
10,000 Mechanical Turkers work separately to draw a 100 dollar bill. - shafqat
http://www.tenthousandcents.com/index.html
======
boredguy8
You can certainly see who the lazies are. Especially prominent: the "H" in
"THIS", the "LE" in "LEGAL", part of the crest, and part of the seal.

Guess the Mechanical Turk isn't good for, say, important data entry (without a
system to set up cross-checks).

Pretty cool, though.

~~~
serhei
If you scroll down you can see that some people drew completely unrelated
things. One guy doodled a stick figure. Another wrote "$0.01!! REALLY?!" The
last guy did the drawing, then wrote "i hate u" over top.

~~~
shafqat
That kind of stuff is pretty rare. Turkers are pretty hard-working/honest
people on the whole I guess out of 10,000 maybe 10-20 screwed around. That's
less than .2%.

~~~
timr
They're certainly harder working than I'd be, given the amount of effort for
the return.

------
floozyspeak
I think its funny that folks feel this stuff is so baffling. It think what's
causing this alarming "HEY" in people is the price. Understandable really, who
the hell wants to do anything for .02 cents. Yet, again, we got blinders on.
That's not .02 cents an hour, time really isn't defined, either is real
effort, or care and quality of effort.

We just jump to the obvious answer in our heads without thinking about why,
why WOULD someone do this. Why do people participate in social media? Why does
the average teen check their myspace page 17 times a day? Who's getting paid
to make 2.0 such an interesting place, well we sure aren't. Yet in turk land,
the name of the game isn't to wake up and get excited about doing a .02 cent
task. Its how fast can I do that so it doesn't feel like I did a .02 cent
task. I'm bored, watching tv, why not make a few cents. Crazy, I know, yet,
again, hello people are doing it.

Then we jump into the next assumption, well most of these folks have to be
indian or chinese. Gold farmers sleeping in cots, that's it, thats gotta be
it. Feel better? Wrong, 80% of these turks are not chinese gold farmers. They
average joes here in the states buying milk and bacon just like you do.
SHOCKING!

The sad thing is we hone in on all the .02 cent stories in turk, and yes there
are plenty of them. But most turks I believe endure that cent crap to get to
bigger fish. The "it took me less than 30 seconds for a buck" HITS, and I did
50 of those today. Now the money isn't so bad.

For people requesting the work, paying some 2 cents is a great way to get crap
data, good luck with that. Course at a large volume of stuff, maybe you don't
care, but in general turks don't do 2 cent tasks for 2 cents, they do it cause
they are bored, multi-tasking, its interesting or fun- drawing 100 bill rather
interesting, or cause its fast as hell to do.

------
andreyf
What kind of people think of stuff like this?

Or more precisely - what kind of people think of stuff like this, sober up,
and then actually implement it?

~~~
alex_c
People who eventually end up doing something meaningful, because they're not
afraid to try.

~~~
timr
"Afraid" is not even close to the right word for this context.

When I consider something like this, I don't think: _"Oh, that's scary and/or
challenging!"_ Instead, I think: _"given all other possible uses of my time,
is this one the best use possible?"_ Usually, the answer is no.

For me, if there's any "meaning" in this project, it's in divining why someone
would choose to begin (or participate in) this in the first place.

~~~
alex_c
If the question is _"given all other possible uses of my time, is this one the
best use possible?"_ , then the answer will be "no" for almost any given value
of "this". A likely result is doing nothing while one waits for the "perfect"
thing to do - it might not apply as much to people on news.yc, but this does
describe many people I know.

If the question is _"given all the ideas I have right now, and considering the
effort to implement each, should I work on this?"_ , the answer might be
different.

~~~
SCVirus
In fact, it is impossible to determine the best possible use of your time
without determining, without doubt, the meaning of life.

------
sdfx
What really baffles me is the number of people that start out with the
foreground and then destroy most of their work by slowly filling in the
background. No wonder that it took them 5 month. Great project though and a
nice demonstration of what can be done with mechanical turk.

------
felipe
With a single print ($100) they recovered the costs of the entire labor ($100,
or 10,000 cents). This is a great metaphor of our modern production chain,
isn't it? (i. e.: How production exploits cheap labor)

~~~
kirse
What metaphor would we use to explain the guy who did this on our production
line?

