Running instant psych experiments on Mechanical Turk (Joshua Schachter)

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Joshua Schachter (of del.icio.us fame) recently ran a simple study around expected value, and got about 2100 responses in an hour for the low low price of around $30 on Mechanical Turk -- enough to get some interesting results really in just one night, and be able to at least make some interesting observations about human decision making.

Mechanical Turk, for the uninitiated, is Amazon Web Services' offering for micro-payments for micro-work. The other main use for it, so I hear, is cracking captchas.

This may have potential to replace those annoying psych surveys that undergrad psych majors have to take over and over again. That's right, kids in Psych 1 may no longer be required to subject themselves to the myriad of strange and boring questionaires created by grad students trying to massage the data into something statistically significant. I love the Internets.

Seen on Hacker News

Steinski spins Blackalicious's Swan Lake (Beat Poets Mix)

Steinski was one of the original turntablist DJ's-- a great influence on my favorite turntablist DJ Shadow. This is a track off of Steinski's first and only official retrospective, "What Does It All Mean?" -- what can I say, I'm a sucker for jazz-influenced laid back hip hop.

Incidentally Steinski's first mixes weren't on turntables at all. He collaborated with Double Dee by splicing together tape reels in the 80's. Now that is hardcore. That's like Ansel Adams bringing large format photography to the pinnacle of that art form, slaving away in an unknown basement doing something no one has ever done before.

Music and photography share an interesting lineage in that respect. It's the pioneering nerds who slave away over their art who create these new forms that shake the world.

RescueTime - a log of how hardcore you are

Ivan Kirigin (founder of Tipjoy) recently posted his rescuetime graph. 1,600 hours logged -- now that is a lot of work being done. I can attest as well -- the Y Combinator 3 month session is a time of incredible productivity.  Also, I can't believe I spent 21 hours straight in front of a computer at some point this summer. That's like mad crazy "in the zone" coding. Oh, to be in the zone more often... I hope to be back there soon.

Everyone should go download RescueTime ASAP. It gives you cool graphs of how productive you are. (And signup for a Tipjoy while you're at it.)

Hat tip to Ivan

Fantastic Contraption - prepare to waste several hours of your life playing a flash game.

You know how when you were a kid, you could play with legos and imagine them to do all sorts of things?  You ever play Lemmings -- you know, that old school puzzle computer game where you had to build little things so the lemmings would reach their goal instead of dying horrible deaths? Fantastic Contraption is kind of a mix of legos and lemmings, with a bunch of cool physics modeling in there as well.

Basic idea is to get some blocks into the goal, and to build any sort of machine using rolling balls and sticks.

http://fantasticcontraption.com (do not click unless you're willing to lose a few hours of your life immediately)

Hat tip to Adam R