Slashdot Mirror
Amazon's Mechanical Turk
rscoggin writes "Amazon.com has a new program that wants you to 'Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it.' (example: 'Is there a pizza parlour in this photograph?'). For each task you complete you get a small payment, usually ranging from a few cents to a little under a dollar. It's named the Amazon Mechanical Turk after a famous hoax from the 19th century. Kill time and get paid in tiny increments to boot!" Similar to Google Answers, there seems to be a reliability ratings system and some incentives.
Great... Another way for /.'ers to waste time at work.
GOOD JOB AMAZON
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
This could get addictive.
Does this mean I can get paid for breaking CAPTCHAs?
Why not fork?
- can you see boobs in the picture ?
- Is there a donkey in the picture ?
- Can you see the can of whipped cream ?
- is there chocolate paint involved..
Advanced indexing of Pr0n, humanity is moving forward, no doubt.
Pepsi pays Amazon 3 cents for product placement. You are shown an image of a Pepsi can. "What kind of soda is this?" "pepsi", you answer. You get paid 2 cents.
According to this earlier Slashdot report, the spam industry has been doing this for awhile with free porn.
I'm curious to know if Amazon is going to use the cumulative results to try to "train" computers, or if it really is just for the money. The requirements include being over 18, so you can't pimp your kids to click through this stuff for cash (though I'm sure it will happen).
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Maybe it's just me, but it seems that it's not really worth it. Consider the following task, for example:
Guess how much you get paid for that. 2 dollars? 3? That wouldn't be unreasonable, I think, considering that you're supposed to write an entire product description from scratch for which additional "research" is required. The actual amount paid is only 65 cents, though.
Maybe it's just me, but if I check to see how much I need to work in my regular job to make 65 cents, then it does not make any sense to invest more than a few minutes into a task like this, and it seems that it would take more than that to actually complete it. The fact that there's a review required afterwards doesn't exactly make things better, either - if what you did gets rejected, then you've essentially worked for nothing (I wonder if there's anything that keeps amazon from still using your description in this case, too...).
In other words, the whole thing seems like a good idea in theory, but it won't really take off until they're willing to actually pay you a reasonable amount.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Anyone want to make an estimation of $/hr earned doing this? I'm at work, and don't have the balls to spend 20 minutes earning cash online ;)
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Wow, I can give up my day job!
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
I'm a bit too paranoid to type my Amazon user name and password into a site that isn't on the main amazon.com domain....I can't find it mentioned anywhere on amazon's main site. Can somebody a little bit less of a wuss tell me if it is legit?
Monstar L
That way probably works to prevent cheating due to the fact that multiple people can verify it, and you can get rid of known cheaters (though that's a bit Stalinist).
.. questions to categorize and then add keywords .. or vice versa.
.. even though it's a known technique etc.
I'd go with telling people to write keywords about the images based on some rules/criteria. "ancient building, square windows, desert" etc. cause the questioning approach takes too long. Unless you do a blend of both
Knowing amazon they've patented this
following HIT: "Is there a goat in that picture?"
Maybe I'm not getting the idea right, but isn't it a work for a person skilled, for example, in marketing and adv. to make up descriptions for products? Or if it's a product, that doesn't require a special advertising description, can't it be done by person who spends about the same time to write an ad about that?
Crime in your neighborhood?
Get a webcam...
After a quick review of the available tasks, I must say this looks like a huge scam. Most of the tasks are marketing oriented (e.g. copywriting, photo manipulation), for which experienced contractors get paid $30 to $50 per hour.
Only 75 cents to research and write a complete automotive product description? Are they kidding? Sure, they say I can copy the description from the manufacturer's Web site, but my time is still worth more than that. Besides, I think it's the responsibility of the manufacturer to make sure their Amazon listing is correct. That's how they do it on IMDB.
I can only hope the program will make more sense as they add more requesters and more tasks.
Apparently mturk's webserver is from the 19th Century as well.
They are asking you to rewrite product descriptions and will pay you 60 cents?
Not only will the work most likely be shoddy, but it seems like they are trying to replace someone else's job by using this cheap online service.
Yes, for some it may provide rewards but if you calculate the amount of time spent on each item VS. the payment reward (usually a few pennies) it is just not worth someone's free time.
