Mechanical Kurt

A few weeks ago, I found myself wandering around in the world of crowdsourcing. At one point, a friend of mine had his machine set up to work on the SETI project and a few months ago I heard a piece on NPR about using CAPTCHA responses to parse texts OCR programs couldn't crack.

In my meanderings, I came across Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), named after the 18th century hoax, a chess-playing automaton that wasn't an automaton at all, but rather an elaborate machine operated by a hidden chess master. MTurk has been around for quite a few years now, and I vaguely recall hearing about it, but I didn't take the time to explore until a couple of weeks ago.

Amazon's MTurk is essentially a match-finding service that pairs up people willing to work on Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) in exchange for currency. Tasks range anywhere from transcribing WalMart receipts and voice recordings to identifying inappropriate images in a cluster pf pictures to helping a grad student with his or her research.

Intrigued, I signed up as a worker. It took a couple of days to verify my details and pretty soon, I was off. I quickly ran across HITS that were transparent attempts to generate web traffic. I took some glee in reporting these, as such crude manipulations are strictly against Amazon MTurk policy.

Then I pulled up some WalMart receipt transcription jobs, but decided I wasn't all that interested in typing "NUTS 1 9729837653423986592398" and "DIAPERS 1 089274897089348572" 63 times. Instead, I viewed a cluster of images, found nothing inappropriate, and clicked on the box that said so. Easy money, yo! then I ran across a psych grad student's survey about physical activity and health. It was fun clicking on the little radio buttons and contributing to science and all. Plus, I was getting paid!

After messing around on MTurk for an hour or so, I felt the same kind of rush all those Candy Crush players seem to be chasing. Plus, I was making money!

Well, sort of. If all my excitement has got you thinking about a new career path as an Amazon MTurker, you may want to look at my earnings statement: