Were the questions answered by Mturk (Amazon Mechanical Turk Web Service) answered by humans?
Hi Helen, Mturk was simply another service run by Amazon that allowed users to get paid for completing simple tasks. One subset of tasks is answering questions posted on Askville and Now Now (another Amazon service). The basic premise is that there are some tasks that are quite simple for a human to do but which are difficult to solve using programming algorithms. The example Amazon uses is the task of identifying whether there is a pizza parlour in a series of photos – easy for a real person to spot, not so easy for a computer to analyse. You can read all about why the name was chosen, and what the original Mechanical Turk was in the Mechanical Turk FAQ. There’s even a book on the subject titled, not surprisingly,