Why don't they just hire a staff of people to work on these 'HITS'?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I'm interested to know if those living overseas can participate. If so, they would drive down the labor costs so much that only truly desperate Americans would participate in this piecework scheme.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
for example, the storefront that is being asked about might be cut off completely, showing instead the entirety of the neighboring store. This might be the "best" photo, however, it would NOT be what the requesting storefront would be looking for. If people consistently chose the nicest photo as opposed to the one that most closely matches the request, i think this system will be proven invalid.
How long until someone makes a series of bots smart enough to make money at this?
I doubt most people's time is worth that little.
Reminds me of spammer CAPTCHA solvers...
n
More here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha#Circumventio
I was wondering why it suddenly slammed to a halt. Gee, thanks, Slashdot.
Since this is all web-services driven, it seems to me you could create an interesting cycle with a simple program:
1) Use the API to find a HIT, and sign up to complete it.
2) Create a new HIT that basically asks someone to complete the first HIT,
only for $0.01 less than the original HIT was offering.
3) Do this for every existing HIT.
4) Profit?
Keep your friends close.
Keep your enemies in a little jar on your desk.
That would actually be a good thing. The whole point is that this is a "hard" AI problem (And I use "hard" in the AI sense of the word, which is much stricter than the english meaning of "hard"). If the problem is solved, it would be a huge advance for artificial intelligence.
Rather than think about how much you could make per hour on this, think about how much your time is worth. Are you worth $65,000 per year? Maybe you're worth more or you value your time more? In any case, at $65,000 per year, you make about $0.52 per minute.
So to accomplish the 3 cent task and make your time worth it, you should spend no more than about 2 and a half seconds from the second you begin to the second you finish and get approval.
On some of the higher paying ones, oh, say $0.40 for writing a full product review, you could devote almost a full minute!
Acutally, all the tasks that I saw involved processing data for A9's block-level search and "tour". Seems like a clever, cheap way to organize the insane amount of data they have mapped for this project.
India's economy sky-rockets as the unemployment rate drops below zero percent...
It looks like the site is having a hard time putting up with its slashdotting session. that can mean one of 2 things.
It is hosted on a really slow server
They are using IIS
Increase the value of the job till it's worth someone's while to actually do it. Everyone benefits. Any rejected work remains owned by author.
Deleted
The reminds me of the Philip K. Dick novel in which the main character thinks he lives an ordinary life, and who solves the daily puzzle in the newspaper every day for cheap entertainment. In reality, though, the whole town he lives in is a front, and the fun puzzles he's solving in the newspaper are actually cleverly disguised military strategy problems of some sort.
Quick -- someone patent that storyline and sue Amazon for infringement!
So what happens if your product scores well in Google.. well, people just copy your ad copy. And since Google hates duplicates, it will eliminate all except one page from the results. And very often that can be the original page. And yes, I have had Amazon copy my product descriptions, even with properly paid staff.
So what's likely to happen here is that some takes on a task of writing a series of product descriptions. But for less than a dollar per description, they're just going to be tempted to copy-and-paste from someone else. Now, Google is always likely to assume that Amazon originated the content, and drop the actual originator from the index.
Net result? Well, DMCA complaints being filed, lawyers and other unpleasantness.. simply because it's not worth anybody's time to write a product description from scratch for less than a buck.
My feeling is that $5-$10 is probably the base value of these sort of things, plus some proper quality control management. As it is, it looks like a cost-cutting exercise that could backfire hugely.
Keep them coming, Amazon!
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
This article has recently been linked from Slashdot.
Please keep an eye on the page history for errors or vandalism.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Guys, let me tell.
0 &p=irol-news
It's registered through Godaddy.com, one of the companies spammers/phishers love to use.
It has hotmail contact addresses in whois. Impossible for a company like Amazon
No clue of such thing on official Amazon press room
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=17606
So if it looks like,acts like,runs like (amazon gigantic server farm slashdotted?) a regular phishing site, it is. Even if it made to Slashdot. I'd say pull the story until Amazon comes up with an explanation. Before any harm done.
It could be even a more "elite" hack including subdomain/DNS hacking. I am a spamcop mail customer and I see amazing things everyday.
In risk of looking very funny if it is not anything above, happily posting it.
$5.15 minimum wage and all that. Is Amazon breaking the law by paying people 65 cents for work that obviously takes more than 60*(.65/5.15) minutes?
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
or as we used to say in the UK, "Pull the other one, it's get bells on"
Or as I say today, "40 cents for a product description!?!?! Fuck off!"
No but, yeah but, no but...
