A Hong Kong Mechanical Turk Addict

HITs running out at breakneck speed

hkturker — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 16:31:54 +0000

Today is not a turking day either. HITs are running out so fast I doubt if I could grab any of them without the help of the script. But even with its help, I’ve only been able to grab 40 IA HITs so far but at least all HITs got cleared immediately.

HIT status summary – 802 submitted and USD18.04 earned so far. Not that bad after all, given that I’ve only spent a few hours doing it while surfing other blogs at the same time.

Well, let’s see how things go for the rest of the night…

Script makes things easier turking

hkturker — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 12:12:10 +0000

At the beginning, I refused to use any sort of scripts to help me complete the tasks on Mechanical Turk. But the more I turked the more annoying it has became (clicking “accept HIT”, scrolling down the page to view all the photos, clicking on the radio button and then clicking “submit HIT” and so on…). So I’ve decided to install the script provided by CThomas.

To run this script, you need to be on FireFox 1.5 which can be downloaded from here.

After installing FireFox, install Greasemonkey 0.6.3 which can be found here.

Installing Greasemonkey is easy. Just download it from the link and choose “save as”, save the file to anywhere you want, as long as it’s a location you’ll remember later. After you’ve saved the file, drag it onto a FireFox browser window (or use the “open with” FireFox option) and it will install itself the next time you open FireFox.

Once you’ve both FireFox and Greasemonkey installed, go grab the newest IA (Image Adjustment) script here. When you’re on that page, just move your mouse over to the “Install this Script” link on the upper right corner. Right click on the link and choose “Install this script / Install user script” and you’re done.

To read more about this script, check out this post on Turker Nation and the script description on UserScripts.org.

Still no HITs on Mechanical Turk…

hkturker — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 11:48:36 +0000

Sucks… waited one whole night and day (it’s almost 20:00 in Hong Kong), still no HITs available except the CAN… Amazon ! Gimme more HITs !

Not able to do available HITs

hkturker — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 17:50:36 +0000

Another problem, again, is it just me?

It usually happens to me when a group of IA tasks has less than 500 HITs left. When I click on the “view a HIT in this group” link, it would say that there is no HITs available for me in that group. But I’m so sure there ARE available HITs coz when I refresh (and refresh and refresh) and click “HITs available to you” again, the HITs are still there !

What could be wrong here? Could it be my cache problem? Thoughts, anyone?

Mechanical Turk back online, but not the HIT status

hkturker — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 17:45:27 +0000

Hmmm…..

Mechanical Turk site down

hkturker — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 16:22:13 +0000

Well, sort of. HITs are not available, nor the dashboard information. Hope it gets back online soon

Beverly Hills HITs running out…

hkturker — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 14:58:48 +0000

I was lucky enough to have grabbed a dozen of Beverly Hills IA HITs before they all ran out. I’ve only done about 160 HITs today, not a turking day for me I guess…

Error message on Mechanical Turk

hkturker — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 12:06:54 +0000

Is it just me or is someone else also getting this error message every now and then?

Your request was not completed successfully.

Please try it again. If you continue to receive this message, please try your request again later.

It usually happens when I click a “submit HIT” button after finishing with a HIT. I never realized that when it does happen, the HIT that I’m working on will be stored in the “HITs assigned to you” section… I missed 8 HITs just because of this! When I got the error message I thought it was something about the system and there was nothing I could do… apparently I was mistaken…

So now whenever I see an error message I go resubmit my HITs in the “HITs assigned to you” section, just to make sure no effort is wasted.

Interested in Anaheim and Baltimore IA tasks, anyone?

hkturker — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 11:18:46 +0000

I’ve been checking the available HITs every few minutes and Amazon’s been adding more HITs to the “Anaheim, CA” and “Baltimore, MD” IA groups. If you’re interested in doing IA for those areas, now is the time!

HIT status – 323 approved

hkturker — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 11:12:48 +0000

Just checked again. Looks like Amazon (or the Requesters) is working hard clearing the pending HITs now. I just got 323 HITs approved, which leaves about 160+ HITs pending.

Can’t wait

Music – Confirm Artist Name

hkturker — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 11:04:47 +0000

I’ve been doing IA (Image Adjustment) HITs ever since I started turking, since those were the only HITs available to me. This afternoon the CAN (Confirm Artist Name) HITs started appearing, but I was busy doing the very limited IA HITs left available so I didn’t try it.

But like I said in the previous post, IA HITs were so running out, so when I went back to check my dashboard a few minutes earlier, I decided to give CAN a try.

Well, it turned out to be exactly what I thought – boring and not worth the time.

First all, being a Hongkie who isn’t a big fan of music, most of the albums they showed me were like aliens, foreign and never heard of. Although they do provide a list of possible artist names, it’s just so time-consuming to go through them all and then copy and paste the right one into the answer box. It sure would be more convenient if they provide radio buttons instead of text box.

Then, like I said, I’m not all that into music, so looking at those old albums is an unbelievably boring task for me. It would be impossible to stick to those tasks for more than a few minutes. Btw, some albums don’t even have an image, all you get to hang on to is the album title, wouldn’t it be easier for Amazon to just google the album title and get the artist name in the search results?

Lastly, even if I could bear the boringness and time-consumingness of those CAN tasks, those tasks only worth USD0.02 which is USD0.01 less than the IA tasks!

I wish there were more interesting tasks, but for now, I’m sticking to IA for sure.

So little HITs left…

hkturker — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 09:15:28 +0000

So I’ve just spent about 30 minutes turking. I learned one thing today, which is NOT TO turk during day time in Hong Kong, especially on a Sunday. There are sooooo little HITs left, and the only available HITs are in remote areas – I was just working on Wilmington, NC, and it was driving me nuts. All the shops are so small are far away from the main road there is no way to tell if it’s the right place, unless they have a hugh sign above the shop – which they usually don’t.

I guess loads of people in the states are spending their Saturday night turking, so I’ll just have to wait till tonight… hopefully I’ll get 2000+ HITs in Beverly Hills (my fav area so far) like I did last night.

Amazon Mechanical Turk server crawling…

hkturker — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 07:24:21 +0000

Gees… the Mechanical Turk server is at crawling speed…. the Amazon server seems fine though… hope it gets fixed soon…

Still 460 HITs pending…

hkturker — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 07:16:24 +0000

Just checked my dashboard, 50+ HITs got approved overnight but there are still 400+ pending…

Gonna grab some lunch and start turking soon !

My goal is to make USD200.00 a day turking

hkturker — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 21:40:10 +0000

Oh yeah, forgot to mention, astrid over at Turker Nation is making over USD200.00 a DAY! Nice innit? Well I have a goal to work toward to from now on…

1st day turking

hkturker — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 21:22:04 +0000

I read about the Amazon Mechanical Turk when it first came out, but never got the chance to try it as I’ve been busy working on other things.

Who would have guessed that in just 3 short weeks (the service was introduced on Nov 2nd), the WHOLE WORLD is blogging about it and thus I came across the site again.

To be honest, USD0.03 doesn’t look very attractive to me, but since I’ve got time to kill anyway I sat down and played with it. Not long after did I get kinda addicted… It’s pretty much like playing photo hunt and it feels good when the money I’ve earned keeps adding up almost immediately.

I spent about 3 hours turking on and off and submitted about some 500 HITs. The money stopped adding up a while later, probably coz the server (or the people?) got busy when users in the states start turking…

Anyway it’s almost 6am now and I better off to bed. Will post updates when I get to turk tomorrow.