "a learning machine". In 1986 Bloom combined the concepts of apoptosis, parallel distributed processing, group selection, and the superorganism to produce a theory of how collective intelligence works. Later he showed how the collective intelligences of competing bacterial colonies and human societies can be explained in terms of computer-generated "complex adaptive systems" and the "genetic algorithms", concepts pioneered by John Holland.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Bloom traced the evolution of collective intelligence to our bacterial ancestors 1 billion years ago and demonstrated how a multi-species intelligence has worked since the beginning of life. Ant societies exhibit more intelligence, in terms of technology, than any other animal except for humans and co-operate in keeping livestock, for example aphids for "milking". Leaf cutters care for fungi and carry leaves to feed the fungi.


title: Collective intelligence

text: David Skrbina cites the concept of a 'group mind' as being derived from Plato's concept of panpsychism (that mind or consciousness is omnipresent and exists in all matter). He develops the concept of a 'group mind' as articulated by Thomas Hobbes in "Leviathan" and Fechner's arguments for a collective consciousness of mankind. He cites Durkheim as the most notable advocate of a "collective consciousness" and Teilhard de Chardin as a thinker who has developed the philosophical implications of the group mind.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Tom Atlee focuses primarily on humans and on work to upgrade what Howard Bloom calls "the group IQ". Atlee feels that collective intelligence can be encouraged "to overcome 'groupthink' and individual cognitive bias in order to allow a collective to cooperate on one process – while achieving enhanced intellectual performance." George Pór defined the collective intelligence phenomenon as "the capacity of human communities to evolve towards higher order complexity and harmony, through such innovation mechanisms as differentiation and integration, competition and collaboration." Atlee and Pór state that "collective intelligence also involves achieving a single focus of attention and standard of metrics which provide an appropriate threshold of action". Their approach is rooted in scientific community metaphor.


title: Collective intelligence

text: The term group intelligence is sometimes used interchangeably with the term collective intelligence. Anita Woolley presents Collective intelligence as a measure of group intelligence and group creativity. The idea is that a measure of collective intelligence covers a broad range of features of the group, mainly group composition and group interaction. The features of composition that lead to increased levels of collective intelligence in groups include criteria such as higher numbers of women in the group as well as increased diversity of the group.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Atlee and Pór suggest that the field of collective intelligence should primarily be seen as a human enterprise in which mind-sets, a willingness to share and an openness to the value of distributed intelligence for the common good are paramount, though group theory and artificial intelligence have something to offer. Individuals who respect collective intelligence are confident of their own abilities and recognize that the whole is indeed greater than the sum of any individual parts. Maximizing collective intelligence relies on the ability of an organization to accept and develop "The Golden Suggestion", which is any potentially useful input from any member. Groupthink often hampers collective intelligence by limiting input to a select few individuals or filtering potential Golden Suggestions without fully developing them to implementation.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Robert David Steele Vivas in "The New Craft of Intelligence" portrayed all citizens as "intelligence minutemen," drawing only on legal and ethical sources of information, able to create a "public intelligence" that keeps public officials and corporate managers honest, turning the concept of "national intelligence" (previously concerned about spies and secrecy) on its head.


title: Collective intelligence

text: According to Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, collective intelligence is mass collaboration. In order for this concept to happen, four principles need to exist:


title: Collective intelligence

text: A new scientific understanding of collective intelligence defines it as a group's general ability to perform a wide range of tasks. Definition, operationalization and statistical methods are similar to the psychometric approach of general individual intelligence. Hereby, an individual's performance on a given set of cognitive tasks is used to measure general cognitive ability indicated by the general intelligence factor "g" extracted via factor analysis. In the same vein as "g" serves to display between-individual performance differences on cognitive tasks, collective intelligence research aims to find a parallel intelligence factor for groups "c" factor' (also called 'collective intelligence factor' ("CI")) displaying between-group differences on task performance. The collective intelligence score then is used to predict how this same group will perform on any other similar task in the future. Yet tasks, hereby, refer to mental or intellectual tasks performed by small groups even though the concept is hoped to be transferable to other performances and any groups or crowds reaching from families to companies and even whole cities. Since individuals' "g" factor scores are highly correlated with full-scale IQ scores, which are in turn regarded as good estimates of "g", this measurement of collective intelligence can also be seen as an intelligence indicator or quotient respectively for a group (Group-IQ) parallel to an individual's intelligence quotient (IQ) even though the score is not a quotient per se.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Mathematically, "c" and "g" are both variables summarizing positive correlations among different tasks supposing that performance on one task is comparable with performance on other similar tasks. "c" thus is a source of variance among groups and can only be considered as a group's standing on the "c" factor compared to other groups in a given relevant population. The concept is in contrast to competing hypotheses including other correlational structures to explain group intelligence, such as a composition out of several equally important but independent factors as found in individual personality research.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Besides, this scientific idea also aims to explore the causes affecting collective intelligence, such as group size, collaboration tools or group members' interpersonal skills. The MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, for instance, announced the detection of "The Genome of Collective Intelligence" as one of its main goals aiming to develop a "taxonomy of organizational building blocks, or genes, that can be combined and recombined to harness the intelligence of crowds".


title: Collective intelligence

text: Individual intelligence is shown to be genetically and environmentally influenced. Analogously, collective intelligence research aims to explore reasons why certain groups perform more intelligently than other groups given that "c" is just moderately correlated with the intelligence of individual group members. According to Woolley et al.'s results, neither team cohesion nor motivation or satisfaction is correlated with "c". However, they claim that three factors were found as significant correlates: the variance in the number of speaking turns, group members' average social sensitivity and the proportion of females. All three had similar predictive power for "c", but only social sensitivity was statistically significant (b=0.33, P=0.05).


title: Collective intelligence

text: The number speaking turns indicates that "groups where a few people dominated the conversation were less collectively intelligent than those with a more equal distribution of conversational turn-taking". Hence, providing multiple team members the chance to speak up made a group more intelligent.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Group members' social sensitivity was measured via the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RME) and correlated .26 with "c". Hereby, participants are asked to detect thinking or feeling expressed in other peoples' eyes presented on pictures and assessed in a multiple choice format. The test aims to measure peoples' theory of mind (ToM), also called 'mentalizing' or 'mind reading', which refers to the ability to attribute mental states, such as beliefs, desires or intents, to other people and in how far people understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions or perspectives different from their own ones. RME is a ToM test for adults that shows sufficient test-retest reliability and constantly differentiates control groups from individuals with functional autism or Asperger Syndrome. It is one of the most widely accepted and well-validated tests for ToM within adults. ToM can be regarded as an associated subset of skills and abilities within the broader concept of emotional intelligence.