You're thinking too much, which in your case unfortunately makes your reply look like you didn't think at all.
You were supposed to infer that the "bot" would just "christmas tree" the forms, filling in random answers.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
Stop the gripe about the pay. $0.03 is better than nothing. Now all we have to do is link it up to RateMyVomit.com or HotOrNot.com!
If millions of people are happy to spend hours of their life rating pictures for free on these websites, then getting a few cents to rate some equally meaningless pictures is good pay.
Your task is to edit an existing Automotive product title to make it more human readable and update and add additional feature points about the product. This HIT will require some research to complete. Approval depends on the quality of your title and feature points, determined by a manual review.
So, they get a lot of results and they do not approve anyone of them because the quality is not enough. And they get the job done uh?
Yeah, sure... where do I sign... *sigh*
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
It is good to know that us humans are still not obsolete, even though we have been relegated to the menial jobs...
This isn't linked off of www.amazon.com this could be a phishing scam......
- webappsec
Web Security
Are the 3rd world drones that will do this pulling themselves up by their bootstraps into the information age or is this some kind of futuristic Dickensian sweatshop where piecemeal work is paid at three cents a click?
For the image ones, couldn't you create 5 bots each with a different account and each one picks a different image and one picks None of these? One of them would be approved and you'd get paid, right?
Also if they are having humans approve your image selection before you get paid, isn't that as much effort as you making your original choice?
I don't know if all of the tasks are going to be from Amazon. It looks to me like anyone can submit "work" through the API, and the market will decide what gets done and what does not. If that 65 cent job sits long enough, and Amazon wants to get it done, they'll pony up more cash until someone thinks it's worthwhile.
If you cut off the phoenix.zhtml crap, the base url redirects to http://www.ccbn.com/
/. not to display the site's domain name after the link in your post? /. inserts domain name0 &p=irol-InfoReq
It seems like the company does investor relations,
hence the corporate-ir (investor relations)
I wouldn't worry too much about this, if its good enough for EarthLink its good enough for me
btw- how did you convince
same link but
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=17606
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It is on amazon right here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/ref=sc_fe_l_2 /104-0856920-6487152?_encoding=UTF8&node=15879911& no=3435361&me=A36L942TSJ2AJA
If a person has to review each and every hit, then that person could have done the work themselves.
How many "agreeing" hits would you need before you can "accept" that the result is valid?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I had lunch with a guy yesterday who works at Amazon and said "Hey we just launched this cool web service called Mechanical Turk."
There is an announcement from Amazon.
Well, that is probably a whole month's average income for someone in Elbonia...
Oh well, what the hell...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/104-1026772-4 777552?node=15879911
OK, I hurried a bit but I felt as I had to.
/ /mturk.com
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http:
It is indeed in Amazon netblock but registering it through godaddy.com with a hotmail address... Gee, I wish I could show like 40 phishing mails I received with the same pattern.
Sadly there are many victims of phishing sites, and they get slashdotted because the database software can't handle that many requests.
I have never seen such a unserious whois from a big company like amazon. There are many registrars REJECTING hotmail.com contact addresses even!
A lot of very small copywriting and image manipulation tasks crop up on RAC. If MTurk has lower transaction fees then I expect to see most of them moving over, providing a very nice user base for the service.
Of course, after transfering that money to my bank account, I'd probably be in the red after service charges.
So basically it’s Rent-A-Coder for stoners, right?
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
... basically it's just like a sneaker factory in Vietnam, but with a cool-sounding name.
#DeleteChrome
okay, you win mister coward.
I accidentally made a first post
then purposely bragged about it.
and you know what, I do feel like a champ.
I hope you spend the rest of your days on dial-up
trying to make money of this Amazon mturk thing.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
"I'm sure he's in there somewhere..."
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
Make the site dog ass slow so you can ID 3 photos in 10 minutes. I'm up to 9 cents! I guess I should get back to coding, since thats what the OTHER people are paying me to do right now...
I'm in Canada too - isn't it possible to use that credit on Amazon.com? I'd much rather do that than actually get the cash!
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
Yes, the web site says that any earnings are credited to your Amazon account. You can later cash out if you want to, or spend it at Amazon.
Always look to spammers and pornographers to solve the world's most challenging computational puzzles before anyone else.
Ok, nevermind. Follow this path:
Go to http://www.amazon.com/
Scroll way down, and on the left hand side under "Make Money" and click "Web Services". On the resulting page, you'll see MTurk being advertised.
