When you experiment with Amazon's Mechanical Turk, it feels like magic. You toss 500 questions into the ether, and the answers instantly start rolling in from anonymous workers around the world. It was great for getting work done, but who are these people? I've seen the demographics, but that was too abstract for me.So Andy paid Turkers 50 cents to upload their photo of theirs with a handwritten note saying why they Turk. So here is how Turkers look like and why they Turk!Last week, I started a new Turk experiment to answer two questions: what do these people look like, and how much does it cost for someone to reveal their face?
Needless to say, this is already hanging outside of my office door. This picture is going into a slide in my Mechanical Turk talk, so that I can give a good answer to the question "Who are these people and why do they do it?"
(via Brendan O'Connor)