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Weiye Loh

Paris Review - The Grandmaster Hoax, Lincoln Michel - 0 views

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Turing Test Mechanical Turk Chess Machine Artificial Intelligence

shared by Weiye Loh on 28 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • The Turk was a hoax, although he was incorrect about the workings of the trick. Rather than a man hidden inside the wooden body, the seemingly exposed innards of the cabinet did not extend all the way back. A hidden grandmaster slid around when the cabinet doors were opened and closed. The concealed grandmaster controlled The Turk’s movements and followed the game’s action through a clever arrangement of magnets and strings.
Weiye Loh

Minds for Sale: Jonathan Zittrain explores the rise of Cloud Labor at theory.isthereason - 1 views

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Digital Labor

shared by Weiye Loh on 03 Dec 09 - Cached
  • In his hour long presentation, he discusses… 2:05 Ubiquitous Human Computing or “Minds for Sale” 2:32 The Tween Bot 4:14 Crowdsourcing “The Future of the Internet” 7:36 A tour of the Ubiquitous Human Computing pyramid 8:37 Example 1: The X-Prize 10:24 Example 2: Innocentive 12:08 Example 3: LiveOps 15:43 Example 4: SamaSource 16:16 Example 5: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk 20:13 Example 6: The ESP Game 22:47 Example 7: Human Computing for Electronic Design Automation 24:01 Example 8: Google 25:24 Why Should We be Pessimistic? 26:38 Child Labor on PBS 28:11 Laboring for a Devious Cause 29:23 US Border Webcams 30:05 Smart Drive 30:45 Internet Eyes 32:09 Identifying Protesters 33:21 A Speculative Example 35:05 Mechanical Turking your way to a Fake Reputation 39:36 Mechanical Turking your way to a Political Movement 41:20 Captchas Sweatshops 43:03 “Crowding Out” 44:41 The Future of Crowdsourcing and How to Stop It 47:14 Clickworkers of the World Unite! 50:45 Monetizing Kindness
Weiye Loh

The future of customer support: Outsourcing is so last year | The Economist - 0 views

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Mechanical Turk Crowd-Sourcing Crowd Curation Unsourcing Cloud Labor

shared by Weiye Loh on 12 May 12 - No Cached
  • Gartner, the research company, estimates that using communities to solve support issues can reduce costs by up to 50%. When TomTom, a maker of satellite-navigation systems, switched on social support, members handled 20,000 cases in its first two weeks and saved it around $150,000. Best Buy, an American gadget retailer, values its 600,000 users at $5m annually. 
  • Weiye Loh on 12 May 12
     
    "Unsourcing", as the new trend has been dubbed, involves companies setting up online communities to enable peer-to-peer support among users. Instead of speaking with a faceless person thousands of miles away, customers' problems are answered by individuals in the same country who have bought and used the same products. This happens either on the company's own website or on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and the helpers are generally not paid anything for their efforts.
Weiye Loh

The disintermediation of the firm: The feature belongs to individuals | A Computer Scie... - 0 views

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Mechanical Turk Programming Internet PhD Academia

shared by Weiye Loh on 31 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 31 Jul 12
     
    I expect to see the rise of individuals and the emergence of small teams to be an important trend in the next few years. The bigger firms will feel the increase pressure from agile teams of individuals that can operate faster and get things done quicker. Furthermore, talented individuals, knowing that they can find good job prospects online, they will start putting higher pressure on their employers: Either there is a more equitable share of the surplus, or the value-producing individuals will move into their own ventures. Marx would have been proud: The value-generating labor is now getting into the position of reaping the value of the generated work. Ironically, this "emancipation" is happening through the introduction of capitalist free markets that connect the planet, and not through a communist revolution.
Weiye Loh

Google's War on Nonsense - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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Search Engine Optimization Google Content Capitalism Advertising Crowd-Sourcing Mechanical Turk

shared by Weiye Loh on 28 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • As a verbal artifact, farmed content exhibits neither style nor substance.
  • The insultingly vacuous and frankly bizarre prose of the content farms — it seems ripped from Wikipedia and translated from the Romanian — cheapens all online information.
  • These prose-widgets are not hammered out by robots, surprisingly. But they are written by writers who work like robots. As recent accounts of life in these words-are-money mills make clear, some content-farm writers have deadlines as frequently as every 25 minutes. Others are expected to turn around reported pieces, containing interviews with several experts, in an hour. Some compose, edit, format and publish 10 articles in a single shift. Many with decades of experience in journalism work 70-hour weeks for salaries of $40,000 with no vacation time. The content farms have taken journalism hackwork to a whole new level.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • So who produces all this bulk jive? Business Insider, the business-news site, has provided a forum to a half dozen low-paid content farmers, especially several who work at AOL’s enormous Seed and Patch ventures. They describe exhausting and sometimes exploitative writing conditions. Oliver Miller, a journalist with an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence who once believed he’d write the Great American Novel, told me AOL paid him about $28,000 for writing 300,000 words about television, all based on fragments of shows he’d never seen, filed in half-hour intervals, on a graveyard shift that ran from 11 p.m. to 7 or 8 in the morning.
  • Mr. Miller’s job, as he made clear in an article last week in The Faster Times, an online newspaper, was to cram together words that someone’s research had suggested might be in demand on Google, position these strings as titles and headlines, embellish them with other inoffensive words and make the whole confection vaguely resemble an article. AOL would put “Rick Fox mustache” in a headline, betting that some number of people would put “Rick Fox mustache” into Google, and retrieve Mr. Miller’s article. Readers coming to AOL, expecting information, might discover a subliterate wasteland. But before bouncing out, they might watch a video clip with ads on it. Their visits would also register as page views, which AOL could then sell to advertisers.
  • commodify writing: you pay little or nothing to writers, and make readers pay a lot — in the form of their “eyeballs.” But readers get zero back, no useful content.
  • You can’t mess with Google forever. In February, the corporation concocted what it concocts best: an algorithm. The algorithm, called Panda, affects some 12 percent of searches, and it has — slowly and imperfectly — been improving things. Just a short time ago, the Web seemed ungovernable; bad content was driving out good. But Google asserted itself, and credit is due: Panda represents good cyber-governance. It has allowed Google to send untrustworthy, repetitive and unsatisfying content to the back of the class. No more A’s for cheaters.
  • the goal, according to Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts, who worked on Panda, is to “provide better rankings for high-quality sites — sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”
  • Google officially rolled out Panda 2.2. Put “Whitey Bulger” into Google, and where you might once have found dozens of content farms, today you get links to useful articles from sites ranging from The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, the F.B.I. and even Mashable, doing original analysis of how federal agents used social media to find Bulger. Last month, Demand Media, once the most notorious of the content farms, announced plans to improve quality by publishing more feature articles by hired writers, and fewer by “users” — code for unpaid freelancers. Amazing. Demand Media is stepping up its game.
  • Weiye Loh on 28 Jun 11
     
    Content farms, which have flourished on the Web in the past 18 months, are massive news sites that use headlines, keywords and other tricks to lure Web-users into looking at ads. These sites confound and embarrass Google by gaming its ranking system. As a business proposition, they once seemed exciting. Last year, The Economist admiringly described Associated Content and Demand Media as cleverly cynical operations that "aim to produce content at a price so low that even meager advertising revenue can support it."
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