At last, here is an official page on the Amazon site:1 _3435361_1/103-6895399-1861459?_encoding=UTF8&node =15879911&no=3435361&me=A36L942TSJ2AJA [amazon.com]
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/ref=sc_fe_r_
The correct phrase is Cheap-Labor Conservative.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Great! One more American job being Outsorced. :)
TODO create witty sig.
Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers.
I wonder if serving web pages counts as such a task. Because their computers sure are doing a crappy job of it at the moment.
BTW: It's "Anonymous coward" with small 'c'. ;-)
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
*And* it gets around any sort of foreign employment restrictions! All they need to do is modify it to give tasks based on your skillset and they'd have a global, cheap, semi-anonymous group of programmers working for them 24/7.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
All right, so Amazon have decided to handle manual labour which is necessary and it also rewards users in return for the service. They get a description of photos without much effort and re-pay back in some form of 'coupons'. More sophisticated things have been done for quite some time. There is a full object-labelling framework where surfers compete with one another and the Web site of the game is http://www.espgame.org/ . To quote an article from Post-Gazette: "Since the Post-Gazette first wrote about the ESP Game in October 2003, more than 80,000 people have played the game and in the process have generated more than 10 million descriptive words for 1 million images"
My Linux - (L)ove (I)s (N)ever (U)tterly eXPensive
its like slicing only legal!
"slicing" that neat trick where the program tries to send all the fractions of a cent lost in calculations to some account for latter collection.
XML - A clever joke would be here if
"Could you Imagine a Beowulf cluster of people doing complex tasks?"
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
I am offended! Mechanical Turks are capable of much more than decoding captchas or sorting pr0n! My great-granddaddy was a chess master, for crying out loud! *grumble*
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
There is reference to this from amzon's site. On the left hand sidebar, uner the "Make Money" heading, there is a "web services" link. Click on this and you will see reference to the Mechanical Turk service.
1 620764?node=3435361
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/104-3920625-
I'm not going to argue with your point on replacing someone's job with cheap online labor, but it does look like the HIT's that require editing product descriptions are reviewed, and you only get paid if your descriptions is chosen.
I got nothin'
..they could ask us questions like "Is this a dupe?"
-- Boycott Shell
Wow, these are jobs people in developing countries would kill for!!! $0.40!?!? Sign me up!!!
I got nothin'
I read somewhere that in India there's already a captcha sweatshop.
I would have posted this earlier, but since I am a robot, it took a while to create an Amazon Turkish Guy Human Intelligence Task to type this captcha from Slashdot below.
It reminds me of a little semi-scam some company had going in my town a few years back. . .
"You are invited to participate in a screen test of a new television series!"
People would go down and be a test-audience for a television pilot, and then fill out a questionnaire at the end. People, loving their TV culture, were tickled pink to be asked to do this. --Heck, they were even paid something like $15 for their participation!
So, a buddy of mine went to see what it was all about. . .
Basically, some marketing research firm had acquired the rights to an old pilot which never made it to air. They played this for people, and also played a bunch of adverts during the commercial breaks. The questionnaire asked a few boring questions about the pilot, but it also asked a curiously high number of questions about the ad spots. Stuff like, "Which of the two detergent packages in the ad did you find more appealing? The Blue or the Red?"
--Obviously the whole contrivance was designed to test market, uh, marketing.
Either way, by friend was amazed that nobody else seemed to catch on, took his fifteen bucks, and left shaking his head.
-FL
Something like this might be beneficial for people in Third World countries or Africa. This is basically a "human computing grid", facilitated by Amazon and the Internet. People in poorer countries are already doing something along these lines in "click fraud farms"; and this is not only infinitely more ethical and useful, it is legal, too. I don't think anyone but the most idle in the developed and developing countries will devote more than a couple minutes of his/her life to this, but I can see armies of English-speaking African youths earning money by helping tag images and improve the semantic Web.
Now if you excuse me, I have to finish this letter to our embassy here in the US so they can complain about the "mechanical Turk" name officially.
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
So how much do I get paid for finding Waldo?
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I tried it again. I tried it later. Maybe I should 'try later again' and perhaps then it might work!
And they said zombies weren't real!
To verify the legitimacy of the site, manually type "amazon.com" into your browser's location bar, and hover over the "See all 32 Product Categories" tab. When it pops up the list, click "Web Services" and read the first item listed on that page, which is a press release announcing Amazon Mechanical Turk.