title: Collective intelligence

text: The proportion of females as a predictor of "c" was largely mediated by social sensitivity (Sobel z = 1.93, P= 0.03) which is in vein with previous research showing that women score higher on social sensitivity tests. While a mediation, statistically speaking, clarifies the mechanism underlying the relationship between a dependent and an independent variable, Wolley agreed in an interview with the "Harvard Business Review" that these findings are saying that groups of women are smarter than groups of men. However, she relativizes this stating that the actual important thing is the high social sensitivity of group members.


title: Collective intelligence

text: It is theorized that the collective intelligence factor "c" is an emergent property resulting from bottom-up as well as top-down processes. Hereby, bottom-up processes cover aggregated group-member characteristics. Top-down processes cover group structures and norms that influence a group's way of collaborating and coordinating.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Top-down processes cover group interaction, such as structures, processes, and norms. An example of such top-down processes is conversational turn-taking. Research further suggest that collectively intelligent groups communicate more in general as well as more equally; same applies for participation and is shown for face-to-face as well as online groups communicating only via writing.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Bottom-up processes include group composition, namely the characteristics of group members which are aggregated to the team level. An example of such bottom-up processes is the average social sensitivity or the average and maximum intelligence scores of group members. Furthermore, collective intelligence was found to be related to a group's cognitive diversity including thinking styles and perspectives. Groups that are moderately diverse in cognitive style have higher collective intelligence than those who are very similar in cognitive style or very different. Consequently, groups where members are too similar to each other lack the variety of perspectives and skills needed to perform well. On the other hand, groups whose members are too different seem to have difficulties to communicate and coordinate effectively.


title: Collective intelligence

text: For most of human history, collective intelligence was confined to small tribal groups in which opinions were aggregated through real-time parallel interactions among members. In modern times, mass communication, mass media, and networking technologies have enabled collective intelligence to span massive groups, distributed across continents and time-zones. To accommodate this shift in scale, collective intelligence in large-scale groups been dominated by serialized polling processes such as aggregating up-votes, likes, and ratings over time. In engineering, aggregating many engineering decisions allows for identifying typical good designs. While modern systems benefit from larger group size, the serialized process has been found to introduce substantial noise that distorts the collective output of the group. In one significant study of serialized collective intelligence, it was found that the first vote contributed to a serialized voting system can distort the final result by 34%.


title: Collective intelligence

text: To address the problems of serialized aggregation of input among large-scale groups, recent advancements collective intelligence have worked to replace serialized votes, polls, and markets, with parallel systems such as "human swarms" modeled after synchronous swarms in nature. Based on natural process of Swarm Intelligence, these artificial swarms of networked humans enable participants to work together in parallel to answer questions and make predictions as an emergent collective intelligence. In one high-profile example, a human swarm challenge by CBS Interactive to predict the Kentucky Derby. The swarm correctly predicted the first four horses, in order, defying 542–1 odds and turning a $20 bet into $10,800.


title: Collective intelligence

text: The value of parallel collective intelligence was demonstrated in medical applications by researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine and Unanimous AI in a set of published studies wherein groups of human doctors were connected by real-time swarming algorithms and tasked with diagnosing chest x-rays for the presence of pneumonia. When working together as "human swarms," the groups of experienced radiologists demonstrated a 33% reduction in diagnostic errors as compared to traditional methods.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Woolley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, & Malone (2010), the originators of this scientific understanding of collective intelligence, found a single statistical factor for collective intelligence in their research across 192 groups with people randomly recruited from the public. In Woolley et al.'s two initial studies, groups worked together on different tasks from the McGrath Task Circumplex, a well-established taxonomy of group tasks. Tasks were chosen from all four quadrants of the circumplex and included visual puzzles, brainstorming, making collective moral judgments, and negotiating over limited resources. The results in these tasks were taken to conduct a factor analysis. Both studies showed support for a general collective intelligence factor "c" underlying differences in group performance with an initial eigenvalue accounting for 43% (44% in study 2) of the variance, whereas the next factor accounted for only 18% (20%). That fits the range normally found in research regarding a general individual intelligence factor "g" typically accounting for 40% to 50% percent of between-individual performance differences on cognitive tests.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Afterwards, a more complex task was solved by each group to determine whether "c" factor scores predict performance on tasks beyond the original test. Criterion tasks were playing checkers (draughts) against a standardized computer in the first and a complex architectural design task in the second study. In a regression analysis using both individual intelligence of group members and "c" to predict performance on the criterion tasks, "c" had a significant effect, but average and maximum individual intelligence had not. While average (r=0.15, P=0.04) and maximum intelligence (r=0.19, P=0.008) of individual group members were moderately correlated with "c", "c" was still a much better predictor of the criterion tasks. According to Woolley et al., this supports the existence of a collective intelligence factor "c," because it demonstrates an effect over and beyond group members' individual intelligence and thus that "c" is more than just the aggregation of the individual IQs or the influence of the group member with the highest IQ.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Engel et al. (2014) replicated Woolley et al.'s findings applying an accelerated battery of tasks with a first factor in the factor analysis explaining 49% of the between-group variance in performance with the following factors explaining less than half of this amount. Moreover, they found a similar result for groups working together online communicating only via text and confirmed the role of female proportion and social sensitivity in causing collective intelligence in both cases. Similarly to Wolley et al., they also measured social sensitivity with the RME which is actually meant to measure people's ability to detect mental states in other peoples' eyes. The online collaborating participants, however, did neither know nor see each other at all. The authors conclude that scores on the RME must be related to a broader set of abilities of social reasoning than only drawing inferences from other people's eye expressions.


title: Collective intelligence

text: A collective intelligence factor "c" in the sense of Woolley et al. was further found in groups of MBA students working together over the course of a semester, in online gaming groups as well as in groups from different cultures and groups in different contexts in terms of short-term versus long-term groups. None of these investigations considered team members' individual intelligence scores as control variables.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Note as well that the field of collective intelligence research is quite young and published empirical evidence is relatively rare yet. However, various proposals and working papers are in progress or already completed but (supposedly) still in a scholarly peer reviewing publication process.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Next to predicting a group's performance on more complex criterion tasks as shown in the original experiments, the collective intelligence factor "c" was also found to predict group performance in diverse tasks in MBA classes lasting over several months. Thereby, highly collectively intelligent groups earned significantly higher scores on their group assignments although their members did not do any better on other individually performed assignments. Moreover, highly collective intelligent teams improved performance over time suggesting that more collectively intelligent teams learn better. This is another potential parallel to individual intelligence where more intelligent people are found to acquire new material quicker.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Individual intelligence can be used to predict plenty of life outcomes from school attainment and career success to health outcomes and even mortality. Whether collective intelligence is able to predict other outcomes besides group performance on mental tasks has still to be investigated.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Gladwell (2008) showed that the relationship between individual IQ and success works only to a certain point and that additional IQ points over an estimate of IQ 120 do not translate into real life advantages. If a similar border exists for Group-IQ or if advantages are linear and infinite, has still to be explored. Similarly, demand for further research on possible connections of individual and collective intelligence exists within plenty of other potentially transferable logics of individual intelligence, such as, for instance, the development over time or the question of improving intelligence. Whereas it is controversial whether human intelligence can be enhanced via training, a group's collective intelligence potentially offers simpler opportunities for improvement by exchanging team members or implementing structures and technologies. Moreover, social sensitivity was found to be, at least temporarily, improvable by reading literary fiction as well as watching drama movies. In how far such training ultimately improves collective intelligence through social sensitivity remains an open question.


