Dumb

Article Headline: "Freddie Mac Economist sees 50 percent chance of US recession"

http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssFinancialServicesAndRealEstateNews/idUSL2766221720080227

my computer got so mad at the uselessness of this prediction that safari went insane. started eating up 96% of the cpu continuously. poor guy really worked himself into a state!

MTurkin'

So I've been interested in Amazon's Mechanical Turk for a while now. For those of you not in the know, the Mechanical Turk is a service provided by Amazon that creates a market place which allows Requester to post tasks that (putatively) require human intelligence to be completed. Then other users can complete the tasks, and be paid a small fee. It's an interesting platform, and I don't see a lot people talking about it.

Basically there are three main issues about it that interest me. First of all, it is a worldwide market, any one can accept these tasks. How do we ensure that the renumeration is fair? The second is still a little convoluted in my brain. These are tasks which are purported to require human intelligence to be completed. But it seems as if spamming is kind of a problem. It makes perfect sense. I think for now that it's pretty low level stuff, but I imagine it will get more sophisticated. As it does, this starts to get into Turing Test issues. As exploiters figure out ways to automate specific solutions to problems that were previously only do able by humans.

I'm gonna do a few posts about this. I'm planning on trying out being a completer and requester of Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs). I've got an idea for a nice tiny project that could use a little human intelligence (finding a character in comic panels). So hey, we'll see what happens.

Cool weekend

Hey. Took a little trip down to DE. Had some cool conversations about creativity and starting big/interesting projects. It's pretty cool how people are sort of independently stumbling down similar pathway, each of us is accidentally discovering huge pockets of insight, and only later do we learn that our friends are thinking similarly. Maybe we need to let ideas gestate in the back of our heads for a few months before we feel comfortable talking about them.

New plans for a little series of post, probly would fit better in a seperate post.

Slackin

Working non-work and non-work working. I'd say the first is not working but spending a lot of time thinking/fretting about work, while the second is working in such a mode that it doesn't feel like work. I guess there's also working work and non-working non-work. Kinda makes a little square.

I spend a lot of time in the working non-work region. I'd love to be able to hop over to the non-work working region. So I read some of the wildly popular productivity blogs. I'm not sure how much they help. But they're better than nothing.

Here's a few of them
http://zenhabits.net/
http://lifehacker.com/
http://stevepavlina.com/

steve is a little .. extreme. sorta like Pat from Achewood, but with more of a sense of humor.