Mechanical Turk; The New Paper Boy

Back when my dad was a kid, his folks didn't have much money, and he had no allowance. When he wanted to buy something, he went out and got a paper route- a fairly common cliche, but also one that no longer roots itself in reality; Kids don't deliver papers anymore. I don't want to delve too deep into the reasons why, but it's evident that parents aren't letting their kid do a route around the neighbourhood at six o'clock AM unsupervised.

TL;DR
Times have changed, and it's uncommon for kids to deliver papers.

So what do the kids of today do to earn a little bit of disposable income?

Well, i have two words for you. Mechanical Turk.

For those of us who don't know what I'm alluding to, on November 2, 2005, Amazon released a service they call the Amazon Mechanical Turk into beta. The service is described as a "marketplace for work," and to qualify to be an employee all you need is a typical human intelligence; The inherent ability to perform tasks that are suited for humans. More specifically, tasks that computers are currently unable to do.

Some example tasks:

• choosing the best among several photographs of a product
• writing product descriptions
• identifying performers on music CDs

While the wage of an average 'Turker' is low when compared to Canada's hourly minimum, these tasks can be be done on the employee's own time- and on their own terms. This particular cocktail of a job is perfectly suited for a kid; The job description is inherently something that any human can do, and the low wage is perfect for teaching the value of a dollar. The job dangers are less than handing out papers on the street, and all you need to do the job is an Internet connection!

So is the future of teaching our kids the value of a dollar rooted in outsourcing problems that computers can't do? It's hard to say for sure, but I wouldn't count it out.

 Finally, I want to point out this map/mash-up of all the 'Turkers' out there!


Sources

1. https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk#Missing_persons_searches
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquitous_Human_Computing
4. http://techlist.com/mturk/global-mturk-worker-map.php
5. http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2010/12/mechanical-turk-now-with-4092-spam.html

Music for Today’s Fast Pace

Learning a musical instrument is easier today than it has ever been in the past. It’s a fact. Anyone can walk into Walmart, pick up a nice guitar that they like within the price range of $50-100, and go home and start learning it. Before Youtube was around you would’ve needed to take lessons (which cost upwards of $15 per hour)- but today you can hop online and instantly have access to literally hundreds of thousands of tutorials and lessons. But this isn’t true for only guitar, this is true for any instrument you can imagine, and even the one’s that you couldn’t have  imagined!

Learning music is just one more thing that is following the trends of our fast paced society, not to mention the countless number of apps that exist for learning music. But is there a tradeoff? I would argue that people are less likely to be exposed to learning music theory, but that doesn’t mean that theory is dieing out. Take for example, the way people use grammar and spelling in society today. Now that we have spellcheck, people can get away with not knowing how to spell as well; in a similar way, people can get away without knowing much theory of music.

A newly developed product called the gTar is using some interesting hardware to combine teaching and technology; this product speaks for itself, and makes a convincing argument about whether it is becoming easier to learn music in today’s society. The hardware has a slot for you to connect your iPhone, and uses an app on your phone to light-up the correct finger positions to play the song you’ve selected.

I think as technology develops, ideas and innovations like the gTar will only continue to prosper. After all, people who love music also love to teach and share.

sources:

1. http://www.designboom.com/weblog/images/images_2/2011/jenny/gtar/gtar01.jpg (image)
2. http://www.incidentgtar.com/

The Real Price of Incoming txt mgs

Everyone knows that the rates for Canadian cellphone plans are too high. I heard a case on the radio this morning about Canadians going to the US and getting a cell plan under a completely fictitious address - solely because it's cheaper than dealing with our rates. If you don't believe me about how absurd these rates are, just take a look at this article (printed in '09) which claims that Canada has the highest cellphone rates among all the developed nations.

While I strongly believe our rates are inflated based on a market oligopoly, i wanted to touch on another idea in this post; I've been playing around with this concept for a little while, and I've titled it a "txt-attack." In essence, If you pay for incoming texts, than anyone can bankrupt you. Let's talk hypothetically, so i can try to explain what i mean:

Suppose that 'Steve' pays $0.50 per incoming text message,

Now suppose that I don't really like Steve too much- maybe he smells bad or something. All I need is Steve's phone number, and an Internet connection, and I can put him in the red.

"How," you ask? Well, there are hundreds of websites which provide free online-to-mobile txting services. Take ohdontforget for example (check it out, it's a pretty neat app!)

So all i need to do to hurt Steve is to write a script that uses one of these applications to send him txts. Let's say my script sends him ten message every minute- after an hour he will have received 600 messages, and he owes the phone company $300.

Nowadays, it's pretty uncommon for anyone to have to pay for incoming texts; This is simply because it's not fair to have to pay for something out of your control. It's fair to say that these "txt-attacks" are nonexistent, but there was a time when paying for incoming texts was predicted to be adopted by all the major phone companies [3].

 While this is no longer the case, it still makes for an interesting scenario to think about.



Sources:

1. http://mashable.com/2008/04/19/send-text-messages/
2. http://ohdontforget.com/
3. http://www.canada.com/topics/technology/story.html?id=be40f524-80e1-4948-970b-80959623d4ad

Hello World!