title: Collective intelligence

text: There are further more advanced concepts and factor models attempting to explain individual cognitive ability including the categorization of intelligence in fluid and crystallized intelligence or the hierarchical model of intelligence differences. Further supplementing explanations and conceptualizations for the factor structure of the Genomes of collective intelligence besides a general "c" factor', though, are missing yet.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Other scholars explain team performance by aggregating team members' general intelligence to the team level instead of building an own overall collective intelligence measure. Devine and Philips (2001) showed in a meta-analysis that mean cognitive ability predicts team performance in laboratory settings (0.37) as well as field settings (0.14) – note that this is only a small effect. Suggesting a strong dependence on the relevant tasks, other scholars showed that tasks requiring a high degree of communication and cooperation are found to be most influenced by the team member with the lowest cognitive ability. Tasks in which selecting the best team member is the most successful strategy, are shown to be most influenced by the member with the highest cognitive ability.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Since Woolley et al.'s results do not show any influence of group satisfaction, group cohesiveness, or motivation, they, at least implicitly, challenge these concepts regarding the importance for group performance in general and thus contrast meta-analytically proven evidence concerning the positive effects of group cohesion, motivation and satisfaction on group performance.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Noteworthy is also that the involved researchers among the confirming findings widely overlap with each other and with the authors participating in the original first study around Anita Woolley.


title: Collective intelligence

text: In 2001, Tadeusz (Tad) Szuba from the AGH University in Poland proposed a formal model for the phenomenon of collective intelligence. It is assumed to be an unconscious, random, parallel, and distributed computational process, run in mathematical logic by the social structure.


title: Collective intelligence

text: In this model, beings and information are modeled as abstract information molecules carrying expressions of mathematical logic. They are quasi-randomly displacing due to their interaction with their environments with their intended displacements. Their interaction in abstract computational space creates multi-thread inference process which we perceive as collective intelligence. Thus, a non-Turing model of computation is used. This theory allows simple formal definition of collective intelligence as the property of social structure and seems to be working well for a wide spectrum of beings, from bacterial colonies up to human social structures. Collective intelligence considered as a specific computational process is providing a straightforward explanation of several social phenomena. For this model of collective intelligence, the formal definition of IQS (IQ Social) was proposed and was defined as "the probability function over the time and domain of N-element inferences which are reflecting inference activity of the social structure". While IQS seems to be computationally hard, modeling of social structure in terms of a computational process as described above gives a chance for approximation. Prospective applications are optimization of companies through the maximization of their IQS, and the analysis of drug resistance against collective intelligence of bacterial colonies.


title: Collective intelligence

text: One measure sometimes applied, especially by more artificial intelligence focused theorists, is a "collective intelligence quotient" (or "cooperation quotient") – which can be normalized from the "individual" intelligence quotient (IQ) – thus making it possible to determine the marginal intelligence added by each new individual participating in the collective action, thus using metrics to avoid the hazards of group think and stupidity.


title: Collective intelligence

text: There have been many recent applications of collective intelligence, including in fields such as crowd-sourcing, citizen science and prediction markets. The Nesta Centre for Collective Intelligence Design was launched in 2018 and has produced many surveys of applications as well as funding experiments. In 2020 the UNDP Accelerator Labs began using collective intelligence methods in their work to accelerate innovation for the Sustainable Development Goals.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Here, the goal is to get an estimate (in a single value) of something. For example, estimating the weight of an object, or the release date of a product or probability of success of a project etc. as seen in prediction markets like Intrade, HSX or InklingMarkets and also in several implementations of crowdsourced estimation of a numeric outcome such as the Delphi method. Essentially, we try to get the average value of the estimates provided by the members in the crowd.


title: Collective intelligence

text: In this situation, opinions are gathered from the crowd regarding an idea, issue or product. For example, trying to get a rating (on some scale) of a product sold online (such as Amazon's star rating system). Here, the emphasis is to collect and simply aggregate the ratings provided by customers/users.


title: Collective intelligence

text: In these problems, someone solicits ideas for projects, designs or solutions from the crowd. For example, ideas on solving a data science problem (as in Kaggle) or getting a good design for a T-shirt (as in Threadless) or in getting answers to simple problems that only humans can do well (as in Amazon's Mechanical Turk). The objective is to gather the ideas and devise some selection criteria to choose the best ideas.


title: Collective intelligence

text: James Surowiecki divides the advantages of disorganized decision-making into three main categories, which are cognition, cooperation and coordination.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Because of the Internet's ability to rapidly convey large amounts of information throughout the world, the use of collective intelligence to predict stock prices and stock price direction has become increasingly viable. Websites aggregate stock market information that is as current as possible so professional or amateur stock analysts can publish their viewpoints, enabling amateur investors to submit their financial opinions and create an aggregate opinion. The opinion of all investor can be weighed equally so that a pivotal premise of the effective application of collective intelligence can be applied: the masses, including a broad spectrum of stock market expertise, can be utilized to more accurately predict the behavior of financial markets.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Collective intelligence underpins the efficient-market hypothesis of Eugene Fama – although the term collective intelligence is not used explicitly in his paper. Fama cites research conducted by Michael Jensen in which 89 out of 115 selected funds underperformed relative to the index during the period from 1955 to 1964. But after removing the loading charge (up-front fee) only 72 underperformed while after removing brokerage costs only 58 underperformed. On the basis of such evidence index funds became popular investment vehicles using the collective intelligence of the market, rather than the judgement of professional fund managers, as an investment strategy.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Political parties mobilize large numbers of people to form policy, select candidates and finance and run election campaigns. Knowledge focusing through various voting methods allows perspectives to converge through the assumption that uninformed voting is to some degree random and can be filtered from the decision process leaving only a residue of informed consensus. Critics point out that often bad ideas, misunderstandings, and misconceptions are widely held, and that structuring of the decision process must favor experts who are presumably less prone to random or misinformed voting in a given context.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Companies such as Affinnova (acquired by Nielsen), Google, InnoCentive, Marketocracy, and Threadless have successfully employed the concept of collective intelligence in bringing about the next generation of technological changes through their research and development (R&D), customer service, and knowledge management. An example of such application is Google's Project Aristotle in 2012, where the effect of collective intelligence on team makeup was examined in hundreds of the company's R&D teams.


