It might sound strange, but I find certain kinds of survey type simple tasks incredibly relaxing and some of the HITs clearly connect to what seems to be interesting research.
Pretty much everything the author says here is spot-on and has been for a long time.
MTurk is positively flooded with HITs for generating fake reviews for products and fake content for websites. The best paying HITs by far are translation tasks - transcribing Arabic and Farsi seems to pay the best ($0.30 or more per minute of transcription).
I aim for academic projects with preference for things which require qualification (simple math / reading comprehension tests usually) as they generally pay quite a bit more.
I've earned an average of $0.27 per HIT and have never had one rejected.
Some of the more interesting / unusual tasks I've seen:
* Pinpoint various joints (shoulder, elbow, knee) in each frame of a clip showing a baseball player swinging a bat.
* Drop a pin on an estimate map location based on scenery shown in a short video clip (This was long before MapCrunch/GeoGuessr).
* Manipulate the camera in a scene of flat-shaded objects to bring them into 'correct' perspective.
* Choose 'preferred' structure designs (little houses) which appear to have been created by some sort of genetic algorithm.
I get distracted by categorization jobs, like look at this blueprint and if there is a blueprint number in the title box, enter it. Well, I end up admiring the print. Oh look a giant gear for some kind of mining thing. Why, what an interesting looking architectural drawing.
Similar thing happens with categorize document numbers. Apparently some municipality decided to turn millions of paper scanned pages of contract bids into piles sorted by contract, so I'd end up sitting there reading all about bids to put in some drainage culvert. Who would ever have guessed theres so many steps and processes and backfill and compaction are critical and theres so many inspectors... I mean you can half A a drainage culvert in like one paragraph but if you want it done right its 50 pages of PDF.
These jobs are probably impossible without an excellent short term memory or dual (or more) monitors.
The ones that annoyed me the most were "leave blank if no number" so I'd scour the document for what seemed like forever just to make sure. Inevitably leading me to becoming fascinated by drainage culvert design.
Its very D+D like. Whats behind this dungeon door? Oh, I see, a blueprint of a giant gear from some mining equipment. Fascinating. Like archeology but I'm getting paid for it. Well, not much pay.
It might sound strange, but I find certain kinds of survey type simple tasks incredibly relaxing and some of the HITs clearly connect to what seems to be interesting research.
Pretty much everything the author says here is spot-on and has been for a long time.
MTurk is positively flooded with HITs for generating fake reviews for products and fake content for websites. The best paying HITs by far are translation tasks - transcribing Arabic and Farsi seems to pay the best ($0.30 or more per minute of transcription).
I aim for academic projects with preference for things which require qualification (simple math / reading comprehension tests usually) as they generally pay quite a bit more.
I've earned an average of $0.27 per HIT and have never had one rejected.
Some of the more interesting / unusual tasks I've seen:
* Pinpoint various joints (shoulder, elbow, knee) in each frame of a clip showing a baseball player swinging a bat.
* Drop a pin on an estimate map location based on scenery shown in a short video clip (This was long before MapCrunch/GeoGuessr).
* Manipulate the camera in a scene of flat-shaded objects to bring them into 'correct' perspective.
* Choose 'preferred' structure designs (little houses) which appear to have been created by some sort of genetic algorithm.