O Mechanical Turk te dá a chance de, nas horas vagas, faturar uma graninha desempenhando tarefas que, enquanto a singularidade tecnológica não chega, nenhum computador é capaz de realizar. Tarefas que exigem a utilização de recursos e algorítimos que só uma rede neural humana possui. A conclusão de cada uma dessas atividades te dá o direito a uma recompensa, definida por quem solicitou a tarefa.

As tarefas que pagam melhor (algo em torno de US$ 5,00 por tarefa) envolvem escrever resenhas, em inglês, contendo algo entre 300 e 500 palavras. Num nível intermediário (algo como US$ 2,00 por tarefa) temos atividades como resumir ou parafrasear fragmentos de texto e transcrever gravações de audio e vídeo. No nível mais baixo de recompensa (que pagam entre US$ 0,02 e US$ 0,25) temos as tarefas mais simples, como como classificar imagens e produtos, incluir determindos links numa conta Del.icio.us ou cadastrar perfis em sites

O pagamento é feito assim que o contratante aprova sua tarefa e os trocadinhos vão caindo na sua conta do Mechanical Turk. A qualquer momento seu saldo pode ser transferido, integralmente ou em partes, para uma conta bancária nos EUA ou convertido em Gift Cards, que podem ser usados para comprar produtos na Amazon.

Neste primeiro mês, em que ainda estava aprendendo a usar o serviço, veja só como ficou meu faturamento.

Para quem gostou da idéia, recomendo uma passadinha no Turker Nation, fórum criado pelos usuários, para tirar dúvidas e ver opiniões sobre o serviço.

E para quem ficou curioso com o nome do serviço, segue o link explicando o que, originalmente, era um Turco Mecânico.

Instead of its original purpose, Joshua Schachter is instead using Mechanical Turk as a platform to conduct behavioral economic experiments, paying only a fraction of what such experiments usually cost and waiting only hours instead of weeks to get results back.

He only uses the system to reveal utility functions, but I'm sure it could be coaxed into conducting much more interesting experiments. And all without the biases that you get from using economics and business students who have usually been drilled in game theory before they take part in these experiments and tend to act more selfish than members of the general population.

*Hate: The Village Voice explains Why MySpace Music Won't Succeed. Basically, the article reads like a history of errors.

*Favorites: Will Sheff of Okkervil River lists some of his favorite shit in an interview with Pee-fork, including a song by Wale called "The Kramer." [via largehearted boy. Is it odd that I am so diligent in crediting conduits through which I come by information -- like Largehearted Boy -- when they are so lax in doing so themselves? No; it is not.]

*Local: The City Pages has come out with its Picked to Click local music issue (for Minneapolis / St. Paul) once again. And the winner is...Lucy Michelle & the Velvet Lapelles.

*Pornography: Complex magazine captures a round-up of porn stars singing and rapping.

*Sports: The Hold Steady's Craig Finn chats baseball with ESPN. [idolator]

*Fashion: M.I.A.'s long-awaited fashion line is due out this week. [music slut] Also, here she is blogging about terrorism.

*Off topic video: A really inappropriate playground slide. [scanner via mojo]

*Off topic: So I have a regular job. With all the weird things that come with that.

*Also: Here's camping.

We assumed most of the work would be completed by non-English speakers, but about 90% of the responses were valid. The remaining 10%, however, was a bit humorous. Some examples:

• Jeri: female given name
• Huck: fruit-berring plant
• Dagobert: Merovingian king of the Franks 628\u2013639
• McCartney: rock star and bass guitarist
• Disa:  heroine of a Swedish legendary saga
• Elle: Elle is a worldwide magazine that focuses on women's fashion, beauty, health, and entertainment.
• Kathryn: far away*

*Kathryn means pure. But Kathryn must be far away from somebody. Aren't you curious? What a bizarre little window into another world....

In essence , the service is adding a second Captcha word in order to make humans fix OCR recognition errors.

Few observations regrading the idea:

1. In Amazon's mechanical Turk one would get $0.04 for doing human Optical Character Recognition.Why should one do it for free ?  Just to login to Craig's list ? How long does it take before people realize they can skip the second word ?