title: Collective intelligence

text: In 2012, the "Global Futures Collective Intelligence System" (GFIS) was created by The Millennium Project, which epitomizes collective intelligence as the synergistic intersection among data/information/knowledge, software/hardware, and expertise/insights that has a recursive learning process for better decision-making than the individual players alone.


title: Collective intelligence

text: New media are often associated with the promotion and enhancement of collective intelligence. The ability of new media to easily store and retrieve information, predominantly through databases and the Internet, allows for it to be shared without difficulty. Thus, through interaction with new media, knowledge easily passes between sources resulting in a form of collective intelligence. The use of interactive new media, particularly the internet, promotes online interaction and this distribution of knowledge between users.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Francis Heylighen, Valentin Turchin, and Gottfried Mayer-Kress are among those who view collective intelligence through the lens of computer science and cybernetics. In their view, the Internet enables collective intelligence at the widest, planetary scale, thus facilitating the emergence of a global brain.


title: Collective intelligence

text: The developer of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, aimed to promote sharing and publishing of information globally. Later his employer opened up the technology for free use. In the early '90s, the Internet's potential was still untapped, until the mid-1990s when 'critical mass', as termed by the head of the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), Dr. J.C.R. Licklider, demanded more accessibility and utility. The driving force of this Internet-based collective intelligence is the digitization of information and communication. Henry Jenkins, a key theorist of new media and media convergence draws on the theory that collective intelligence can be attributed to media convergence and participatory culture. He criticizes contemporary education for failing to incorporate online trends of collective problem solving into the classroom, stating "whereas a collective intelligence community encourages ownership of work as a group, schools grade individuals". Jenkins argues that interaction within a knowledge community builds vital skills for young people, and teamwork through collective intelligence communities contribute to the development of such skills. Collective intelligence is not merely a quantitative contribution of information from all cultures, it is also qualitative.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Lévy and de Kerckhove consider CI from a mass communications perspective, focusing on the ability of networked information and communication technologies to enhance the community knowledge pool. They suggest that these communications tools enable humans to interact and to share and collaborate with both ease and speed. With the development of the Internet and its widespread use, the opportunity to contribute to knowledge-building communities, such as Wikipedia, is greater than ever before. These computer networks give participating users the opportunity to store and to retrieve knowledge through the collective access to these databases and allow them to "harness the hive" Researchers at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence research and explore collective intelligence of groups of people and computers.


title: Collective intelligence

text: In this context collective intelligence is often confused with shared knowledge. The former is the sum total of information held individually by members of a community while the latter is information that is believed to be true and known by all members of the community. Collective intelligence as represented by Web 2.0 has less user engagement than collaborative intelligence. An art project using Web 2.0 platforms is "Shared Galaxy", an experiment developed by an anonymous artist to create a collective identity that shows up as one person on several platforms like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Second Life. The password is written in the profiles and the accounts named "Shared Galaxy" are open to be used by anyone. In this way many take part in being one. Another art project using collective intelligence to produce artistic work is Curatron, where a large group of artists together decides on a smaller group that they think would make a good collaborative group. The process is used based on an algorithm computing the collective preferences In creating what he calls 'CI-Art', Nova Scotia based artist Mathew Aldred follows Pierry Lévy's definition of collective intelligence. Aldred's CI-Art event in March 2016 involved over four hundred people from the community of Oxford, Nova Scotia, and internationally. Later work developed by Aldred used the UNU swarm intelligence system to create digital drawings and paintings. The Oxford Riverside Gallery (Nova Scotia) held a public CI-Art event in May 2016, which connected with online participants internationally.


title: Collective intelligence

text: In social bookmarking (also called collaborative tagging), users assign tags to resources shared with other users, which gives rise to a type of information organisation that emerges from this crowdsourcing process. The resulting information structure can be seen as reflecting the collective knowledge (or collective intelligence) of a community of users and is commonly called a "Folksonomy", and the process can be captured by models of collaborative tagging.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Recent research using data from the social bookmarking website Delicious, has shown that collaborative tagging systems exhibit a form of complex systems (or self-organizing) dynamics. Although there is no central controlled vocabulary to constrain the actions of individual users, the distributions of tags that describe different resources has been shown to converge over time to a stable power law distributions. Once such stable distributions form, examining the correlations between different tags can be used to construct simple folksonomy graphs, which can be efficiently partitioned to obtained a form of community or shared vocabularies. Such vocabularies can be seen as a form of collective intelligence, emerging from the decentralised actions of a community of users. The Wall-it Project is also an example of social bookmarking.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Research performed by Tapscott and Williams has provided a few examples of the benefits of collective intelligence to business:


title: Collective intelligence

text: Cultural theorist and online community developer, John Banks considered the contribution of online fan communities in the creation of the Trainz product. He argued that its commercial success was fundamentally dependent upon "the formation and growth of an active and vibrant online fan community that would both actively promote the product and create content- extensions and additions to the game software".


title: Collective intelligence

text: The increase in user created content and interactivity gives rise to issues of control over the game itself and ownership of the player-created content. This gives rise to fundamental legal issues, highlighted by Lessig and Bray and Konsynski, such as intellectual property and property ownership rights.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Gosney extends this issue of Collective Intelligence in videogames one step further in his discussion of alternate reality gaming. This genre, he describes as an "across-media game that deliberately blurs the line between the in-game and out-of-game experiences" as events that happen outside the game reality "reach out" into the player's lives in order to bring them together. Solving the game requires "the collective and collaborative efforts of multiple players"; thus the issue of collective and collaborative team play is essential to ARG. Gosney argues that the Alternate Reality genre of gaming dictates an unprecedented level of collaboration and "collective intelligence" in order to solve the mystery of the game.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Co-operation helps to solve most important and most interesting multi-science problems. In his book, James Surowiecki mentioned that most scientists think that benefits of co-operation have much more value when compared to potential costs. Co-operation works also because at best it guarantees number of different viewpoints. Because of the possibilities of technology global co-operation is nowadays much easier and productive than before. It is clear that, when co-operation goes from university level to global it has significant benefits.


title: Collective intelligence

text: For example, why do scientists co-operate? Science has become more and more isolated and each science field has spread even more and it is impossible for one person to be aware of all developments. This is true especially in experimental research where highly advanced equipment requires special skills. With co-operation scientists can use information from different fields and use it effectively instead of gathering all the information just by reading by themselves."


