So this morning I threw a new load of data collection experiments up on Mechanical Turk. Among other things, I'm giving people long lists of pairs of words (i.e. "apple/fruit") and asking them to rank how typical the first word is among members of the second. In my instructions I give an example, using religion:

For example, you might rate 'Christianity/Religion' as a 7, because Christianity is a very typical religion, 'Humanism/Religion' as a 3, because Humanism is a somewhat unlikely religion, and 'Pastafarianism/Religion' as a 1, because Pastafarianism isn't like other religions at all.

This afternoon I recieved the following angry email:

Greetings from Amazon Mechanical Turk,

An Amazon Mechanical Turk user is contacting you from the Amazon
Mechanical Turk website.  Please review the message below and respond to
the message as you see fit.

Sincerely,
Amazon Mechanical Turk
http://requester.mturk.com
1200 12TH AVE South, SUITE 1200
SEATTLE, WA 98144-2734 USA
Message from Susan XXXXXX (XXXXXXXXXXXX@msn.com)
---------------------------------
Customer ID: A3VXXXXXXXXXXX
Hello,
 I cannot in good conscience work on your hits, although I am one of the higher educated 
monkeys around here with a high acceptance %.

 Who are you to decide Pastafarianism rates a 1 on the religion scale? That is bordering 
on blasphemy, and showing extreme bias against His Noodly Appendage. May he forgive 
you. Ramen.

Cheer.

Yesterday I spent a good couple of hours trawling through my list of categories & exemplars, looking for spelling mistakes and capitalization errors. See, the plan is to use the word lists I got from that first experiment as input to the next two — giving Turkers words and asking them to label them with categories, or giving them word/category pairs and asking them to rate the typicality. Useful, hopefully, but very dependent on the quality of data I put in.

Anyway, manually going through and correcting the spelling mistakes and general weirdness of a couple hundred well-intentioned Turkers really opened my eyes to a whole new world of spelling. A test! Quick, how do you spell the seed on a “s_____ seed bun?”

.

..

…

Yeah, ‘sesame’. But are you sure you wouldn’t write it ‘seasame?’ Or perhaps ‘seaseme?’ Maybe even ‘seesamie?’

Anyway, enough carping. I actually learned a few things — that a ‘Cuba libre’ and a ‘Harvey Wallbanger’ are cocktails, for instance — and had to laugh out loud at general wise-assery a couple of times. To some anonymous turker ‘sex roleplaying’ is the first thing that comes to mind for ‘games’; for ‘craft’ someone wrote down ‘warcraft’ and ‘starcraft’’. Needless to say, I had to cull a few exemplars from the list.

So it’s Friday and I’m staying home from work to recover from a rather out-of-proportion head cold. It’s raining all day, absolutely miserable (i.e. lovely Scottish weather), which only contributes to my desire to stay inside. What to do on such a day? Well, the obvious thing is to tackle the small pile of work I’ve got queued up — finish a pair of experiment designs and read a couple papers. Of course — I reason to myself — I don’t think very well when I’m sick/medicated. And so off I go, merrily installing Linux instead. What else is an honest geek got to do on a rainy Friday afternoon, really?

Didn’t I have a perfectly functional desktop, you ask? Why would I need to go around, wiping hard drives and installing slightly newer kernels? Jaunty Jackalope, of course. I figure I’m culturally obligated to install operating systems named after quasi-mythological Southwestern creatures. Apparently doing a dist-upgrade (or update-manager -d, whatever) is less broken than the past (i.e., it isn’t completely braindead) — but it still left me with a terminally unbootable system. Argh. Ah, well. If I weren’t OK with a little mild data loss I’d have gone crazy years ago. A fresh install from a 9.04-desktop image worked like a charm.

Miracles!

So, several happily uneventful hours later, here I am — posting this from a shiny new Ubuntu 9.04, XFCE 4.6, compiz-enabled, keyboard-customized linux desktop. Color me happy. Even managed to get EVE running under WINE without too much trouble. Not that that’s a good thing, really.

After wailing about it for ages, I've finally set up some sort of blogging engine thingie here. We'll see how it goes -- if it frustrates me too much, e.g. if I can't get the appearance exactly like I want it, I'll just go back to the old standby of writing static HTML by hand. Which, don't get me wrong, I enjoy -- it's just that hopefully this will motivate me to document some stuff, maybe. If it's trivial to write a post maybe I'll do it more than once every three months.

Anyway, hello from Movable Type.