For extra points, do this only a machine which has been booted from a liveCD with DNS utilities and hosts file that you have personally audited.
Or just, you know, look at the fact that the Turk will, by default, display the name and address you've given to Amazon as your contact info, and conclude that yeah, it's an Amazon property.
A URL on amazon.com's site about this is here
Ah, but thanks to the magic of the internet, these tasks could be done by someone in a country where they would actually be earning a good hourly wage. In the world of free trade it's a race to the bottom!
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Or maybe this would require a new "Grid Kid" architecture with an advanced resource broker to farm out the questions based on difficulty and school grade level.
I find it really odd that people are checking out payscales and how much they could be "paid" for doing this.
Remember guys, it's Amazon credit you get. 3 cents for every image clicky thing, is 3 cents off your next DVD purchase. Now, Amazon sell a lot of things but they don't sell rent checks, electricity bill payments or have a partnership with Speakeasy to fund your ADSL. How are you going to EAT if you need to shop at Amazon?
I guess you could buy items and resell them on eBay? Use your first $70 from eBay to sign up to Amazon Prime in order to get fast FedEx delivery of your goods and get a high turnaround.
Essentially this is great marketing for Amazon though; for the things you CAN buy at Amazon, by doing this work you are forced to shop there. For the small amount of credit the vast majority of people will gain, they will retreive it on the markups and variable discounts that they put on most products.
Very very clever.
Yeah, just like the homeless aluminum can collectors.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
great, now write an AI program that can do that without your help and make money fast :-)
Has anybody noticed that amazon is trying to build a database of storefront images? It looks like they have cars driving around taking random shots and storing the images with GPS coordinates. They then look at what businesses should be around and present this information with some random driveby shots to ask us if the business is on the picture.
I even got a photograph that clearly showed the car taking the photographs reflected in a window.
Not sure what this information is worth, but it seams they are building a database of storefront photo's.
Saying "Getting Paid" on a slashdot article to hasten the griding of hard drive bearing of the hosting server.
Dunno if this means anything, but...
Using Mozilla:
If I go to the amazon.com site and sign in, then go to something on the 'my account' page, I get the locked padlock symbol at the lower right (signed/encrypted page.)
When I go to the signin page on mturk.com, the same locked padlock is there, but it has a red diagonal bar through it.
Why?
I am a mechanical Turk you insensitive clods!!
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Appearantly this thing was designed by the people at myspace.
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NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
amazing - in these days of strife, stereotyping and intolerance between the u.s. and many muslims, amazon comes out with a near-slave-labor waged system for doing mindless repetetive tasks, and calls it the "mechanical turk"! yeah, yeah, i know about the history of the mechanical chess player. i'll try to explain that to all the turkish people in my neighborhood here in germany... i'm sure they'll understand that amazon has nothing but the highest regard for "turks"... what are they going to call their next product, "lawn jockey"? sheesh.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/12/1 6/1844238&tid=14
.It's cash, dough, green cheese, vile metal, the actual stuff.
If you're scoffing because you're already employed at a job that pays better, then you're doing what you should. Somebody already values your labor more presumably because you are more productive doing that job rather than identifying items in pictures. I work plenty of hours and am well compensated for it. My remaining time is very valuable to me. Perhaps one should not scoff, but politely say "No, thanks." The job one might scoff at today might be the job that saves your ass tomorrow.
On the other hand, if you're not working, underemployed, or paid really low, scoffing is probably not the right thing to do, and instead of moping about having no job, you should get busy and start looking for pizza places in pictures, and if they're close, maybe see if they have a job. When I'm not employed and work is hard to come by, I'll pump gas, work a car wash, flip burgers, sweep floors, empty trash, deliver pizza, whatever it takes. It might not be enough to live on, but it's closer to livable than making nothing.
I've always been fond of the idea of people giving me money directly as a form of advertising.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you look at the IP for www.mturk.com it is Amazon's IP (207.171.163.60):
Location: United States [City: Seattle, Washington]
NOTE: More information appears to be available at AC6-ORG-ARIN.
Using 22 day old cached answer (or, you can get fresh results).
Hiding E-mail address (you can get results with the E-mail address).
OrgName: Amazon.com, Inc.