2. It has been known that spammers used to put webmail cpatch'es in front of porn sites to automate account creation. We can draw the following non proven equation :

Webmail account for Spamming = Porn Site Login Credentials = Reading a Distorted Word = 4 Cents

3.   The world record for speed reading is 4251 words per minute. This means she could make 170$ per minute , if only she could read them that fast ( 25,000 words per minute ), but is seems voice recognition would fail here. Back to square one.

4. OCR has been stuck for many years waiting for NLP to evolve. Did spammers really imporve it that much ? I know I have a big problem reading many of the Captcha these days.

Seems that grid and passion can spark innovation.

Mechanical Turk: the definitive Long Tail employment agency.
I registered to provide labor on Mechanical Turk today but haven’t been inspired to take advantage of any of the, um, opportunities, such as:

Provide links to RV park information for $0.01
Extract meeting data Information from websites for $0.08
Write a review of a car you’ve driven for $0.20

I did a rough calculation of the time it would take me to test drive enough cars to review at $0.20 each in order to earn what I would earn from one hour of writing a car commercial . If I drove and reviewed 3 cars per day (I’d have to do this part-time, of course), it would take me nearly six months. My inner net-economist says that this would not be a good career move. Extracting meeting data from websites for $0.08 may be the way to go.

Bless you, Malcolm Gladwell.
I do some consulting through another consultant who helps companies and non-profits sort out their branding and positioning. He conducts workshops with the client’s staff to identify key values, positioning statements, product benefits, customer propositions, prospective visual themes, brand identity colors, etc. He then tests these online through Survey Monkey with several hundred respondents who represent a demographic roughly approximating that of the client company’s target market. If, say, one visual theme scores a narrow victory over the visual theme #2, it is declared the winner and the one that should be deployed in creative executions, which is my department. Convincing him that a creative execution using theme #2 would be more effective for a particular application is always a struggle because “the research says that the audience responds better to #1.” I will now tie him to a chair and make him watch Gladwell on the wisdom of “perfect sauces” – plural. Thank you, Kathy.

Information should be free.
No it shouldn’t. Information should be reasonably priced, and reward the creator well enough to enable and encourage her to create more, and long enough after her death to get her kids through college and provide for her pets to be cared for in a Leona Helmsley Pet Hotel. But I had my say in class, so I’ll turn this one over to the student blogosphere.

Listeners often feel more closely connected to fellow listeners than to their neighbors because of shared values. One of my goals in these classes is to figure out ways to take that community into the digital realm.
A second takeaway was Kathy's explanation of proxies and their limitations. It reminded me of the proxy we have in radio for audience - Arbitron ratings. Each quarter people turn in diaries documenting their listening. Everyone in radio knows they're not likely to be accurate. I saw a hilarious slide show at a public radio conference depicting a listener filling out an Arbitron diary when he got out of bed, while he was standing in the shower, as he was driving to work.
A stronger proxy is the horizon. Arbitron is introducing people meters, devices that can tell what radio station on so the imperfect human element is left out.
Takeaway 3 - Malcolm Gladwell on tomato sauce. I'm glad there's more choice because of this breakthrough. But I've stood in the grocery gaping at the variety of olive oil or beer without a real clue. Would I go back to less choice? Probably not. Do I feel seduced into wasting a lot of time sorting through all the choices marketers throw my way? YES

A favorite story for many people is a tribute to a person's mother. This person talked about how her mother (even though dead) seems to send her special messages on her birthdays. My tribute story was about taking care of my uncle for 6 weeks, 24 hours a day. Relatives thought there was nothing terminally wrong with him, but as soon as I arrived I realized that there was. I am a professional caregiver and can notice things that others don't. All of his relatives were so grateful to me for taking care of him, and that they could come and see him in his apartment during his final days.

Another wonderful story is by a woman talking about the loss of her daughter at the age of 20. A favorite of mine is the story told by a young woman about her wonderful grandmother. She has such great memories of her, and learned so much from her.

Jim

Amazon's captured the essential concept on a much larger scale. Their service, providing ways for programs and websites to request human intervention for tasks where humans are simply better equipped to provide answers. These include things like image recognition and language transcription, where computers lack the nuance to do a high-quality job.