<http://imagesocket.com/view/lol100b69.PNG>

~~~
iigs
[http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2088/2881/320/Herman,%20D...](http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2088/2881/320/Herman,%20David.jpg)
<\---

------
jkent
Isn't it illegal to sell life-sized colour prints of a $100 bill? Quality
aside...

~~~
graywh
This is only the front. You check the backs of your US bills, don't you?

~~~
Agathos
One-sidedness is one of the legal requirements, but it's not the only one.

<http://www.ustreas.gov/usss/money_illustrations.shtml>

------
astine
I've always been a little confused... Who's time is worth so little that
they'd actually see a single cent worth doing one of these drawings? Kids?
Third world laborers?

I can see kids doing this, though I doubt that many would have access to the
accounts and bank information necessary. As per third worlders: if a person's
situation were such that a cent per minute was a reasonable wage, how could
they afford a computer and an Internet connection? I'm imagining vast Chinese
sweatshops with workers making .5 on the cent.

Is my analysis wrong here?

~~~
floozyspeak
A classic and popular misconception that "no one in their right mind would do
this", yet they do. The time for effort formula trips up a lot of people, your
not the first one come up with this analysis.

The problem you have is the lens you're looking through. No one paid you to
post here, no one paid you to participate in a social network, watch a youtube
video, let alone make a blog, yet a whole heck of alot of the folks on the
planet do it.

People need to stop looking at turk through the "job" lens because it will
never ever make sense. But if you look at it through the multitasking, social
media, bored outa my gord, what the hell, yearning to participate in
something, be apart of something, advisory and authority lens it makes much
more sense.

Meanwhile, read up on turks, get to know their behaviors and find out the why
behind their actions.

[http://www.floozyspeak.com/blog/archives/2008/08/valley_of_t...](http://www.floozyspeak.com/blog/archives/2008/08/valley_of_the_t.html)

Don't take my word for it, go ask them yourself, make HIT, put it up there and
see for yourself. But take the traditional "this is a job" lens off cause that
is a classic misguided view of mechanical turk.

~~~
Retric
I think you overestimate the value of most of the worlds workers.

Let's say revenue is 1cent an minute for 40 hours a week and 48 weeks a year.
That's 9,216$ / year. Split the cost of a low cost energy efficient PC 300$,
electricity ~100$, and internet 400$/year, over 1 year. And your left with
~8416$ which works out to ~700$ a month. In 2004 a southern China factory job
would pay about $120 a month for long hours and often dangerous conditions.
There are more than 4 billion people who gladly take that job but most of them
don't have the skills to do so.

PS: If you think my numbers are a little off 8000$/year places someone in the
top ~15% of the worlds income earners. (<http://www.globalrichlist.com/>)

~~~
Retric
Ops, I knew that number looked to large. I multiplied by an extra 8. Anyway,
lot's of people live off of less than 1cent an min of work, but you would need
to significantly cut down the PC and internet cost's to make it work out.
Anyway, it can still work for a surprising number of people as 1k/year still
put's you into the top 1/2 of the worlds workers.

~~~
huherto
A person that makes 1k/year will hardly be able to buy a PC.

That person will probably not know how to use a computer, read or understand
English.

~~~
Retric
True, but I think this is what the 1 laptop per child concept is all about. US
minimum wage is 6.25/hour in other economies over a billion people would be
happy with 1-2% of that. The trick is finding something useful for them to do
and handing them the tools to do so. Anyway, I expect the cost of outsourcing
low end jobs is only going to go down as digital work becomes more common.

PS: My point is mostly about what constitutes a "living wage" in most of the
world and has little to do with Amazon Mechanical Turk as it exists right now.
I expect most people using Turk are making a lot more than 1cent / min of work
or are just doing it as a hobby where the cash value is almost zero incentive.

------
colortone
this is the same idea as the 10,000 sheep art project, done by the same guy,
aaron koblin

whee

------
jacobbijani
This isn't exactly new. It was also one of the first projects like this done
with Turk (ie, an art project and not just menial data entry).

