Very cool! And in hindsight, transcribing tabular data is an excellent use of Mechanical Turk.
- Rajarshi Guha
/me wonders if this works for extracting NMR data from primary literature too... but given JCs experience... I guess that would require too much insight too...
- Egon Willighagen
@Rajarshi - Mechanical Turk also has an API - something we need to discuss in detail over a conf call - but, combined with the web services we've been working on with GoogleSpreadsheets this could be a very interesting year for cheminformatics :)
- Jean-Claude Bradley
@Egon - that sounds like a great application - if you have a sample NMR image I can try and see what happens
- Jean-Claude Bradley
I dislike the mechanical turk interface, it is very hard to browse through it, also for taking qualification tests. So, beside the ability to take qualification tests, some additional review process (is this not the idea of crowdsourcing) would be a good way to ensure quality reponses. Or people could first provide some work for free and then get some real money from providing a larger amount of data.
- joergkurtwegner
@Joerg - Yes it took some time to learn how to use the interface. But now that my templates are made it is a lot easier. I haven't used a qualification test yet but that certainly is something worth trying for the more complex tasks.
- Jean-Claude Bradley
@Joerg - Quality control I think is something that MT does well routinely for cheap. That will be part of the process.
- Jean-Claude Bradley
@Bill - absolutely could help there - the only question is who will fund :)
- Jean-Claude Bradley
@Jean-Claude - good to hear that templates exist and help.
- joergkurtwegner
@JC - I was more thinking about extracting assignments from detailed papers from natural product journals... but your idea is interesting too!
- Egon Willighagen
Gavin Baker writes about our recent experience of trying a bursty approach to get research funding with some interesting insights into the process, what worked and what didn't (and he calls me Dr Neylon, man it's been a long time since anyone did that ;-)
- Cameron Neylon
from Bookmarklet
This is still not working brilliantly - it would make more sense for the link to be the text of the comment. I think a bit of Yahoo piperage might fix that though. Will try tomorrow. coComment also doesn't work on Nature Networks, which is where the action was last night:http://tinyurl.com/5hjc47
- Cameron Neylon
This whole commenting thing is one reason I switched to Disqus ... perhaps there will be some consolidation in the space
- Deepak Singh
They really should have gone with an established, open-source CMS for Nature Network; would make aggregation and networking much easier
- Neil Saunders
And it might actually stay up more than five hours at a time. Is it just that we put too much of a load on it? :)
- Cameron Neylon