One of the many unique applications I've seen is a map company that has turk workers draw a line on a small satellite photo to identify exactly where the road lies. Their maps are tremendously accurate and they can make rapid updates thanks to this simple human intervention. Another service uses people to transcribe podcasts. They've even set up a second batch of tasks, where workers evaluate the accuracy of the transcriptions. In this way they can to ensure overall quality service to their customer with limited need for oversight. Basically, the oversight is already built into the process.

Tasks are known as "HITs," which stands for "Human Intelligence Tasks." Most HITs are quick and simple; pay is generally a few cents each. A few run $1 or more, but not many. Keep in mind this level of wage is more likely to draw third-world workers than domestic.

The absolute most creative use of Mechanical Turk: The Sheep Market, an interactive online art experiment. Hear more directly from artist Aaron Koblin:

Now that you are inspired with a dose of out-of-the-box creativity, what simple, repetitive tasks are required in your business? Do you need your own mechanical turk? Here are a few examples to get you started:

• Online research (trivia, competitors, information-gathering)
• Writing (reviews, website updates, articles, blog comments)
• Photo evaluation (identification, selection, matching)

Find all the details on Amazon's Mechanical Turk Welcome page.

Anti-spam technology.

Don't get me wrong -- huge strides in anti-spam technology have been made.  Paul Graham's essay A Plan for Spam discusses a now popular technology -- Bayesian filtering.  According to Sophos 92.8% of all mail sent in the first quarter of 2008 was spam.  Wow.  So spam technology is taking care of most of the problem, but that's just not good enough. 

Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

The idea of artificial artificial intelligence (AAI) isn't new, but the term AAI comes from Amazon's Jeff Bezos.  From Wikipedia:

Artificial artificial intelligence (AAI) is a term coined by Jeff Bezos. Certain computational tasks, such as identifying whether a person in a photograph is male or female, are tasks that humans still do better and faster than computers. If perfect artificial intelligence systems existed, computer programs could complete those tasks. The idea of artificial artificial intelligence is to outsource those parts of a computer program to humans.  AAI is the underlying principle behind Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk outsources human labor at the task level.  You get paid in HITs (human intelligence tasks) for doing tasks that companies, individuals, and organizations pay for on a per HIT basis.  

AAI + Spam = Nirvana

We should turn down the intensity of the anti-spam filters to avoid false-positives (I have several important messages -- on the sending and receiving side -- go into spam EVERY WEEK).  We should then supplement anti-spam models by having real humans evaluate messages which fall in the gray area.  

One option is to literally use Mechanical Turk as part of an anti-spam solution.  Take the messages that are clearly spam according to your model and toss it.  Let the kosher mail pass without harassment.  But then send questionable mail to the Mechanical Turk to have humans help you figure out what to do.  Another solution is to build a fully-integrated Anti-spam Turk.  

There are clearly privacy issues which need to be managed carefully.  But I'm confident that those issues can be solved with technology better than relying on AI to understand the difference between spam and important mail.  Until SMTP is updated to include a much higher level of authentication/security, spam will be an issue.  We either need to leverage some cost-based model like bonds, or we need to supplement AI with a little AAI.

For a fuller story see the WSJ blog story "Do people think you look trustworthy?"

The trivial example:

If my task is to produce a novel, you could stupefy the task for me by writing the novel and letting me copy it. The act of copying a novel requires less intelligence than creating a novel, yet it appears -- if examined only in terms of its final product -- identical to the act of creation. By letting me copy your novel, you have stupefied a potentially intelligent act by extracting the intellectual requirement from it, taking the burden of intelligence upon your own shoulders, doing the intelligence-requiring work, and letting me produce the output.

Some people may rightly object to this example by pointing out that, overall, the amount of intelligence utilized has not decreased at all (and may in fact have increased.) For whether or not I wrote the novel, a novel was written; and writing a novel requires an expenditure of intelligence no matter who writes it. But let us remember that stupefication is often a task that requires intelligence (see this post.) Thus, you may have stupefied my task of creating a novel at the expense of great expenditures of your own intelligence. Likewise, the makers of Deep Blue created a computer that could trounce any of its creators in a chess game -- but making the machine was a long and difficult road.

But no matter how you slice it, my aptly named "trivial example" is so absurdly simple as to be useless in the context of manufacturing artificial intelligence. After all, virtually any task (with a few notable exceptions) can be stupefied in this way. But doing so will never constitute the creation of an artificially intelligent system.

