Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Slow Turking

Our new baby boy was born two weeks ago today, and along with my father passing away two weeks before that I haven't been involved in the Mechanical Turk scene much lately. There doesn't appear to be too much of interest going on right now, although there have been a few new types of hits to show up.

I read recently that the scientists at the University of California, Berkley who are in charge of the Stardust space probe are going to enlist the help of the public in a distributed project to scan photographs to identify which sections of their capture area contain dust particles. This would have been a great use of the Mturk system, but they have no need to pay since I'm sure they'll get enough volunteers to easily finish off the 30,000 man hours required to go through the dataset four times.