pirot - Slashdot User

Submission + - Mechanical Turk, Low Wages, and the Market for Lem (blogspot.com)

Submitted by pirot on Tuesday August 10, 2010 @03:49PM

pirot writes: There is significant discussion about the appalling pay rates on online crowdsourcing services such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Many people blame the requesters and the low rates, or the workers for accepting them. But this is not the enough to explain the rates. The basic problem: Spammers. Given that many large tasks attract spammers, most requesters rely on redundancy to ensure quality. So instead of having a single worker to do a task, they get 5 workers to work on it. This increases the effective rate from $2/hr to $10/hr. Effectively, Amazon Mechanical Turk is a market for lemons , following the terminology of Akerlof's famous paper, for which he got the 2001 Nobel prize. A market for lemons is a market where the sellers cannot evaluate beforehand the quality of the goods that they are buying. So, if you have two types of products (say good workers and low quality workers) and cannot tell who is whom, the price that the buyer is willing to pay will be proportional to the average quality of the worker. So the offered price will be between the price of a good worker and a low quality worker. What a good worker would do? Given that good workers will not get enough payment for their true quality, they leave the market. This leads the buyer to lower the price even more towards the price for low quality workers. At the end, we only have low quality workers in the market (or workers willing to work for similar wages) and the offered price reflects that.

Comment Re:The problem is not an efficient algorithm (Score 0) 421

by pirot on Monday November 09, 2009 @09:50PM (#30041330) Attached to: What Computer Science Can Teach Economics

"they quickly change their behavior based on that knowledge": This is exactly what game theory studies: how agents will change their information based on the knowledge they have.

Here is how an interaction will happen, in a very stylized manner:

1a: Party A will act in a specific way, following action A1, which seems to be the best.

1b: Party B, anticipating the action A1 of A, will follow action B1

2a: Party A knowing that party B will play B1, now revises the decision and follows action A2.

2b: Party B knowing that part A will play A2, now revised the decision and follows action B2.

3a: Party A knowing that party B will play B2, now revises the decision and follows action A3.

3b: Party B knowing that part A will play A3, now revised the decision and follows action B3.

....(the story continues)....

At the end, we have a situation where this interaction converges into the equilibrium.

The problem is not that humans will "change their behavior based on that knowledge". It is that most humans do not have the infinite computational capability to follow the logic until the end. Costis work shows that the computational power required for agents to compute their "optimal" actions is too high, so they will most probably go with their suboptimal decisions.

Comment Perhaps an antidote for ADD? (Score 0) 695

by pirot on Wednesday April 22, 2009 @10:09AM (#27674319) Attached to: Windows 7 Starter Edition — 3 Apps Only

I wanted to say something but I forgot after checking my other open apps...

Submission + - Mechanical Turk: Profitable or Not?

Submitted by

pirot

on Wednesday March 11, 2009 @06:01PM

pirot writes: "The Mechanical Turk website seems to be of much smaller value to Amazon, in terms of direct revenue, than originally thought. The average value of HITs posted in any day is around $2000. The $2K/day value means that the average revenue per day for Amazon is around $200 per day (10% of the requester's payment), or $6K/month. This hardly covers the expense of dedicating a developer to the service! .... It seems that Mechanical Turk is not generating any significant revenue for Amazon. It is also unlikely that it generates any profit.... Thankfully Amazon uses Mechanical Turk for its own purposes, so there are second-degree benefits for Amazon to keep the service around."

Submission + - Suspect Freed After Exposing Cop's Facebook Status (nytimes.com)

Submitted by

longacre

on Wednesday March 11, 2009 @05:57PM

longacre writes: "A man on trial in New York for possession of a weapon has been acquitted after subpoenaing his arresting officer's Facebook and MySpace accounts. His defense: Officer Vaughan Ettienne's MySpace "mood" was set to "devious" on the day of the arrest, and one day a few weeks before the trial, his Facebook status read "Vaughan is watching 'Training Day' to brush up on proper police procedure."