Deep Blue would have been a silly machine indeed if its "internal" calculations had been performed in real-time by human grandmasters hiding inside its belly (which, by the way, would have been merely a modern resurrection of the famous Mechanical Turk hoax from the 18th century.) It is unlikely that even the most naive of individuals would have considered The Turk an example of artificial intelligence. For The Turk is merely an example of old fashioned human intelligence.

That being said, this idea of hidden human intelligence connects in an interesting way to the quotation in this post, which suggests that when Kasparov played against Deep Blue, he was actually playing against "the ghosts of grandmasters past." If so, then although there were no literal grandmasters hiding in the belly of the machine, years of powerful over-the-board intellect managed, in some form or another, to find its way into Deep Blue's physical and/or virtual innards.

I offer the trivial example in order to initiate a more complex discussion later and because it demonstrates clearly that stupefication of a task is not a sufficient condition for the creation of artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence is not always aptly defined, and I'm not going to enter the ongoing debate about what constitutes artificial intelligence. I will merely suggest that the trivial example above is not it.

For one thing, the machinery of The Turk was no different from a rock, in that it obeyed purely physical laws and moved only when the grandmaster hiding inside manipulated it with his hands and feet. The Turk made no decisions. I will tentatively suggest here that in order to create an artificially intelligent system, the process of stupefication must result in 1) a new task, which 2) can be performed by a different entity and which 3) involves some level of decision making.

I mention this last qualification because I could easily make a machine that "writes novels" by programming it to print out novels that I had written. This would be The Turk all over again. And few people would be impressed.

I will address the idea of decision making later. To that end, consider the following tasks.

A Less Trivial Task: Creating a novel that has never been written before.

An Even Less Trivial Task: Stupefying the previous task

Ce site d'Amazon vous propose d'effectuer des tâches souvent relativement faciles et répétitives, mais qu'un robot (ou un logiciel) ne serait pas capable d'effectuer à la place d'un humain. Les mini-contrats que vous remplirez sur le site sont donc très mal payés, mais rapides à remplir.

Si vous faites le calcul vous verrez tout de même que bien souvent, l'heure de travail sur le site reste tout de même bien inférieure à un smic horaire, mais parfois cela vaut tout de même mieux que de rester devant la télévision, surtout que vous pouvez bien souvent faire les deux en même temps ! Sans compter bien sûr l'intérêt de travailler à la maison, à n'importe quelle heure.

Ensuite, il y a des HITs (les mini-jobs sur lesquels vous travaillez) qui nécessitent certaines qualifications, et qui sont automatiquement bien mieux rémunérés. Vous pourrez donc passer des tests sur le site, par exemple pour prouver que vous êtes bilingue français-anglais, pour pouvoir ensuite travailler à des traductions.

Pour finir, le gros problème de ce système, c'est que vous ne pourrez pas récupérer l'argent gagné sur votre compte en banque, à moins que vous ne disposiez d'un compte aux États-Unis... L'autre moyen de récupérer le fruit de votre travail, c'est de le convertir en chèque-cadeau valable sur amazon.com.

Au final, ce site est surtout un moyen de vous offrir facilement quelques CDs, DVDs ou comics, tout en vous faisant pratiquer un peu d'anglais... et c'est toujours ça de gagné !

Voir aussi mes articles : Améliorez votre niveau d'anglais (1) et Améliorez votre niveau d'anglais (2)

Crédits schéma : ©2005-2008 Amazon.com, Inc. or its Affiliates

I was wrong.  The results of that project have surfaced, in the form of "Ten Thousand Cents".  TUrns out we were drawing a one hundred dollar bill.

The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100. The work is presented as a video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, "crowdsourcing," "virtual economies," and digital reproduction.

This project serves as a brilliant metaphor of the normalizing power of crowds.  When you open up a project to the masses, governance becomes extremely difficult.  Anybody is given the ability to contribute erroneous information.  However, as you gain a larger community of contributors, things balance out despite the fouls.  Consider opinion-based efforts, such as Digg and Travelocity: eventually, the best items shine through.  That is why Wikipedia is so reliable considering the circumstances: because thousands of editors are better than one.  So how is Ten Thousand Cents relevant?

Still Ben, right?

