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June 21, 2006

Crowdsourcing: Amateurs work cheap; Looking for more R.I. blogs; Camel recipes

Many hands make cheap the work: The Rise of Crowdsourcing: "Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D."

If the language seems obscure... when I was a really little kid I wanted to run an elevator or pump gas when I grew up. (The elevator operator at right is a 1948 pin-up illustration by Gilette Elvgren.) Now everybody pumps gas and operates elevators.

This story begins with a freelance photographer whose $100 stock images were undercut by $1 images from iStockphoto:

iStockphoto, which grew out of a free image-sharing exchange used by a group of graphic designers, had undercut Harmel by more than 99 percent. How? By creating a marketplace for the work of amateur photographers – homemakers, students, engineers, dancers. There are now about 22,000 contributors to the site, which charges between $1 and $5 per basic image. (Very large, high-resolution pictures can cost up to $40.)

At the other end of this four-part story, there's a profile of an Amazon beta site called Mechanical Turk where Requesters make micropayments for tasks people do better than computers -- identifying which view best represents a storefront in a photo lineup of neighborhood businesses, for example.

When I explored the relatively few "jobs" (called HITS) visible here, most paying pennies, one caught my eye: A blogger paying for bloggers who link to and discuss one of his posts. He gets to decide if your effort is worth the 85 cents he's offering.

At Turk Nation, people discuss their experience. Here, I learned that you have to alphabetize that "All HITS" listing or the "1 2 3 4 next previous" links return pages with random hits. Can this be true? What sort of engine returns random, repetitive, incomplete results pages? That's what I experienced before I alphabetized.

This is one strange story.

Name those blogs: Thanks for the pointer to that last item go to blogger Marshall Votta (Things Worth Knowing). He notes unintended consequences to having chosen that name:

I intended to change the title of the site before… having company over. I might owe an apology to anyone who’s found me while searching for “things worth knowing”. As of this moment, this site is the #1 result on Google and the #5 result on Yahoo for that string, which means I’ve probably disappointed a few folks researching philosophy papers, and pleased a few more pursuing pretentious website titles.

We all look to search engines to discover something worth knowing, and here, inadvertently, without any aggressive SEO or other fanfare, I’ve created a top-ranked destination for a search on the very topic of what one ought to find. It wasn’t my original intention to hang around, but with this happy accident, maybe I will.

TWK also tells us that Pete's Bits "is home to Pete Gustin, the man who does much of the voiceover work and other comedy bits for WEEI. The man behind the curtain…"

It's time for me to update the Greater Rhode Island Blog list again. I'll start digging, but I'd appreciate it if you'd shoot me an email with the link of local blogs you know of that aren't already listed. Use the envelope icon below.

Ingenius: S.F. Chronicle profiles the puzzling mind of Will Shortz, editor of the New York Times crosswords. A fun read.

The most offended people ever got, though, was by a puzzle that ran on the day of the 1996 presidential election. Two of the answers were clued as "lead story in tomorrow's newspaper!" The second word was ELECTED, and the first word was seven letters. The crossword provoked something like a popular uprising. Shortz got dozens of phone calls. How dare the Times presume the winner of the election? Furious solvers called in accusing Shortz of being biased, presumptuous, wrong and worse.

The genius of the puzzle was that there were two possible answer sets. An entire section of the grid had bivalent answers. "Black Halloween animal" could be either CAT or BAT; "French 101 word" could be LUI or OUI; "provider of support, for short" could be IRA or BRA. And the answer to the clue about tomorrow's top story could be either BOB DOLE ELECTED or CLINTON ELECTED.

Bonus: The photo comes from Lisa Rein (On Lisa Rein's Radar), and links to Shortz on The Daily Show in 2003.

Exposed! Former Chinese Restaurant Employee Tells All: The Peng Da Restaurant in the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province. This goes way beyond cats, into toxic. This is just bait and switch, but it raised my eyebrow:

... One day in April 2000, a wholesaler brought over some camel humps. Rong asked the wholesaler to cook it and let the kitchen staff taste it. Everyone said it had good texture and told Rong to try it. Rong hesitated and took one bite. I saw Rong secretly spit the meat into the sink drain. From then on, the camel humps became a hot dish in the restaurant. Many customers came back repeatedly and ordered the dish. I liked the texture and snacked on the dish from time to time using the excuse of tasting for flavor. Rong smiled and asked if I really liked the camel hump dish. The question came out of nowhere. I was confused and asked her what was wrong. She chuckled, "Those so-called camel humps are in fact breasts from female pigs." I was quite shocked by what she said and did not believe her. Rong smiled and told me that the wholesaler had admitted it to her. She had been keeping it a secret all this time.

The next day while I was slicing the 'camel humps', I paid close attention to the dark red flesh and found several holes spread out evenly. If they were real camel humps, why were there holes in them? The holes must be what were left after the nipples were removed. The smell of sour milk hit me and then I totally believed what Rong had told me. A few days later, I confirmed it with the wholesaler and he admitted it. I had to admire the thought they put in it. If they called it female pig breast, who would dare eat it?...

San Francisco restaurant A16's pork breast gets a rave review...
Twice.

Yeah, I'd rather eat camel humps, wouldn't you?

The photo is from a page of images by a nameless traveler to Jordan.

Camel recipes: Camel Fillet with a Shiraz Butter Glaze.

And another pair, from an Australian chef in Australia, where they have a lot of wild camels. She praises it as low-fat, low-carb and low-GI. Scroll down this page to read her earnest endorsement, which ends with how to make Camel with Caramelized Onions and Casserole of Camel and Seasonal vegetables.

Art to wear out: brown dress:

a year-long performance project
365 days. one brown dress. a one-woman show against fashion.

The year ends July 7 in grand fashion.

Just asking: Crunch time for Planet Pluto BBC

At its conference this August, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) will make a decision that could see Pluto lose its status as a planet.

If the planet named for the god of war gets demoted, does the Big Neighborhood get more peaceful?

Related: Pluto's Newest Moons Named Hydra and Nix. They[re the "candidate satellites" in this Hubble Space Telescope image that discovered them.

Six years in the making: Jeff's Famous Pizza: A man perfects a clone of his favorite pizza parlor's product. (It must taste better than it looks.) He begins,

This pizza is modeled after Patsy's on 117th street in NYC. I have been working on this for SIX years, but FINALLY I can report that I have achieved my goal. Many people have tried my pie and swear it is not only the best pizza they've ever had, but a clone of the original Patsy's recipe. This pie is incredibly light and perfectly charred. It took just 2 minutes and 10 seconds to bake at 825F.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 4:16 AM | Permalink

Comments

Posted by: C.G. on June 22, 2006 4:09 PM

Posted by: Sheila on June 22, 2006 4:26 PM