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Comment 2
References:
Title: Who are the Crowdworkers? Shifting Demographics in Mechanical Turk
Authors: Joel Ross, Lilly Irani, M. Six Silberman, Andrew Zaldivar, and Bill Tomlinson
Venue: CHI EA 2010; April 10-15, 2010
Summary:
In this paper, the authors take a survey of a popular crowdsourcing service, Amazon Mechanical Turk, to determine who does these tasks and to see if the demographics of these people has changed. Amazon Mechanical Turk is a service in which companies may post simple tasks that are difficult for a computer to perform, for example transcribing an audio clip, tagging a picture, or taking a survey, and have people perform these tasks for an amount of money equal to the size of the task. The authors posted up a two minute survey with a payment of ten cents for users of the service that asked questions about the user's country of origin, education, sex, and income. What they discovered was that the service was becoming increasingly international, with India leading the way. Additionally, whereas females were more numerous on the service before, males were bridging the gap. Finally, they found out that a greater slice of users, especially international users, were using the service as a sort of full or part-time job. They then concluded by saying that because people are using this as a full-time job, HCI needs to do research into these services to make it easier for users to make money.Discussion:
I found this paper to be interesting because I had never heard of this concept of crowdsourcing. The fact that companies are giving out small tasks that computers cannot do is really cool, and the fact that people can make enough money off of it to live is equally interesting. However, I do have to agree with the authors of this paper -- if people are using this as a full-time job, research needs to be done to make sure that the users of sites such as Amazon Mechanical Turk are getting fairly paid.
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As I mentioned to Stuart, these individuals are considered independent contractors and if they reside in the US and make more than $600, they are supposed to pay 15% self employment tax, if they don't reside in the US they aren't subject to our tax laws and most likely make more. In the end, it should come out to be even. Besides, the conjecture people rely on HITS as income was made off the notion that internationals are more likely to accept lower rewarding HITS as well as higher ones.
ReplyDeleteI think this is a great tool to be used so that those looking for work can use this as income. However when using large crowds for research it can be tough to determine the accuracy of the research. The concept of using people to do these tasks is a great idea however and I think it could be used more.
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