***

Curtis Taylor, 50, a corporate trainer in Clarksville, Ind., who has earned more than $345 on Mturk.com, doesn't even think of turking as work. To him, it's a way to kill time. "I'm not in it to make money, I'm in it to goof off," he says. Taylor travels a lot for business and finds himself sitting around in hotel rooms at night. He doesn't like to watch TV much, and says that turking beats playing free online poker. To him, it's "mad money," which he blows buying gifts on Amazon, like Bill Bennett's "America, the Last Best Hope," for his son, a junior in high school. "If I ever stop being entertained, I'll stop doing it," he says. "I'll just quit."

Yet what's a happy diversion for Taylor is serious business for the companies on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Efficient Frontier, a search engine marketing firm, has used Mturk.com to accomplish tens of thousands of tasks since early 2006. Efficient Frontier helps companies figure out which keywords will bring Web surfers to their sites. With Mturk.com, Efficient Frontier can afford to pay three different people to look at each potential keyword, and vote whether those words are relevant to a given site. It costs the company just 4.5 cents to test each keyword, paying 1.5 cents to Amazon, and 1 cent each to three turkers.

Sherwood Stranieri of SkyPromote, another search engine marketing firm in Boston, says he now has a virtual staff of 120 workers on Mturk.com. "It's like a giant human computer," he says. "It's like having an infinite attention span." Stranieri pays qualified turkers to surf a Web directory and figure out exactly where a specific site should be listed. He can get 300 of these tasks done in just five or six hours, even if he posts them on Mturk.com in the middle of the night. He pays 5 cents a task. "Pricing is very low right now because there are so many more workers than tasks right now," he says. "People are fishing around for work to do." Why do people do it if the pay is so low? It's a question Stranieri wonders about himself. "I think it's something of a hybrid between trying to make money on the side and a diversion, a substitute for doing a crossword puzzle. It's sort of a mental exercise."

Eric Cranston, 18, who recently graduated from high school, got into turking because at the time he didn't have anything better to do. "When it came out," he says, "I had just broken my foot, so I was just at home doing nothing on the computer. So, why not?" He's used the money he's made answering survey questions and transcribing podcasts to buy a game controller and a computer monitor. He recently transferred $200 to his bank account. "I don't think anyone could actually make a living off of Mturk. There isn't enough work," Cranston says. He is one turker, however, who is plotting how to move up the food chain. Currently, Cranston and a friend are working to launch a Web-based business altering photographs, called Image Den, using, naturally, Mechanical Turkers to treat the images.

In its earliest days, someone posted a request on Amazon Mechanical Turk, offering to pay 2 cents for a drawing of a sheep facing left. Peter Cohen, director of Amazon Mechanical Turk, says the company was "puzzled by" the request. The requester was Aaron Koblin, a student in UCLA's Design/Media Arts program, who was writing his master's thesis about the site. He was intrigued by Amazon's effort to "establish a framework for the utilization of people as computers," as he wrote in his thesis. "My project was very tongue-in-cheek," he tells me. "On the one hand, it's using the system the way it's meant to be used. On the other hand, it's asking them to do this ridiculous thing."

The grad student invited turkers to draw up to five sheep at the rate of 2 cents apiece. Over 40 days and 40 nights, the sheep flooded in at a rate of 11 per hour. By the end, 7,599 turkers had participated. He collected 12,000 sheep and promptly put 10,000 of them up for sale at the rate of $20 for 20 sheep at the Sheep Market. This caused some consternation among the people who had drawn them. "They're selling our sheep!!!" wailed one poster on a turker message board. Another wrote: "Does anyone remember signing over the rights to the drawings?" In fact, they had. To participate in Amazon Mechanical Turk, workers, in the legalese of the site, "agree that the work product of any Services you perform is deemed a 'work made for hire' for the benefit of the Requester, and all ownership rights, including worldwide intellectual property rights, will vest with the Requester immediately upon your performance of the Service."

Why sheep? Koblin relished all the associations that sheep have from the biblical followers of the good shepherd to George Orwell's "Animal Farm." The term "cottage industry" comes from peasants' setting up shop at home, when it wasn't planting or harvesting season, often spinning wool. "The cottage industry, which would employ entire families from their houses, has notable similarities to Mechanical Turk, such as employing people for spare time, working from home, and relative anonymity," he wrote in his thesis.

