Michael Ewens

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.

Dr Marti’s research team analysed 4,358 runners in the Bern Grand Prix, a 9.6-mile road race. All the runners filled out an extensive questionnaire that detailed their training habits and footwear for the previous year; as it turned out, 45 per cent had been hurt during that time. But what surprised Dr Marti was the fact that the most common variable among the casualties wasn’t training surface, running speed, weekly mileage or ‘competitive training motivation’.

It wasn’t even body weight or a history of previous injury. It was the price of the shoe. Runners in shoes that cost more than $95 were more than twice as likely to get hurt as runners in shoes that cost less than $40.

This has got to be a selection problem: the average person that purchases a really expensive running shoe is probably a poor runner that jumps into it too fast. They think that the shoe is the best way to get themselves in shape. Rather than picking a shoe based on feel and fit, they pick the most expensive one. These types of consumers and probably more likely to be runners that don’t train properly. The best runners that I know do not have the most expensive shoe on the rack; they have the shoe that feels the best.