title: Collective intelligence

text: Military, trade unions, and corporations satisfy some definitions of CI – the most rigorous definition would require a capacity to respond to very arbitrary conditions without orders or guidance from "law" or "customers" to constrain actions. Online advertising companies are using collective intelligence to bypass traditional marketing and creative agencies.


title: Collective intelligence

text: The UNU open platform for "human swarming" (or "social swarming") establishes real-time closed-loop systems around groups of networked users molded after biological swarms, enabling human participants to behave as a unified collective intelligence. When connected to UNU, groups of distributed users collectively answer questions and make predictions in real-time. Early testing shows that human swarms can out-predict individuals. In 2016, an UNU swarm was challenged by a reporter to predict the winners of the Kentucky Derby, and successfully picked the first four horses, in order, beating 540 to 1 odds.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Specialized information sites such as Digital Photography Review or Camera Labs is an example of collective intelligence. Anyone who has an access to the internet can contribute to distributing their knowledge over the world through the specialized information sites.


title: Collective intelligence

text: In learner-generated context a group of users marshal resources to create an ecology that meets their needs often (but not only) in relation to the co-configuration, co-creation and co-design of a particular learning space that allows learners to create their own context. Learner-generated contexts represent an "ad hoc" community that facilitates coordination of collective action in a network of trust. An example of learner-generated context is found on the Internet when collaborative users pool knowledge in a "shared intelligence space". As the Internet has developed so has the concept of CI as a shared public forum. The global accessibility and availability of the Internet has allowed more people than ever to contribute and access ideas.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Games such as "The Sims" Series, and "Second Life" are designed to be non-linear and to depend on collective intelligence for expansion. This way of sharing is gradually evolving and influencing the mindset of the current and future generations. For them, collective intelligence has become a norm. In Terry Flew's discussion of 'interactivity' in the online games environment, the ongoing interactive dialogue between users and game developers, he refers to Pierre Lévy's concept of Collective Intelligence and argues this is active in videogames as clans or guilds in MMORPG constantly work to achieve goals. Henry Jenkins proposes that the participatory cultures emerging between games producers, media companies, and the end-users mark a fundamental shift in the nature of media production and consumption. Jenkins argues that this new participatory culture arises at the intersection of three broad new media trends. Firstly, the development of new media tools/technologies enabling the creation of content. Secondly, the rise of subcultures promoting such creations, and lastly, the growth of value adding media conglomerates, which foster image, idea and narrative flow.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Improvisational actors also experience a type of collective intelligence which they term "group mind", as theatrical improvisation relies on mutual cooperation and agreement, leading to the unity of "group mind".


title: Collective intelligence

text: Growth of the Internet and mobile telecom has also produced "swarming" or "rendezvous" events that enable meetings or even dates on demand. The full impact has yet to be felt but the anti-globalization movement, for example, relies heavily on e-mail, cell phones, pagers, SMS and other means of organizing. The Indymedia organization does this in a more journalistic way. Such resources could combine into a form of collective intelligence accountable only to the current participants yet with some strong moral or linguistic guidance from generations of contributors – or even take on a more obviously democratic form to advance shared goal.


title: Collective intelligence

text: A further application of collective intelligence is found in the "Community Engineering for Innovations". In such an integrated framework proposed by Ebner et al., idea competitions and virtual communities are combined to better realize the potential of the collective intelligence of the participants, particularly in open-source R&D. In management theory the use of collective intelligence and crowd sourcing leads to innovations and very robust answers to quantitative issues. Therefore, collective intelligence and crowd sourcing is not necessarily leading to the best solution to economic problems, but to a stable, good solution.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Collective actions or tasks require different amounts of coordination depending on the complexity of the task. Tasks vary from being highly independent simple tasks that require very little coordination to complex interdependent tasks that are built by many individuals and require a lot of coordination. In the article written by Kittur, Lee and Kraut the writers introduce a problem in cooperation: "When tasks require high coordination because the work is highly interdependent, having more contributors can increase process losses, reducing the effectiveness of the group below what individual members could optimally accomplish". Having a team too large the overall effectiveness may suffer even when the extra contributors increase the resources. In the end the overall costs from coordination might overwhelm other costs.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Group collective intelligence is a property that emerges through coordination from both bottom-up and top-down processes. In a bottom-up process the different characteristics of each member are involved in contributing and enhancing coordination. Top-down processes are more strict and fixed with norms, group structures and routines that in their own way enhance the group's collective work.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Tom Atlee reflects that, although humans have an innate ability to gather and analyze data, they are affected by culture, education and social institutions. A single person tends to make decisions motivated by self-preservation. Therefore, without collective intelligence, humans may drive themselves into extinction based on their selfish needs.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Phillip Brown and Hugh Lauder quotes Bowles and Gintis (1976) that in order to truly define collective intelligence, it is crucial to separate 'intelligence' from IQism. They go on to argue that intelligence is an achievement and can only be developed if allowed to. For example, earlier on, groups from the lower levels of society are severely restricted from aggregating and pooling their intelligence. This is because the elites fear that the collective intelligence would convince the people to rebel. If there is no such capacity and relations, there would be no infrastructure on which collective intelligence is built. This reflects how powerful collective intelligence can be if left to develop.


title: Collective intelligence

text: Skeptics, especially those critical of artificial intelligence and more inclined to believe that risk of bodily harm and bodily action are the basis of all unity between people, are more likely to emphasize the capacity of a group to take action and withstand harm as one fluid mass mobilization, shrugging off harms the way a body shrugs off the loss of a few cells. This train of thought is most obvious in the anti-globalization movement and characterized by the works of John Zerzan, Carol Moore, and Starhawk, who typically shun academics. These theorists are more likely to refer to ecological and collective wisdom and to the role of consensus process in making ontological distinctions than to any form of "intelligence" as such, which they often argue does not exist, or is mere "cleverness".


title: Collective intelligence

text: Harsh critics of artificial intelligence on ethical grounds are likely to promote collective wisdom-building methods, such as the new tribalists and the Gaians. Whether these can be said to be collective intelligence systems is an open question. Some, e.g. Bill Joy, simply wish to avoid any form of autonomous artificial intelligence and seem willing to work on rigorous collective intelligence in order to remove any possible niche for AI.


title: Collective intelligence

text: In contrast to these views, companies such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and CrowdFlower are using collective intelligence and crowdsourcing or consensus-based assessment to collect the enormous amounts of data for machine learning algorithms.


title: Evening Shade

text: Evening Shade is an American sitcom television series that aired on CBS from September 21, 1990, to May 23, 1994. The series stars Burt Reynolds as Wood Newton, an ex-professional football player for the Pittsburgh Steelers, who returns to rural Evening Shade, Arkansas, to coach a high-school football team with a long losing streak. Reynolds personally requested to use the Steelers as his character's former team, because he was a fan.


