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Making progress, one word at a time...
Feb. 12th, 2007 08:47 pmI just finished the first pass through the item due to the new client tomorrow. It weighs in at about 6,000 words, which means I did about 2/3 of the work today. (Of course, there still remains the task of making sure all the words are in the right order and correspond - more or less - to the sentences in the original document, but those are mere... details. I, on the other hand, am an idea person... a "big picture" kinda guy, but I digress...)
* * * A few days ago, I got involved with the Amazon Mechanical Turk to help scan satellite images for traces of Jim Gray's boat, which disappeared two weeks ago near San Francisco. I didn't find anything, but did get an opportunity to get acquainted with the kinds of things people set up to get done on the Turk.
The idea of the site is to enlist people to do drudge work, typically things that don't require much brainpower but so require intelligence beyond that of machines, such as clicking on traffic signs within an image. The pay offered is generally a pittance, but pittances add up and one could, conceivably, turn "down time" into, say, an iTune download by simply accepting enough "hits."
The site got its name from a mechanical device, in the shape of a Turk, that was touted as being able to play chess. Indeed, the device made the rounds of quite a few famous places in Europe, including a number of courts, where it played and beat a number of players. The device was lost in a fire a long time ago, but the smart money bets that the contraption was a masterfully constructed illusion staffed by a person of small stature. Artificial artificial intelligence, so to speak, which is the motto of the website.
What gets me is the kinds of things people expect to get done for almost no pay.
There are a lot of transcription jobs available, which pay about $1 for about 10 minutes of audio (with the possibility of earning twice that in addition for high-quality work). Assuming you do top-notch work, and that you work continuously, that works out to somewhere around $9 per hour, assuming you only have to spend 2 minutes to transcribe 1 minute of audio (a wildly optimistic estimate, based on my experience).
There is also one translation job up right now, to translate about 500 Japanese symbols for, um, $1. (I find that simply amazing. For that rate, the offeror better not have any high hopes for any kind of detailed translation, though I am pretty sure he'll be sore if he doesn't get one.) FWIW, the last time I checked freelance Japanese-to-English rates, that dollar would pay for translating about 5-7 symbols. Maybe.
Myself, I've earned a whole 30 cents so far by taking a survey. I feel like a big roller.
* * * Galina brought home one of her real estate associates for dinner. We had a pleasant enough dinner, but then they started to talk real estate and my eyes glazed over. A good thing, too, as I needed to complete 192 words to finish the job that's waiting for me.
Cheers...
The idea of the site is to enlist people to do drudge work, typically things that don't require much brainpower but so require intelligence beyond that of machines, such as clicking on traffic signs within an image. The pay offered is generally a pittance, but pittances add up and one could, conceivably, turn "down time" into, say, an iTune download by simply accepting enough "hits."
The site got its name from a mechanical device, in the shape of a Turk, that was touted as being able to play chess. Indeed, the device made the rounds of quite a few famous places in Europe, including a number of courts, where it played and beat a number of players. The device was lost in a fire a long time ago, but the smart money bets that the contraption was a masterfully constructed illusion staffed by a person of small stature. Artificial artificial intelligence, so to speak, which is the motto of the website.
What gets me is the kinds of things people expect to get done for almost no pay.
There are a lot of transcription jobs available, which pay about $1 for about 10 minutes of audio (with the possibility of earning twice that in addition for high-quality work). Assuming you do top-notch work, and that you work continuously, that works out to somewhere around $9 per hour, assuming you only have to spend 2 minutes to transcribe 1 minute of audio (a wildly optimistic estimate, based on my experience).
There is also one translation job up right now, to translate about 500 Japanese symbols for, um, $1. (I find that simply amazing. For that rate, the offeror better not have any high hopes for any kind of detailed translation, though I am pretty sure he'll be sore if he doesn't get one.) FWIW, the last time I checked freelance Japanese-to-English rates, that dollar would pay for translating about 5-7 symbols. Maybe.
Myself, I've earned a whole 30 cents so far by taking a survey. I feel like a big roller.
Cheers...
