Are you a sports fan as well as a spacer? How about combining the two?
Introducing Kaggle. Their claim?
“We’re making data science a sport.™” ~Kaggle
Funny name huh? They seem to have some interesting projects though. You saw Observing Dark Worlds yesterday. There are 7 more active competitions.
“The motivation behind Kaggle is simple: most organizations don’t have access to the advanced machine learning and statistical techniques that would allow them to extract maximum value from their data. Meanwhile, data scientists crave real-world data to develop and refine their techniques. Kaggle corrects this mismatch by offering companies a cost-effective way to harness the ‘cognitive surplus’ of the world’s best data scientists.” ~About Kaggle
The rewards are classified as knowledge, cash, jobs or ‘private’ so far. The number of teams is healthy for all types though the higher dollar ones are sometimes attracting the most teams, not always though.
The competitions seem to be all different kinds of things.
You can participate or create a competition. There’s even a forum.
Can you ‘Map the Internet’ or ‘Classify Handwritten Digits,’ how about Predict information? And more. If this sounds like you’re kind of thing, hop on over to Kaggle Competitions. You’ll be glad you did!
NOTES:
*An understanding of data science might be useful
*May or may not be age dependent
*Haven’t seen a cost involved just prizes
Sources
*http://www.kaggle.com/competitions
