A computer scientist at a business school writes about Mechanical Turk, crowdsourcing, worker pay and online labor markets.
Commenters link it for Mechanical Turk demographics and pay, and one calls it an interesting blog with a unique perspective.
No, I could not really think of that. I do not filter my blog posts through any PR department, and I have written plenty of stories that received wide attention. And going through a PR department typically means that the resulting document lacks any punch and originality. (Been there, done that, for other types of communication.)
If I could think that people could leverage the post to post their negative preconceptions about business schools, NYU, Turnitin, academic, US, or whatever else they hate, I would have not posted the blog post to start with.
In most of my blog posts I try to propose and describe solutions, even when I "whine". (See, for example, http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2010/10/plea-to-amazon-fix-mechanical-turk.html and http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2010/12/mechanical-turk-now-with-4092-spam.html). The blog post about cheating was not an exception.
The reason that it was in my draft folder was because I did not want to put it out just to talk about cheating. The post felt incomplete. Yes, I could complain. But after that, what?
It took me a while to realize that people did not cheat in some of the assignments, but tried in others, was because some assignments were designed to withstand cheating. And that was a point worth talking about.
There’s a common perception that Mechanical Turk thrives on exploiting 3rd world labor. This doesn’t appear to be the case.
From:
http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2008/03/mechanical-turk-demographics.html and
http://asc-parc.blogspot.com/2008/07/mechanical-turk-demographics.html
82% of turkers are from the US, Canada or the UK and over 75% have a Bachelor’s degree or higher.
When we were creating http://markiter.com
We did a blog post referencing a study:
http://blog.markiter.com/#turk
http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2008/03/mechanical-turk-demographics.html
Which has been updated recently. Some high quality data presented in a clear way.
http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-demographics-of-mechanical-turk.html
You have an interesting blog there with a unique perspective (http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2010/10/can-crowdsourcing-scale-role-of-active.html as an example). Given that this is your first (visible) submission since you registered 553 days ago, I'm sure it would be the pleasure of many here if we saw your posts being submitted more often.
Since Dan mentioned that Amazon Mechanical Turk is being used to do the reviews, as a founder it may be useful to know what the demographics of such users are:
http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-demographics-of-mechanical-turk.html
Thanks for that - this set is from Feb 2010
http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-demographics-of-mechanical-turk.html
* United States: 46.80% (65% female)
* India: 34.00% (70% male)
* Miscellaneous: 19.20%