Tag Archives: perl

A perl script to make granting Mechanical Turk bonuses a little easier

Posted on by
Reply

One of the problems I quickly encountered when noodling around with Mechanical Turk is the limited and clunky web interface. Amazon has a handy comparison table which shows you what I mean by “limited”. Below is a look at the web interface for managing submitted HITs which will show you what I mean by “clunky” (which you can click for bigger.) None of it is JavaScript enabled — so every button-click requires a page reload. And there’s no logging for who’s been paid, and who hasn’t. Aargh!

mechanical turk management interface

After my first foray into using bonuses to engineer better results, I found that I needed to pay over a hundred bonuses. It rapidly became clear that paying these using the web interface would be nearly impossible, forcing me to look at the command line interface tools a little faster than I’d been planning.
Continue reading →

A perl script to create Twitter friend/follow matrices

Posted on by
6

Geek alert: if the title of this post isn’t a dead giveaway I should tell you — unless you’re interested in APIs and badly-put-together bits of code — this probably isn’t for you.

I’ve recently found myself using a service provided by Damon Clinkscale called DoesFollow. All it does is answer the simple question “does twitter user A follow twitter user B?” Apart from a frill which lets you reverse the order of your question (“does twitter user B follow twitter user A?”) that’s all it does. You can even interrogate it from the address bar like this: http://doesfollow.com/barackobama/mediaczar

does barack obama follow mediaczar?

While I was thinking about how useful a service this is, I was suddenly struck by a moment of clarity. A lot of the research I’ve been doing could be simplified by something like this.
Continue reading →