title: Evening Shade

text: The general theme of the show is the appeal of small-town life. Episodes often ended with a closing narration by Ossie Davis, as his character Ponder Blue, summing up the events of the episode, always closing with "... in a place called Evening Shade." The opening segment included clips from around Arkansas, including the famous McClard's Bar-B-Q, which is situated on Albert Pike Blvd. and South Patterson St. in Hot Springs National Park.


title: Evening Shade

text: A former pro football player for the Pittsburgh Steelers who quit due to injury, Wood Newton has settled down to a quiet life as the coach of the Evening Shade High School football team—which is notorious for losing every game.


title: Evening Shade

text: He and his wife Ava, whom he married when she was only 18 (a frequently-voiced grievance by her father Evan Evans, owner of the local newspaper) are devoted to each other despite their age difference. Ava is an ambitious, successful practicing lawyer who in the first season is elected District Attorney while pregnant with their fourth (unintended) child, Emily. Among Wood and Ava's closest friends are the somewhat-older town doctor Harlan Eldridge and his trusting wife Merleen, who always believes the best of people.


title: Evening Shade

text: The show's plots focus on the various difficulties that Wood faces in living a very different life than he ever expected, as well as the obvious family pressures of two jobs and four children. Additional tensions come from Ava's Aunt Frieda, Evan's perennially discontented sister, who especially disapproves when Evan begins dating Fontana Beausoleil, who works as a stripper and discovers in season two that she is the long-lost daughter Merleen gave up for adoption when she was 15. Evan and Fontana get married in a three-part episode in season two and have a child in season three.


title: Evening Shade

text: The show also gets mileage out of the incongruity of the decidedly unathletic, but well-meaning and eager to learn, assistant coach Herman Stiles, the best the school's budget can afford. During the first season, he catches the eye of the prim-and-proper high-school principal Margaret and they start dating.


title: Evening Shade

text: On July 12 and 19, 1993, CBS aired two parts of an hour-long pilot, "Harlan & Merleen", as a proposed spin-off of the series. The pilot had the Eldridges open their home to young pregnant women who needed help (one was played by Leah Remini). The pilot did not achieve series status.


title: Evening Shade

text: The show's production company, Mozark Productions, was a joint venture by creator Linda Bloodworth-Thomason of Missouri and her husband, Arkansas native, Harry Thomason, which concurrently produced another successful show set in the South, "Designing Women". Hal Holbrook's "Designing Women" character was killed off to free the actor to star in the newer program. The series was produced in association with CBS Productions, Burt Reynolds Productions, and MTM Enterprises. CBS retained full ownership of the series while MTM syndicated the series in the United States.


title: Evening Shade

text: On July 15, 2008, CBS DVD/Paramount Home Entertainment released the first season on DVD, albeit with redone music and editing.


title: Evening Shade

text: On April 12, 2019, Visual Entertainment released the complete series on DVD in Region 1 for the first time.


title: Evening Shade

text: The series enjoyed strong ratings during its entire run, hitting its peak in season two with a number 15 Nielsen ranking. At the time, this was a notably higher position than "The Cosby Show", which had recently fallen from a five-year streak as TV's number-one program. "Evening Shade" was still a top-30 performer, after CBS cancelled the series in May 1994. Skyrocketing production costs, mainly attributed to the large salaries of the show's top-caliber, all-star cast, were the primary reason given for the cancellation (which was confirmed by Marilu Henner in her September 1994 appearance on "Charlie Rose"). However, some have speculated that the show's ending was a decision made by Reynolds, rather than CBS, as his recent marriage troubles with Loni Anderson (from whom he was divorced in 1993) were thought to have affected his work.


title: Evening Shade

text: After its cancellation, reruns of "Evening Shade" were picked up by The Family Channel; however, due to the network's conservative censorship standards, only 40 of the series' 101 episodes produced were aired by FAM, which were also edited considerably from their original broadcast versions.


title: Panache

text: Panache () is a word of French origin that carries the connotation of flamboyant manner and reckless courage, derived from the helmet-plume worn by cavalrymen in the Early Modern period.


title: Panache

text: The literal translation is a plume, such as is worn on a hat or a helmet; the reference is to King Henry IV of France (13 December 1553 – 14 May 1610), a pleasure-loving and cynical military leader, famed for wearing a striking white plume in his helmet and for his war cry: ""Follow my white plume!"" (French: "Ralliez-vous à mon panache blanc!").


title: Panache

text: The epitome of panache and the reason for its establishment as a virtue are found in Edmond Rostand's depiction of Cyrano de Bergerac, in his 1897 play of that name. Prior to Rostand, panache was not necessarily a good thing and was seen by some as a suspect quality.


title: Panache

text: Panache is referred to explicitly at two points in the play but is implicit throughout: Cyrano's challenges to Montfleury, Valvert, and, at one point, the whole audience at the theatre (Act I), and his nonchalant surrender of a month's salary to pay for the damages; his duel with a hundred footpads at the Porte de Nesle (Act II), as well as his dismissal of the exploit when talking to Roxane ("I've been much braver since then"); his crossing the Spanish lines daily to deliver Roxane's letters (Act IV); and his leaving his deathbed to keep his appointment with her in Act V.


title: Panache

text: The explicit references bring in the double entendre: first, in Act IV, when sparring with de Guiche over the loss of de Guiche's white sash, he says: "I hardly think King Henry would have doffed his white panache in any danger." A second instance is in Cyrano's last words, which were: "yet there is something still that will always be mine, and when I go to God's presence, there I will doff it and sweep the heavenly pavement with a gesture: something I'll take unstained out of this world... my panache."


title: Panache

text: In Canadian French, the word panache may also refer to antlers, such as those of a moose or deer. The Panache River is a tributary of the east bank of the Wetetnagami River flowing into Senneterre in the La Vallée-de-l'Or Regional County Municipality, in the administrative region of Abitibi-Témiscamingue, in Quebec, in Canada. Lake Panache is a lake in the Sudbury area of Ontario. "Antlers" was the English name of "Panache", a 2007 documentary film by Canadian director André-Line Beauparlant.


title: Panache

text: In Quentin Tarantino's 2012 film "Django Unchained", Dr. King Schultz (played by Christopher Waltz) tells slaveowner Calvin Candie (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) that he wants a Mandingo fighter with "panache". Candie, despite claiming to be a francophile, does not understand what this means. Schultz then describes it as a "sense of showmanship". As referenced earlier, this is a bit of an anachronism because the word "panache" did not take this connotation until after Cyrano de Bergerac was published in 1897, and "Django" is set in 1858.


title: Panache

text: In Wes Anderson's 2014 film "The Grand Budapest Hotel", the main character's ubiquitous perfume is called 'L'air de Panache'.


