amazon

MTurk Quality Experiment #1

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As I’ve previously mentioned in my Twitter (nolar), I’ve been experimenting with Amazon MTurk, and here are the preliminary results of the quality of the results for one specific task of translation of the texts from English to Russian.

Initially I wanted to name this article as “Zoo of Mechanical Turkeys”, but changed my mind for better SEO of this article (I mean relevancy, not the traffic and popularity of the Dark SEO). I don’t know why MTurk is so associated with turkeys in my mind, when it has nothing to do with these birds or nationality.

I guess, the results will show why it happens so. But before I will give you the results, I want to describe what the task is, and why is it so unusual.

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Amazon compact AMI with Ubuntu

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Did you ever try Amazon Web Services (AWS)? If you are an IT person and did not try it yet, then I recommend you to do so as soon as possible.  Just sign up with your Amazon account, and get their Free Tier for 1 year. Free Tier includes 10GB of EBS storage and 750 hours (24 hours * 31 days) of free time for “micro” instance. When the year will finish, this “micro” instance will cost you no more than ~$15/month (30 days * 24 hours * $0,02/hr).

You can easily run an instance of almost any modern OS — either Windows or any distribution of Linux — in less than a minute, with absolutely no need to go through difficult installation and initial configuration process. Just select an image (Amazon Machine Image, AMI), push the button, wait few seconds and connect with ssh to a running virtual server.

To be honest, the initial motive of making my own nano-AMI has came from misunderstanding of the Free Tier policy. I had found that the smallest of these images are 8GB in size, and one image takes all the Free Tier included EBS storage. So I thought that instead of  running one big 8GB empty image I can run ten nano-size 1GB images instead. Thus, saving money by fitting into Free Tier boundaries.

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