OrgID: AMAZON-4
Address: 605 5th Ave S
City: SEATTLE
StateProv: WA
PostalCode: 98104
Country: US
NetRange: 207.171.160.0 - 207.171.191.255
CIDR: 207.171.160.0/19
NetName: AMAZON-01
NetHandle: NET-207-171-160-0-1
Parent: NET-207-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Assignment
NameServer: NS-1.AMAZON.COM
NameServer: NS-2.AMAZON.COM
NameServer: NS-3.AMAZON.COM
NameServer: AUTH00.NS.UU.NET
Comment:
RegDate: 1999-09-23
Updated: 2002-03-19
TechHandle: AC6-ORG-ARIN
TechName: Amazon.com, Inc.
TechPhone: +1-206-266-2187
TechEmail: ***@amazon.com
OrgTechHandle: ROLEA19-ARIN
OrgTechName: Role Account
OrgTechPhone: +1-206-266-2187
OrgTechEmail: ***@amazon.com
# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2005-10-11 19:10
Funny, the average response time for someone to describe a porn picture is about 2 minutes, about the same time it takes to...eeewww
"You are now qualified to respond to tentacle hentai!"
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Indeed it's probably not going to replace a day job for a lot of people. But for people with free time who are bored, why not be paid for being bored while doing something interesting?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
YOU pay Amazon to do small tasks.
(sorry)
(this won't be seen by anyone though with a score of 0)
This is similar to an idea in the Vernor Vinge novel, "A Deepness In The Sky." A culture that appears to have very intelligent computers turns out to be employing stables of idiot savants for tasks like surveillance, target acquisition, translation, etc.
also a bit like the plot of Ender's Game...not many original ideas in literature. Of course even Shakespeare stole plotlines shamelessly so what the hell.
12:50 - press return.
We're grateful to have been Slashdotted! Our beta site, mturk.amazon.com, is experiencing the Slashdot effect. You can still read about Amazon Mechanical Turk and its web services APIs at www.amazon.com/webservices. Also, send a blank email to aws@amazon.com if you want us to email you when page load times recover. The Amazon Mechanical Turk Team
So something like Ender's Game then?
For those who haven't read this book by Orson Scott Card, it involves a training camp for gifted children where they play in battle sims. Thing is these sims are actually real battles carried out across the galaxy and result in the decimation (xenocide) of an entire alien species save a single egg.
Where the hellare these images coming from? I sirned up for the site and have done a few hits, and it looks like a complete retard took the pictures. I mean the shots aren't on target and sometimes the pictures are of like a pole or something. It baffles me
When "The Truman Show" came out, about a guy whose whole life was a reality TV show, many people commented on how similar it was to Dick's "Time Out of Joint".
** spoiler **
TOoJ's "newspaper game" is actually predicting bomb attacks from orbital stations. Obviously, they want him to "win" - correctly predict the attacks - every day. And to this end, they make this whole town to convince him he is freeloading off his sister and her husband and wasting his time on this stupid game.
So.
I suddenly feel better about playing World of Warcraft. In REALITY, I am beating back enemy troops every time I think I am killing a dwarf hunter.
And on that page it is important to note the word "Beta". They are just testing the waters with this program. Will people sort pictures for $.03 each? Can we (Amazon) make/save money on this? etc.
Maybe that's why this is on GoDaddy... If Amazon doesn't like the way the beta testing is going, they can just yank the whole thing.
Sig cancelled due to lack of interest
What's wrong in the story submission? (You will be paid in Zonks)
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
There was an interesting article a while back about a Collaborative Human Interpreter (CHI).
The idea is to harness this kind of thing to develop software for the global brain.
that would explain the constant shots of rundown gheto houses where stores are supposed to be
i think you nailed it
May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage. RAmen.
That's not even enough to get kids in the US to do it for pocket money. I'd bet it's also set up as contract work, so Amazon doesn't need to pay the Social Security contribution or take out any other taxes; contractors are required to handle that themselves to stay legal under US tax law.
However, it might be decent money in some parts of the global economy, so many might not be subject to US tax law. (Or are they?) Of course, for the contractor there's the capital cost of a computer and monitor, and the question of how the economics changes if high speed network connections aren't available, and for the employer there's the problem of paying someone to write up the HIT descriptions..
The economics might sound viable to me at about double the pay rate; I don't think that the described current pay rates give a business model that will last over a year.
I'll play with it the next time my insomnia is acting up.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Buy a movie, get a free rootkit!
One little problem with that:
- can you count?