Koblin wanted his project to capture the creativity expressed by turkers, while drawing attention to the insignificant role each of them played in the process. He certainly succeeded in capturing their creativity. Even after he stopped accepting sheep, and started selling them by the lot on the Internet, more people wrote to him wanting to contribute sheep for free. They just wanted to see their sheep join the herd. "Most of these people clearly weren't in it for the money," Koblin says. "They weren't doing it so they could get 2 cents. It was more about participating in something larger."

Maybe so. But maybe the ultimate message is: Congrats, fellow humans, we're not obsolete! The machines, they still need us! Only at a very sheepish price

***

The real human ingenuity of Mechanical Turk shines in the novel ways that companies and workers use it to get tasks done efficiently. CastingWords is a transcription service built entirely on the work of Mechanical Turk transcribers and editors. With a little code, plus the turkers, it has succeeded in basically automating the process. The company charges its customers from 42 cents a minute for podcast transcription to 75 cents a minute for other audio. CastingWords pays Mechanical Turk workers as little as 19 cents a minute for transcription. If a transcription job is posted on Mechanical Turk for a couple of hours at the rate of 19 cents a minute, and no worker has taken on the project, the software simply assumes the price is too low and starts raising it.

After a transcription assignment is accepted by a worker, and completed, it goes back out on Mturk.com for quality assurance, where another worker is paid a few cents to verify that it's a faithful transcript of the audio. Then, the transcript goes back on Mturk.com a third time for editing, and even a fourth time for a quality assurance check. "It's been terribly useful for us," says Nathan McFarland of Seattle, one of the co-founders of CastingWords. Transcription is the type of relatively steady task that keeps turkers with good ears who are fast typists coming back. "There are people who have been with us for months, and they're not leaving," says McFarland.

One of those workers is Kristy Milland, 27, a mother of one who runs an at-home day care in Toronto, as well as a Web site called RealityBBQ about the reality TV show "Big Brother." "I have a lot of free time basically sitting at the computer while the kids play," she says. Among the work she does is editing and quality assurance for CastingWords, but not transcription, because she has tendinitis. When Mturk.com first began, Milland would churn through 3-cent HITs. (That's "human intelligence tasks," Turker lingo for jobs.) Amazon was paying turkers to make sure that photos of businesses used on its A9 site, a local search engine, matched the actual businesses listed, a task a computer can't do. In an eight-hour day, when she didn't have the kids to watch, Milland could go through 1,000 photos, making a cool $30.

Lately, she's found a way to goose her earnings by competing for bonuses. A number of service companies use Mechanical Turk to do a "human augmented search." Say you're in a sports bar and having an argument about whether Roger Clemens has ever thrown a no-hitter. You can end the debate once and for all with a call to one of the services, which instantly posts the question on Mechanical Turk. Turkers then surf the Web and generally earn 2 cents for each answer.

Back in the sports bar, when you get the answer -- "Clemens has never pitched a no-hitter" -- you can rate the answer as great, good, lame or junk. Answers deemed "lame" or "junk" are rejected and the worker is not paid. If you don't rate the answer at all, the worker is automatically paid his or her 2 cents after seven days. Turkers who get the most "great" votes in a week get bonuses of as much as $75. In a good week, Milland can answer 100 research questions, making all of $2, but scoring one of those lucrative performance bonuses, she says, makes the search worthwhile.

The trivia pursuits are so competitive that they're snatched up by turkers within a minute of being posted. So Milland has set up software to notify her whenever a new question shows up on Mechanical Turk, so she can be the first to grab it. Plus, she's armed her Web browser with links to her top 100 reference sites so she can answer the questions as efficiently and accurately as possible. Turkers can choose to be paid in Amazon credit, making it easy to shop at the company store. Just the other day, Milland ordered $600 worth of DVDs and books for her family, as well as prizes for contests on her RealityBBQ. "It still doesn't add up to a lot of money per hour, but if I'm sitting there watching TV anyway, it's more than I'd make just sitting there," she says.