title: Panache

text: In season one, episode four of Amazon Studio's "The English", which takes place in 1890, a retelling of an incident 15 years earlier (1875) included dialogue with the word "panache", meaning 'flare'. Which, as noted above, the word did not take this meeting until 1897.


title: Panache

text: Panache is a loan word that remains in use across English dialects, denoting a style that is confident and flamboyant.


title: Kibera

text: Kibera (Kinubi: "Forest" or "Jungle") is a division of Nairobi Area, Kenya, and neighbourhood of the city of Nairobi, from the city centre. Kibera is the largest slum in Nairobi, and the largest urban slum in Africa. The 2009 Kenya Population and Housing Census reports Kibera's population as 170,070, contrary to previous estimates of one or two million people. Other sources suggest the total Kibera population may be 500,000 to well over 1,000,000 depending on which slums are included in defining Kibera.


title: Kibera

text: Most Kibera slum residents live in extreme poverty, earning less than US$2 per day. Unemployment rates are high. 12% of the population are living with HIV. Cases of assault and rape are common. There are few schools, and most people cannot afford education for their children. Clean water is scarce. Diseases caused by poor hygiene are prevalent. A great majority living in the slum lack access to basic services, including electricity, running water, and medical care.


title: Kibera

text: The Government initiated a clearance programme to replace the slum with a residential district of high-rise apartments, and to relocate the residents to these new buildings upon completion.


title: Kibera

text: The neighbourhood is divided into a number of villages, including Kianda, Soweto East, Gatwekera, Kisumu Ndogo, Lindi, Laini Saba, Siranga, Makina, Salama, Ayany, and Mashimoni.


title: Kibera

text: The city of Nairobi, where Kibera is located, was founded in 1899 when the Uganda Railway line was built, thereby creating a need for its headquarters and British colonial offices. The colonial administration intended to keep Nairobi as a home for Europeans and temporary migrant workers from Africa and Asia. The migrant workers were brought into Nairobi on short-term contracts, as indentured labour, to work in the service sector, as railway manual labour and to fill lower-level administrative posts in the colonial government.


title: Kibera

text: Between 1900 and 1940, the colonial government passed a number of laws – such as the 1922 Vagrancy Act – to segregate people, evict, arrest, expel and limit the movement of the natives and indentured workers. Within Nairobi, Africans could live in segregated "native reserves" at the edge of the city. Permits to live in Nairobi were necessary, and these permits separated living areas of non-Europeans by ethnic group. One such group were African soldiers who served the military interests of the British colonial army, and their assigned area developed into a slum, now known as Kibera.


title: Kibera

text: Kibera originated as a settlement in the forests at the outskirts of Nairobi, when Nubian soldiers returning from service with the King's African Rifles (KAR) were allocated plots of land there in return for their efforts in 1904. Kibera was situated on the KAR military exercise grounds in close proximity to the KAR headquarters along Thika Road. The British colonial government allowed the settlement to grow informally. The Nubians had no claim on land in "Native Reserves" and over time, other tribes moved into the area to rent land from the Nubian landlords. With the increase in railway traffic, Nairobi's economy developed, and an increasing number of rural migrants moved to urban Nairobi in search of wage labour. Kibera and other slums developed throughout Nairobi.


title: Kibera

text: Proposals were made in the late 1920s to demolish and relocate Kibera, as it was within the zone of European residential holdings; however, the residents objected to these proposals. The colonial government considered proposals to reorganise Kibera, and the Kenya Land Commission heard a number of cases which referred to the "Kibera problem". By then, Kibera was not the only slum. A 1931 Colonial Report noted the segregated nature of housing in Nairobi and other Kenyan towns, with housing for Europeans reported as good, and widespread prevalence of slum property for Africans and other non-European migrants.


title: Kibera

text: After Kenya became independent in 1963, a number of forms of housing were made illegal by the government. The new ruling affected Kibera on the basis of land tenure, rendering it an unauthorised settlement. Despite this, people continued to live there, and by the early 1970s landlords were renting out their properties in Kibera to significantly greater numbers of tenants than were permitted by law.


title: Kibera

text: The tenants, who are highly impoverished, cannot afford to rent legal housing, finding the rates offered in Kibera to be comparatively affordable. The number of residents in Kibera has increased accordingly despite its unauthorised nature. By 1974, members of the Kikuyu tribe predominated the population of Kibera, and had gained control over administrative positions, which were kept through political patronage.


title: Kibera

text: A shift in Kenyan demographics has taken place since then, with the Luo and Luhya tribes from the West of Kenya being the primary sources of internal emigration. By 1995 Kibera had become a predominantly Luo slum and Mathare Valley nearby the predominantly Kikuyu slum area. The coincident rise of multi party politics in Kenya has caused the Luo leader and MP for much of Kibera, the parliamentary seat of Langata, Raila Odinga to be known for his ability to bring out a formidable demonstration force instantly. Meanwhile, Mathare Valley has become a hotbed of gang warfare. Political tensions in the nation between the ethnic tribes escalated after the re-election of President Kibaki in 2007.


title: Kibera

text: The Nubian community has a Council of Elders who are also the Trustees of its Trust. This Trust now claims all of Kibera. It claims that the extent of their land is over . It claims that owing to State sanctioned allotments the land area is now reduced to . The Government does not accept their claims but its rehousing program envisions a land extent around for the claimed Nubian settlement. Neither side has left any room for negotiation from this position.


title: Kibera

text: Presently, Kibera's residents represent all the major Kenyan ethnic backgrounds, with some areas being specifically dominated by peoples of one ethno-linguistic group. Many new residents come from rural areas with chronic underdevelopment and overpopulation issues. The multi-ethnic nature of Kibera's population, combined with the tribalism that pervades Kenyan politics, has led to Kibera hosting a number of small ethnic conflicts throughout its century-long history. The Kenyan government owns all the land upon which Kibera stands, though it continues to not officially acknowledge the settlement; no basic services,


title: Kibera

text: schools, clinics, running water or lavatories are publicly provided, and the services that do exist are privately owned.


title: Kibera

text: Kibera is in southwest Nairobi, from the city centre. Much of its southern border is bounded by the Nairobi river and the Nairobi Dam, an artificial lake that used to provide drinking water to the residents of the city, but now there are two main pipes going into Kibera.


title: Kibera

text: Kibera is divided into thirteen villages and two estates, including Kianda, Soweto East, Gatwekera, Kisumu Ndogo, Lindi, Laini Saba, Siranga, Makina, Salama, Ayany and Mashimoni.


title: Kibera

text: Kibera's morphology is very dynamic. Between 2006 and 2014 a spatiotemporal change of single buildings and building blocks across the areas of Lindi, Mashimoni, Laina Saba and Soweto East was measured (77% rise in number of buildings, density increase by 10%). Yet, its organic structure and pattern (building blocks, pathways), generally remained unchanged.


