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Submission + - Human workers, managed by algorithm (technologyreview.com)

prayag writes: "With the advent of crowdsourcing platforms it has become easier for users to scale up their employees by hiring thousands of people at once. This helps some business to do their business better and on the other hand can be misused by spammers to create "human-bots""

Comment Fair Wage (Score 1) 123

There has been a lot of question about fair wage in the thread. So to answer everybody, the fair wage depends a lot on region, currency etc. We partner a lot of with local organization such as NGOs. Many of our members are house wives or are unemployed for whom the big difference having no access to work at all. Average wages vary from $1.50 to $2 per hour (this is in developing countries mind you).
AI

Crowdsourcing Makes an API For Human Intelligence 123

holy_calamity writes "A startup called MobileWorks claims to offer human-level intelligence to any piece of software, with APIs for image, text or speech processing that crowdsource tasks to workers in India. Unlike Amazon's Mechanical Turk, jobs can be sent in by software without human help and can also be completed in 'real time' with a turnaround of a few seconds. The company claims that for problems like OCR and image recognition it makes more sense to find ways to use human intelligence than developing complex custom algorithms." Not a bad plan — sounds like they've lifted a page from the business model of captcha-cracking spammers.

Comment Mark Zuckerberg (Score 5, Interesting) 317

Mark Zuckerberg is the most unethical guy in the industry today. As is obvious by the origins of Facebook, his infamous hacking of the journalists passwords during the the-facebook era and countless other fiascoes that come to news from time to time. Everyone who has ever dealt with him says have bad things to say about him.
If he is the face of the next generation entrepreneurs, then god saves the industry.
Slashdot.org

Slashdot Discussions Now Include Roulette Video Chat 192

It's been a long time coming, but we're pleased to announce the latest updates to our discussion software. We've been paying a lot of attention to what other websites have been doing in the space, and as we are only too happy to steal good ideas, from now on all Slashdot stories will now be accompanied by a Roulette-style webcam video chat. In testing, we've discovered that Slashdot users are amazingly likely to engage in informative, troll-free discussion when presented with the video image of one of their peers. This new addition to Slashdot nicely rounds out and improves the discussion experience for all users.

Comment Re:How much free speech do you need at aged 6? (Score 5, Insightful) 368

You obviously haven't lived in a totalitarian country. My girlfriend is from a Soviet-Era-communist country. She was very young when the communist regime was repelled but she has distinctive memories of the era, how you could only get state television channel, how going abroad was almost impossible, how it was impossible to get foreign made goods, how the country was everything and criticizing the country was frowned upon. In addition, please remember that Antisemitism in Soviet Union was a de-jure policy after WW2. Also remember, that Sergey Brin's parents were academics, which made them an active target of the government. If you live not under a fear of the government but also under the fear of a government openly hostile to your community and your parents are marked people, it makes a pretty damn good impact on your childhood. In addition, do you think as a child his parents would've never talked about their life in Soviet Union ? These are the experiences that shape your thinking. Just because he was young doesn't mean he doesn't know how it was.

Comment Re:State vs Internet (Score 2, Informative) 186

Actually money transfer to India is not difficult at all. I use bank and wire transfer and it works fine to transfer money to and from India. The problem is that Indian government wants to keep a full track of where and how money crosses border. It always had. Transfers through PayPal, unless it registers itself as a bank, are difficult to track. That is why the problem.
BTW, for this reason, hawala transfers are illegal in India and have come under heavy fire.

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