Milland's main beef with Mturk.com is that there's no way to complain if a company rips her off by refusing to pay for good, accurate work. "Amazon basically says, tough, they can reject what they want," she says. "There's no recourse." (Word of bad-apple companies, however, spreads fast on turker forums.) Milland would also like to see more work and more companies on Mturk.com. When the site first launched there was more to do, she says. These days it feels as if there are fewer opportunities and too many workers competing for them.

Of course, for all its rhetoric about artificial intelligence, Amazon did not launch Mechanical Turk for the good of science. For every task a worker completes for another company, the retailer collects a 10 percent fee from that company. For cheap HITs that pay just a penny, Amazon charges the company half a cent per HIT. Companies need not know the real name, much less the address or Social Security number, of turkers. Unless a worker earns more than $600 from a given company, the business has no obligation to issue the worker a tax form, or report the earnings to the Internal Revenue Service. Few workers cross that $600 threshold with any one company. Yet workers are required to report the money they earn on Mturk.com to the IRS as income -- yes, even the $1.45 I made -- to be taxed at the high rates of the self-employed. There's no chance that a worker might land a full-time job with a company through Mechanical Turk, since it's expressly forbidden in the site's "participation agreement," which requires workers to submit all work through the site, and not directly to the requester.

To a labor activist like Marcus Courtney of WashTech, a tech workers union, the whole arrangement represents a dystopian vision of a virtual sweatshop. "What Amazon is trying to do is create the virtual day laborer hiring hall on the global scale to bid down wage rates to the advantage of the employer," he says. "Here you have a major global corporation, based in the United States, that's showing the dark side of globalization. If this is Jeff Bezos' vision of the future of work, I think that's a pretty scary vision, and we should be paying attention to that."

Rebecca Smith, a lawyer for the National Employment Law Project, seconds that. "The creativity of business in avoiding its responsibility to workers never ceases to astound," she says dryly. "It's day labor in the virtual world." Smith sees Mechanical Turk as just another scheme by companies to classify workers as independent contractors to avoid paying them minimum wage and overtime, complying with non-discrimination laws, and being forced to carry unemployment insurance and workers compensation. "It's an example of cyberspace overtaking a country's labor laws," she says. Needless to say, the turkers don't see it that way.

Read more: Mechanical Turk and 12,000 drawings of sheep facing left

Amazon recently unveiled a new "Web" service, called NowNow, that allows users to find answers to any question via mobile email. When users post a question to NowNow, a team of human workers surfs the web to find the answer. Users will get an email response with up to three answers to their question within just a few minutes. In the Beta test, all questions can be asked for free, though Amazon will eventually begin charging a small fee for each question asked.

The really cool part of this whole system is that it plugs into Amazon's existing Mechanical Turk service, which we've covered before. Questions asked via NowNow get fed into the Mechanical Turk queue and are handled by those workers. Workers are paid based on the quality of their answers.

While some might argue that anyone with mobile access to email probably has mobile Web access as well, negating the need for the service, we think Amazon is exploring this territory because of the mobile Web's current inability to truly mirror the desktop Web experience. Many mobile Web users find surfing and searching to be too slow to do on the fly - making the service pretty appealing in the mobile context. Stay tuned to see how this pans out. Learn more at NowNow.

Für 580 Millionen US $ wurde MySpace im Jahr 2005 vom Medienmogul Rupert Murdoch gekauft. Der Wert des Unternehmens beruht jedoch fast ausschliesslich aus den von den Usern gestalteten Inhalten. Millionen von Menschen haben mit ihrer eigenen Zeit und technischen Infrastruktur ihr Scherflein zum Wert von MySpace beigetragen. Ähnlich verhält es sich bei anderen Webseiten wie Youtube, Flickr etc. Auch in SecondLife wird die virtuelle Welt massgeblich von den Usern selber gestaltet. Dieses Vorgehen der Nutzung von Zeit, Fähigkeiten und Ressourcen von Community Mitgliedern wird auch als Crowdsourcing bezeichnet. Findige Manager wollen nun dieses Crowdsourcing Potential für ihr Unternehmen nutzen. Ein Beispiel dafür ist die Firma IBM, die zuerst die Open Source Software Apache unterstützte und mittlerweile in der Linux Community mitarbeitet. (vgl. Tapscott/Williams S.76ff)
Dabei gibt IBM derzeit jährlich rund 100 Millionen Dollar für die Linuxentwicklung aus, hauptsächlich indem IBM Angestellte an den Linux Projekten mitarbeiten. In der Linux Community arbeiten jedoch gleichzeitig tausende von findigen Köpfen mit und werden dabei gewissermassen ein Teil der Entwicklungsabteilung von IBM. Die Entwicklung und der Unterhalt eines proprietären Betriebssytems würde IBM hingegen eine Milliarde US $ pro Jahr kosten (Cawley in Tapscott/Willams S. 81).

