Have you made interesting use of Mechanical Turk?

Question

I would like to hear about interesting projects which made use of Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

Answer 1

I haven't done anything with it yet but I've been meaning to use it for music search by having an app that accepted recordings of people humming or singing a tune and then using the Turk to identify the tune.

Answer 2

It was used to help search for James Gray when he went missing.

Answer 3

We've used it to approve images that apply to a business. Not terribly interesting, but found it pretty useful in this regard. The tasks were completed very quickly.

Answer 4

There are two works by Aaron Koblin that spring to mind:

• The Sheep Market - Workers were paid to draw pictures of sheep facing left.
• Ten Thousand Cents - Workers were paid to copy a tiny fraction of a larger image.

Answer 5

Halosys: We used Mechanical Turk for some of the customer projects we developed.

This is one of the things that we suggest to our customers when they are ready to launch but need data. Specially interesting were projects like filling in the content for a few caricatures and then showing that on the customer site.

Answer 6

My favorite example of Mechanical Turk in action is one where workers had to extract data from figures and tables in scientific literature. There's a good description and vidoe of the experiment here:

http://usefulchem.blogspot.com/2008/12/mechanical-turk-does-solubility-on.html

Answer 7

Andy Baio of waxy.org has done a few interesting things with it:

• Cheap, easy audio transcription
• Figuring out the hundreds of samples in Girl Talk's "Illegal Art" album
• The faces of Mechanical Turk

Answer 8

Found today: using MTurk to conduct scientific research.

Answer 9

With some colleagues I've been running a lot of behavioral experiments on Mturk exploring altruism and cooperation. Even though Mturk is the ultimate in anonymous and profit-minded settings, we still find high levels of people paying costs to help others.

For a writeup, check out this paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1591202

The Online Laboratory: Conducting Experiments in a Real Labor Market

John J. Horton, David G. Rand, Richard J. Zeckhauser

Harvard University

Abstract:
Online labor markets have great potential as platforms for conducting experiments, as they provide immediate access to a large and diverse subject pool and allow researchers to conduct randomized controlled trials. We argue that online experiments can be just as valid – both internally and externally – as laboratory and field experiments, while requiring far less money and time to design and to conduct. In this paper, we first describe the benefits of conducting experiments in online labor markets; we then use one such market to replicate three classic experiments and confirm their results. We confirm that subjects (1) reverse decisions in response to how a decision-problem is framed, (2) have pro-social preferences (value payoffs to others positively), and (3) respond to priming by altering their choices. We also conduct a labor supply field experiment in which we confirm that workers have upward sloping labor supply curves. In addition to reporting these results, we discuss the unique threats to validity in an online setting and propose methods for coping with these threats. We also discuss the external validity of results from online domains and explain why online results can have external validity equal to or even better than that of traditional methods, depending on the research question. We conclude with our views on the potential role that online experiments can play within the social sciences, and then recommend software development priorities and best practices.

Answer 10

www.nearlyeveryone.com is built on top of Mechanical Turk