Mechanical Turk used to prevent time sheet fraud
I love Mechanical Turk. We used it at my agency where we were having a big problem with time clock fraud (a.k.a. people were asking their friends to punch them out and then leaving hours early)So I built a very simple add on to our timeclock (which is essentially an ELO touch screen and a PC) and had it use a web cam to take a picture of each person punching. Then we created a program that showed turk users a person’s badge picture and then the picture taken at the punch and asked “Is this the same person?” (with answers of Yes/No/Maybe) Doing that virtually eliminated the problem overnight.
I agree with the author that M.T. won’t completely change the market. But what it will do is allow people to monitize their spare seconds and in doing so make a lot of the “no-brainer” grunt work that companies have to do a lot cheaper
This is a fascinating way to use Mechanical Turk. See my take on using it for research.