People are not so good at noticing stuff when concentrating on something else...
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
.. you could skip all that, and build a barn for 1/10 the price of the anklets alone.
Better be worth more than 3 cents just to look at it. --Rob
Towards the Singularity.
The pay isn't great, but it's something I can do when I have free time, it carries no obligation, plus I can listen to music and chat on Skype/Wengo/TS while I do it.
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
I think a big concern with this is whether the answers people give are correct.
Given that money is involved, I think Amazon is going to find these pesky humans are pretty clever at doing things that might be in their self-interest, but not in the interest of people trying to get correct answers.
Well Google didn't take the time to figure that people can't perform HIT's while sleeping, eating, etc.
The grandparent arrived at that calculation based off of a 40-hour week, which I think is appropriate.
Why is this article posted as "news"? Is it April Fool's already?
Actually, it sounds more like an idea presented in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age where the main character has an electronic book that teaches her by reading itself to her. In order to give the best possible speech synthesis, the book is subscribed to a global service where actors provide on-demand voiceovers.
The /. article points to www.mturk.com. Amazon points to http://mturk.amazon.com./ For those just learning to read, know that these are TWO DIFFERENT SITES. Get it straight. The /. site is NOT Amazon.com. I don't know how this got by Zonk's radar. WTF? G0ddamn scammers.
The advantage this seems to have is that you don't need any commitment to make a little extra cash. Great advantage if you don't want to work regular hours and just occasionally need a little spending money.
A few years ago I worked at a company that was heavy into machine learning. One of the problems in that space is getting a big enough training sets to train the various algorithms. You need enough examples to train the classifier and test it (i.e. several hundred). The company had a bunch of part time workers assigned to do that.
Now you had a small budget and clear guidelines, you could have other people do it for you.
I feel like I'm trying to be heard over the "me too"s of a million AOL users. Why is this scam still on the /. front page?!?
http://www.jokewallpaper.com/mtruk
for a parody of the Amazon Mturk.com site
It is called Salami slicing. Some info for the masses: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing/
Please, please! Mod parent up for standing up for the proper usage of language.
I'd only do this if I could Zot people.
The Usenet Oracle has pondered your question deeply. Your question was:
> Why is a cow?
And in response, thus spake the oracle:
} Mu.
Amazon bought the domain from a previous owner. Check the Internet Archive, and you'll see a Matthew Turk, among others, who owned it previously. http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.mturk.com
Slashdot already uses a much more ingenius method.
People post comments (HITs)
Comments get moderated (Human Task)
Moderations get meta-moderated (Approval of Result)
Meta-moderators are more likely to get moderation points. (Payment)
The best part about this:
Slashdot pays you for your work with more work!
Am I the only one who read that as Amazon's Mechanical Turd ?
Ugh....Bad images!
From your link:
Maybe this (the art-grade Gum Arabic) is Coca-Cola's secret ingredient that makes the stuff so vile?
1.Netcraft confirms:In Soviet Russia all your base welcomes a beowolf cluster of CowboyNeal overlords. 2.? 3.Profit!!1!
I like the Mechanical Turk service. It's just like my CHI proposal from half a year ago made real.3 .html
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-03-25-n4
While most of the comments here seem to focus on the Worker side of this (those getting paid for answering simple questions), there's also the Requester side -- programmers tapping into the power of "fake" (but working!) AI. (Ladies and gentleman, we present you the global brain... it can think for you if you micro-pay!) I think we can implement many new programs/ websites in completely new ways, and there may even be fresh commercial niche programs coming out of this. Maybe in 50 years, we'll include AMT (or similar services) into our software as naturally as we now include, say, SQL.
I wish the site was working better at the moment (even before it has been Slashdotted, it was behaving strangely), and I wish it wouldn't ask me for a US bank account (being from Germany, that kinda hinders me from working with it).
What's to stop Amazon just crediting people's account for the work they've done, without having to part with any of their oown funds? This labour's cheap alright. It could be free & no-one would know. I hope whatever regulators look after this are in position & doing their job.
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
Has anyone written a bot on this already? sure it's only 3$/hour but think of the spyware capabilities of it. Your bot earns 3$/hour and it infects another computer and it earns 3$/hour and soon enough you are a digital own slave master.
more bogus Bezos patents, based on results developed with ourlabor. Just say no.
To think that I've spent the last 10 minutes trying to earn $0.40. What the hell. I'd do better with a squeegee out on some highway exit in Phoenix. And by the way, it never did accept my HIT submission.