From the article:
"You have your Internet persona, and you have what you actually do on the street," Officer Ettienne said on Tuesday. "What you say on the Internet is all bravado talk, like what you say in a locker room." Except that trash talk in locker rooms almost never winds up preserved on a digital server somewhere, available for subpoena.
"

Submission + - AT&T Predictions From 16 Years Ago Become Real (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by

Singularity Hub

on Wednesday March 11, 2009 @02:16PM

Singularity Hub writes: "AT&T advertisements from 1993 (16 years ago!) make predictions about the future that turned out to be amazingly accurate. Technology is changing our lives at an ever faster rate, and it is easy for us to forget that many things that we take for granted today were not around just a few short years ago."

Submission + - H-1B hiring too much of a hassle? (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

bednarz

on Wednesday March 11, 2009 @01:19PM

bednarz writes: "In response to President Barack Obama's stimulus plan, U.S. lawmakers are adding to what some say is already a substantial list of requirements for potential H-1B hires. For instance, a provision to the stimulus package would restrict H-1B hiring at companies that have received TARP funds and that have more than 15% of their workers on visas; these companies would be required to prove they have diligently recruited American workers for the position and that in hiring a foreign national they are not replacing a U.S. citizen. "This is a tough issue all around, and no one is happy about it. But if the U.S. starts taking away opportunities for foreign nationals, our public universities and school systems will feel that impact. Lawmakers need to be aware of that potential consequence," says Peter Roberts, partner at corporate immigration law firm McCarter & English."

Comment Do not worry about authenticity (Score 0) 437

by pirot on Saturday February 07, 2009 @11:23AM (#26763899) Attached to: The Deceptive Perfection of Auto-Tune

"As these techniques improve and become more popular, it makes me wonder what music produced twenty or fifty years from now will sound like, and how much authenticity will be left."

Well, according to TFA, T-Pain *has* been using it in a creative/authentic way, to create a different style of music. He may not be "in his right mind" according to Hildebrand, but he is using the tool in previously unexpected ways. So, here is the authenticity!

Comment You are now worrying about privacy? (Score 0) 227

by pirot on Friday February 06, 2009 @10:59PM (#26761197) Attached to: Privacy Group Calls Google Latitude a Real 'Danger'

I am getting tired of hearing all these comments about loss of privacy, big brother, and other nonsense.

I installed the application. You have to actually give explicit permission to your friends in order for them to track you. Furthermore, for this to work, your friends should actually care to actually follow the instructions from Google, go through a set of menus, so that they can see where you are.

Apart from my mother when I was 12, I cannot think of anyone that would actually care to know where I am, 24/7. I am pretty sure that I do not care to know where even my closest friends are right now. They may be at home, at work, with their wives, with their mistresses, buying pot, or selling dirty bombs to arab terrorists. I do not care. And I am sure they think the same for me! Damn, I am not *that* important so that others need to know where I am!

Yes, it would be convenient to know where my friends are when I am trying to meet them. If they could send me an "sms-like" message with their location. But do I *need* to know where they are, 24/7? Hell no!

And to whomever worrying about privacy: You got a cellphone (so the cellphone carrier knows where you are by triangulation). Oh no, you actually got a smartphone, with an embedded GPS! (So, a hacker can install an application that sends an sms with the long/lat.) Ah, you also have a wi-fi! (So a hacker can stream the info easier.)
I see, you also installed the Google Maps application! And since you wanted to see how this Latitude things works, you also installed the latest version of GMaps? And you are *now* freaking worrying that a hacker will get your phone, and enable tracking??

Almost like being afraid of malaria and visiting malaria-infested areas during the rain season!

Comment Re:Only the paranoid survive (not) (Score 0) 508

by pirot on Wednesday January 07, 2009 @08:05AM (#26356125) Attached to: Are My Ideas Being Stolen? If So, What Then?

There is one thing called timing. First movers are very rarely the ones that dominate the marketplace. Furthermore, most inventors are not willing to give credit for their ideas to the environment around them. Even when the environment just creates a problem, this is already the first step towards creating a solution. Given the available tools for solving the problem, it is not surprising that many inventors/scientists/teens-in-a-garage will come up with very similar solutions. Independent discoveries are much more common than many people are willing to believe.

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