Fortgeschritten ist das Crowdsourcing bei den so genannten Human Intelligence Tasks (HIT). Dies sind Arbeiten, die für den Computer sehr schwierig zu bewältigen sind, für einen Menschen hingegen sehr einfach. Dazu gehört zum Beispiel die Beschlagwortung von Bildern oder die Korrektur von computererzeugten Texten. Die Online Agentur Mechanical Turk, welche ein Teil von Amazon ist, vermittelt zwischen Unternehmungen und InternetnutzerInnen solche Human Intelligence Tasks. Internetnutzerinnen können sich so beim Zeitvertreib im Netz sogar etwas Geld verdienen, das sie für ihre Tätigkeit im Stücklohn entschädigt werden. In speziellen Foren wie Turker Nation tauschen die Online-TaglöhnerInnen jeweils ihre Erfahrungen aus und warnen ihre Kolleginnen und Kollegen vor Unternehmen mit schlechter Zahlungsmoral.

Diese Form von Telearbeit wird generell sehr schlecht bezahlt. Lohnnebenleistungen sind nicht inbegriffen und man riskiert, dass die geleistete Arbeit vom Unternehmen abgelehnt wird, um nicht zahlen zu müssen. Seine Existenz wird man sich auf diese Weise nicht sichern können.

So, how often will it switch jobs? Every 3 years, two times a year, each month or…. why not several times a day?

Assumption: A job may less and less be outline of your style, status and skills, THE choice that you make in your self-creative youth and pursue with passion until your hands have shrunk and you mumble wisdoms on professional resilience to your children.

It seems (to me, to you too maybe?) that jobs get more and more project–centric, existing-skills based, time and locality indifferent.
with Theme-generated-tasks’ accomplishment  transforming into task accomplishment around a theme.

The digital business field, where change is well in advance, brings up a strong trend on segmentation of the classical notion of job.

Two examples on the internet can tell the story:
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

and

Innocentive

These two companies propose a per task remunerated employment, amazingly different as regarding necessary skills.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk mostly addresses the non qualified workforce and Innocentive the ultra specialized scientific one. The concept on both is that you’re hired on a per project basis, for a translation, to prove the Fermat Theorem or to fill in the ISO forms.

It is then highly important to have a personal job management system to handle contests you participate and your prizes, puzzle your profile and communicate with trusted professionals.

A sort of e-mployment survival kit to prevent you from e-xploitation.

This vast talent pool of potential Mechanical Turks, scientists and everyone between, also creates opportunities for providers of meta-HR services to aggregate and compose job particles into a real job.

Providers such as advisors, agents and therapists:
social engineers, serial trendsetters, legal timing planners for fringe technology testers (“get the trial before the action is criminalised with a law”), real life rehabilitation mentors (“get rid of Wii gestures when in the grocer’s”), tec-addiction therapists, viral marketing therapists/ digital image makers (banal already maybe), mini-krach recoverers, startup estate agents, other (attention, this is not a generic term, it can be a job where you are paid to differentiate and foster evolution), and so on.

A combination of a middlejob with a classical one or the mix of various middlejobs could result in a steady plus variable income, mental coherence and growth, an optimised planning and a life-job balance.
On the “which?” the question is open. On the “how many?” 2 jobs maybe ok while 3 or more could definitely assure the statics of the e-mployement construction. …

Job- memo for my pizzababy: Exercise with 3 or more jobs, with an hourly basis frequency, vary the status. In case you need help call your agent.
After it was digested I went back to work.

Georgia

I decided to create an art collaboration for the job I made on Mechanical Turk.  I queued 25 jobs, at $0.05 each, for people to take photographs of five different objects pertaining to a building on the street (i.e. a brick wall, windows, cars, people, plants).  I plan to bring all of the photos I received together to create a city street scene outside of a building.  I'm very excited about the outcome.