...none of them has hi-speed DSL access. So I keep on thinking that the prices paid are stinky!
But seriously.. if its legit it could be a really useful system that does fill a need.
Whether [a gloalized playing field is] a good thing or a bad thing is left as an exercise to the reader.
And how much are you willing to pay me for the answer for this particular Amazon HIT?
I completed several. Not really focusing on the money aspect (think I averaged about -0 seconds depending on pic load times).
On the app end of it, it seems to have an achilles heel. It asks a human to pick out a subjective picture genrically they all say x company photo taken near x adress pick which photo best represents the storfront.
That is not enough info to really choose based on the craptastic pictures available. I think in the 11 or so I did, only one was framed halfway decent (ie it was the whole storefront and not just half of it). Most were backdoors, shrubs, parkinglots, or half a building...now if they WANTED a picture of a parking lot or landscape for a job bid, or a sideview of the building then some pics would have been accurate representations. The ones that seemed to represent the place best in others had horrible lighting or were out of focus. There is much different level of acceptable pictures for say someone trying to find a place vs say someone writing an app for real estate pictures.
Until they up the standards of requests it's pretty hard to pick anything but "none of the above" with the current generic requests.
Not Found
The requested URL / was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
What gives?
The $0.03 a piece for judging the photo shoots seems like a nice brainless exercise to cure your insomnia. Click around and see what you get. I've worked on Las Vegas.
My theory of how this works, is that they've mounted a video camera on a car, kept the GPS coordinates for each of the shots. Now, the trouble is that you need to convert a street address into a GPS coordinate to be able to match up a photo with the business. These conversions exist, but are not always accurate. If you're unlucky enough to hit a street that does not have accurate streetnumbers-to-GPS-coordinate mappings, your photos won't match up.
So you'll get Sahara Avenue 2100, and the photo's you see are way off - you'll be shown some photo's around Sahara Avenue 2500.
There is no match.
And lo-and-behold: Amazon does not pay for "no match".
(It didn't say that. It said: you are paid for each HIT / click. I did not get paid for the "no match" clicks. I'm not happy.)
I've done my hour of clicking around and learnt my lesson. Working for 27 cents an hour might not even be tempting for sweatshoppers.
For those who have wondered why we are being asked to do this... check out http://maps.a9.com/ Since everyone seems to have their own spin on mapping applications, why not amazon too? But the bigger issue... What are the ethical implications of this? Is this just a way of skirting employment laws? Clearly anyone who is participating is working far below minimum wage with no benefits whatsoever.
I've been doing HIT's for Mechanical Turk over the last few days, and I've gotta wonder what they use as criteria for rejection. Yesterday, I did 152 of the "Album Artist Verification" HIT's (they show you an album cover and a list of possible artist names and you have to choose or enter the proper name in "First Last" format), and all 152 were rejected! Some of the names were verbatim off the album cover, so I wonder what they're actually doing. Perhaps they've realized they can get almost as much work out of people for much less cost by rejecting many of their answers?
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
The OWNER of the threamill house will provide the computers, and get the cash in.
For some reason I find this activity to be strangely addictive, and since I'm between tasks at work it's the perfect timekiller. Like Minesweeper but for cash.
Anyway, here's what I've found. My reject rate is higher than I thought it would be, almost 9%. At first I was a little offended by this, as I was actually trying to do a good job. I even went to a company's website to verify the storefront. Then I realized why it doesn't pay to do a great job, just a good job.
It is my theory that the verification and acceptance is done automatically, by having multiple users verify the same business. The answer with the most votes wins. Most people won't go to the effort required to verify a difficult identification (one where the sign or address is not clear) so they click "none of the above". I've found I can get through most HITs in a couple of seconds, especially if I've done a bunch from that city. After a while you get to know the blocks.
As for the content of the pictures, I've a theory for that too. The "select the best pic" thing has been going on at A9 for a while now. Search for a business and you get asked to select the best picture. These Turk pictures are the leftovers. This explains why the pictures are mostly 1) open fields or blank walls, 2) business run from a home (can't tell which picture is the best because you don't know which house it is), or 3) inner city pictures. People using A9 to find a business are probably not looking for the inner city liquor store, hair salon, or check cashing place.
I've only found one truly interesting picture so far. I was working on Sacramento and the HIT was for a Walgreens. This was one of the pictures I was presented.