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Mechanical Turk


TwiceHorn

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Heard a thing about this on NPR this weekend.  https://www.mturk.com/

If you don't know (I may be way behind the curve here), it's crowdsourced menial labor, mostly things that can be done online.  Some interesting stories about it over the last year (so maybe I am).  https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/amazon-mechanical-turk/551192/

Anyone ever done anything with it?

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39 minutes ago, clapclapclap said:

Owned by Amazon (Jeff Bezos, once again the working man's best friend...)  What's with the name, is it based in Constantinople?

According to NPR, it's a sly reference to a scam in which an "automated machine" was, in actuality, a person under a table.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk

A lot of the menial tasks are commissioned by allegedly "automated" sites and services and they pay someone a few pennies to do while maintaining the illusion that it's all machine done.

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We've looked into it for a few projects we have going on but haven't pulled the trigger yet. 

I'm guessing it will be a lot of hit or miss but we do want to try it for some of the things we have going on here that programming doesn't quite get us to where we need to be. 

 

 

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17 minutes ago, blacklab said:

We've looked into it for a few projects we have going on but haven't pulled the trigger yet. 

I'm guessing it will be a lot of hit or miss but we do want to try it for some of the things we have going on here that programming doesn't quite get us to where we need to be. 

 

 

aka dealing with derka pm's

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4 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

Heard a thing about this on NPR this weekend.  https://www.mturk.com/

If you don't know (I may be way behind the curve here), it's crowdsourced menial labor, mostly things that can be done online.  Some interesting stories about it over the last year (so maybe I am).  https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/amazon-mechanical-turk/551192/

Anyone ever done anything with it?

I've used it for simple data scrubbing/name matching that we could not automate. It worked fairly well. 

My colleagues use it to find participants for online experiments.   

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