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For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technology 9 February 2013 | NewScientist | 23 AINAZ AMARIA/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX/EYEVINE ONE PER CENT FUSE/GETTY For breaking tech news go to: newscientist.com/onepercent Turk website for the unique numbers that identify each requester, then searches the Turkopticon database for reviews. The requester’s review score is then attached to every task they offer, letting Turkers make more informed decisions about the tasks they choose. Anne Midwinter is a part-time microbiologist from New Zealand who has completed 28,000 tasks on AMT over the past five years. Now she checks the Turkopticon review for every requester before starting any job. “There’s no sick leave, paid holidays, anything like that on mTurk. There is no arbitration, no appeal if you feel that you have been unfairly treated, apart from a stinging review on Turkopticon,” she says. Other crowd-working platforms have already taken some of these issues to heart. “We started as an effort to create a worker friendly crowdsourcing platform, specifically as an alternative to systems like Mechanical Turk,” says MobileWorks co-founder Anand Kulkarni. Unlike AMT, MobileWorks sets minimum wages for its workers tied to the cost of living in the country they are working in. Each worker is assigned to a manager who watches their work and pushes suitable tasks their way, and there are opportunities to ascend the corporate ladder. Without legal redress for online workers these efforts count for little, says Trebor Scholz at New School University in New York City. “People fought for 100 years for the 8-hour work day and paid vacation, against child labour. All of that is wiped away in these digital environments,” he says, and calls for crowd workers to form a transnational union. The first rumblings of legal action can already be heard. Oregon resident Christopher Otey has filed a lawsuit against crowd platform CrowdFlower, saying it is violating the Fair Labor Standards Act by not paying employees a minimum federal wage. CrowdFlower disputes the claims. Meanwhile, alongside other computer scientists, Niki Kittur at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, will outline his vision for the future of crowd work at a conference in San Antonio, Texas, later this month. Kittur says crowd workers need promotions and bonuses – as well as the capacity to take their credentials with them from platform to platform, like a job reference. He is developing tools that will allow more complicated tasks to be crowdsourced because “people will be paid more if what they do is more valuable”. “Forget the perception of unskilled workers – what if you could access the top people in the field?” Kittur says. “If you could get 5 minutes of their time how could you leverage that? We’re working on that now.” n –Virtually every penny counts– iPhone’s next trick: turn into an ATM Next time you’re short on cash, whip out your iPhone and maybe a friendly stranger will give you some. That’s the idea behind a patent filed by Apple last week. It details an app that would connect folks in need to those with some coin to spare. According to the patent, when users fire up the app, they can say whether they are looking to get money or have some to give. The software uses location information to hook up the closest reliable giver with a taker. Once the drop is made, the needy party’s iTunes account is debited accordingly, including a small fee to reward whoever came to their rescue. Longpad lets your fingers roam Tired of your laptop’s tiny touchpad? The infrared touch sensor Longpad gives your fingers room to roam. The device is a pad of LEDs and light receptors as wide as a typical laptop. The receptors detect light that is reflected by your wrists and fingers, allowing the device to recognise a range of touch gestures. In tests, this virtually eliminated accidental touches - a plague of laptop touchpads. Jiseong Gu at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon and colleagues will present the work at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Paris, France, in April. Programming, now in Arabic Though they may look foreign to the uninitiated, most computer languages are based on English. This can limit accessibility for non-native speakers. To remedy the situation, Ramsey Nasser, a software engineer and designer at the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in New York, has created ﻗﻟب(pronounced “alb”, meaning “heart”), a programming language based on Arabic script. He hopes the language, which he has so far used to write a few rudimentary programs, will attract new programmers from the Arabic-speaking world. “People fought for 100 years for the 8-hour day and paid vacation. All of that is lost in the digital world”
