

Using Prosper and Mechanical Turk to figure out if people who are shifty look shifty  - jeremyliew
http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2009/03/19/using-prosper-and-mechanical-turk-to-figure-out-if-people-who-are-shifty-look-shifty/

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tdoggette
Okay, so 'shiftiness' is independent of appearance as measured other ways, but
what is it exactly? The next step is quantifying what cues people pick up on
that identify trustworthiness, and that's what I'm really interested in.

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ktharavaad
An excellent way to figure this out would be to apply some sort of machine
learning technique. Perhaps an Active-Appearance-Model or some other
statistical measure to mathematically represent the shape and texture of an
"untrustworthy" face as a lower dimensional vector. Then train classifier on
this data which can discriminate between "trustworthy" and
"untrustworthiness". Of course, there are going to be ethical concerns, but
this is definitely one interesting way of doing it.

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eli
This blog post adds virtually nothing over the original linked article:
[http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1...](http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13226709)

Otherwise, interesting.

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tkt
This sounds a bit like Bruce Schneier's comments on "hinky"
[http://books.google.com/books?id=wuNImmQufGsC&printsec=f...](http://books.google.com/books?id=wuNImmQufGsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=schneier#PPA133,M1)

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alexandros
Might this be a self-fulfilling prophecy? If the 'shifty' group were offered
higher interest rate, then this increases the probability that they will bail
on their loans, no?