title: Kibera

text: The 2009 Kenya Population and Housing Census reported Kibera's population as 170,070. The Kibera slum was previously thought to be one of the biggest informal urban settlements in the world. Several actors had provided and published over the years growing estimations of the size of its population, most of them stating that it was the largest slum in Africa with the number of people there reaching over 1 million. According to Mike Davis, a well known expert on urban slums, Kibera had a population of about 800,000 people.


title: Kibera

text: The International Housing Coalition (IHC) made an estimate of more than half a million people. UN-Habitat had released several estimations ranging between 350,000 and 1 million people. These statistics mainly come out of analysis of aerial pictures of the area. IRIN estimated a population density of 2000 residents per hectare.


title: Kibera

text: In 2008 an independent team of researchers began a door-by-door survey named "Map Kibera Project" with the aim to map physical and socio-demographic features of the slum. A trained team of locals, after having developed an ad-hoc surveying methodology, has so far gathered census data of over 15,000 people and completed the mapping of 5000 structures, services (public toilets, schools), and infrastructures (drainage system, water and electricity supply) in the village of Kianda. On the basis of data collected in Kianda, the Map Kibera Project team estimated that the whole Kibera slum could be inhabited by a total population ranging from 235,000 to a maximum of 270,000 people, dramatically scaling down all previous figures.


title: Kibera

text: The breakdown of ethnic groups inhabiting Kibera and their gender-specific representation is Luo: 34.9% (male), 35.4% (female); Luyia: 26.5% (male), 32.5% (female); Nubian: 11.6% (male), 9.1% (female); Kikuyu: 7.9% (male), 6.4% (female); Kamba: 7.5% (male), 10.3% (female); Kisii: 6.4% (male), 2.2% (female); Other: 5.2% (male), 4.1% (female)


title: Kibera

text: The Uganda Railway Line passes through the centre of the neighbourhood, providing passengers aboard the train a firsthand view of the slum. Kibera has a railway station, but most residents use buses and "matatus" to reach the city centre; carjacking, irresponsible driving, and poor traffic law enforcement are chronic issues.


title: Kibera

text: Kibera is heavily polluted by human refuse, garbage, soot, dust, and other wastes. The slum is contaminated with human and animal faeces, due to the open sewage system and the frequent use of "flying toilets". The lack of sanitation combined with poor nutrition among residents accounts for many illnesses and diseases. The Umande Trust, a local NGO, is building communal toilets that generate methane gas (biogas) for local residents.


title: Kibera

text: A community radio station, Pamoja FM, advocates not only upgrading Kibera slum but also all the slums in Nairobi.


title: Kibera

text: "Kibera Journal" has existed since November 2006. The paper covers issues affecting the people of Kibera, and it has played an important role in training the youth in basic journalism skills that they use to cover issues in their communities.


title: Kibera

text: Most education centres in Kibera are classified as informal, but various initiatives have been underway to add schools. Some start as babycare centres, which later develop into schools. Most are not regulated by the government. Some of the notable schools are Olympic Primary School, one of the leading government schools in the country. Other government (public) schools in Kibera include Kibera Primary School (also called Old Kibera), Ayany Primary School and Toi Primary School. Facing the Future School (FaFu), as well as several church-owned and privately owned schools are also in the area. Notable Secondary schools include PCEA Silanga High School, owned by the Presbyterian Church of East Africa, Raila Educational centre, and Olympic Secondary School, among others. There is the vocational PCEA Emmanuel Technical Training Centre, offering self-employment skills to the residents and the Tunapanda Institute, offering free courses on technology, design and business skills. Several other local youth organisations, like the football (soccer) team the Kibera Black stars, are also concerned and involved in educational projects.


title: Kibera

text: Kibera is one of the most studied slums in Africa, not only because it sits in the centre of the modern city, but also because UN-HABITAT, the United Nations' agency for human settlements, is headquartered close by. Ban Ki-moon visited the settlement within a month of his selection as UN secretary-general.


title: Kibera

text: Kibera, as one of the most pronounced slums within Kenya, is undergoing an intensive slum upgrading process. The government, UN-HABITAT and a contingent of NGOs, notably Maji na Ufanisi, are making inroads into the settlements in an attempt to facelift the housing and sanitary conditions.


title: Kibera

text: There are three significant complicating factors to construction or upgrade within Kibera. The first is the rate of petty and serious crime. Building materials cannot be left unattended for long at any time because there is a very high chance of them being stolen. It is not uncommon for owners of storm-damaged dwellings to have to camp on top of the remnants of their homes until repairs can be made, to protect the raw materials from would-be thieves.


title: Kibera

text: The second is the lack of building foundations. The ground in much of Kibera is literally composed of refuse and rubbish. Dwellings are often constructed atop this unstable ground, and therefore many structures collapse whenever the slum experiences flooding, which it does regularly. This means that even well-constructed buildings are often damaged by the collapse of nearby poorly constructed ones.


title: Kibera

text: The third complicating factor is the unyielding topography and cramped sprawl of the area. Few houses have vehicle access, and many are at the bottoms of steep inclines (which heightens the flooding risk). This means that any construction efforts are made more difficult and costly by the fact that all materials must be brought in by hand.


title: Kibera

text: On 16 September 2009 the Kenyan government, which claims ownership of the land on which Kibera stands, began a long-term movement scheme which will rehouse the people who live in slums in Nairobi.


title: Kibera

text: The clearance of Kibera was expected to take between two and five years to complete. The entire project was planned to take nine years and to rehouse all the slum residents in the city. The project had the backing of the United Nations and former Prime Minister Raila Odinga, who was the area MP, and was expected to cost $1.2 billion. The new communities were planned to include schools, markets, playgrounds and other facilities. The first batch of around 1,500 people to leave the slum were taken away by truck on 16 September 2009 from 6:30 am local time and were rehoused in 300 newly constructed apartments with a monthly rent of around $10.


title: Kibera

text: The project start was postponed several times when Prime Minister Odinga was unavailable to oversee the first day. He was joined on the first day by Housing Minister Soita Shitanda and his assistant Margaret Wanjiru, with all three helping residents to load their belongings onto the trucks. Also present were several dozen armed police officers to oversee the arrangements and to deter any resistance.


title: Kibera

text: The process has been legally challenged by more than 80 people, and the Kenyan High Court has stated that the government cannot begin demolition works until the case is heard in October but will be able to demolish the homes of people who leave voluntarily before then. The 80 plaintiffs are a mixture of middle-class landlords and Kibera residents, and they claim that the land in Kibera is theirs and hence the government has no right to demolish the shacks. The Nubian community, who have lived on the land for nearly 100 years, are also disappointed with the scheme, and one elder has said that the present housing should be improved instead.