Sheep Market Thesis
Aaron Koblin, developer of The Sheep Market, has published his thesis as a Word document: The Sheep Market: Two Cents Worth. It is fun to read, with some very far-ranging references and some entertaining diversions. It is interesting to read about Aaron's hesitancy to be just a cog in a machine, then to see him use the Mechanical Turk to actually rotoscope a movie frame illustrating Charlie Chaplin as just such a cog, and finally to the use of the Turk to get 10,000 people to draw a sheep. I didn't know that some of the Turkers had actually taken issue with Aaron's decision to offer the sheep for sale.
After having given many, many AWS presentations in the last 4 years, I do have to say that The Sheep Market is one of those applications which always gets people to pay attention. The productivity factor of "11 sheep per hour" always gets a good laugh from the audience.
-- Jeff;
The Luntz effect at Irish Election said,
Wrote on December 10, 2006 @ 6:39 pm
[…] I can offer a more entertaining and alternative suggestion for RTÉ which is based on the work of Aaron Koblin and his Sheep Market experiment on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (this is a system which gets people to do small human intelligence tasks for a little sum of money, cents normally). The Sheep Market asked people to draw sheep and upload them, approximately 10,000 sheep were accepted, arranged on his site and then offered for sale. It has already been seen as an exemplar system with Jeff Barr stating “Today it is sheep, but it could just as easily be choices of color combinations for car interiors, evaluation of some logos for your business, selection of most important features when choosing a vacation spot, and so forth.” […]