12.05.13
Digital sweat-shopping counts the swimming pools of LA
How many swimming pools are in the Los Angeles basin? A UCLA/MIT student and a German graphic designer wanted to know. They employed digital sweat shop labor to find out.
German graphic designer Benedikt Gross was flying into Los Angeles for the first time when he gazed out the jetliner’s window and was mesmerized by the hundreds of shimmering blue swimming pools tiling the landscape below.
The image of all those backyard oases visible only from the sky stuck with him, but he didn’t make much of it until a few months later, when he bumped into Joseph Lee at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology research lab that deals with urban dwellers’ relationship with technology.
“I wonder how many pools there are,” said Gross, 33, who was working at the Senseable City Lab as part of his master’s degree studies at London’s Royal College of Art.
Lee, a UCLA graduate who was at MIT as a research assistant, responded quickly:
“L.A. is endless from the air. The turquoise pools you see are beautiful.”
So they decided to count the pools using Google maps and digital sweat-shopping, first through a crowd-sourcing house in India and then Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, to double-check the work.
The Times story prints the figure — 43,123 pools, although that might not have been all of them.
The duo spent $350 dollars on Mechanical Turk to do the final count check. And that comes to eight tenths of a penny a pool.
Theoretically, if you counted 1000 pools on the Amazon workplace, you earned $8.11. Could you count 1000 pools in an hour, two hours, 20 hours?
Or maybe you just wanted to count 50. In which case you made forty cents. That’s a lot less than what it cost to buy a copy of the LA Times newspaper, where you could read of their accomplishment, published in the paper’s Column One feature.
“When their analysis of the pools was complete, Lee and Gross spent $3,700 to publish the 74 volumes [of LA backyard pool research],” reads the times. “So far, only one complete set has been printed; Gross has it in London.”
That’s ten times what they paid Mechanical Turk workers to do part of the identification and counting task.
The work, Joseph Lee told the newspaper, showed how easy it was to look into masses of data covering people’s not-so-private backyards. Privacy is a growing concern, they conceded. Digital sweat shopping, maybe not so much.
Theoretically, there’s nothing wrong with the idea of using human eyeball crowd-sourcing to count swimming pools. However, if you had to pay a more reasonable amount for it, much much more than the rate of 40 cents for 50 pools, would they have done it?
What would it have cost to pay a minimum wage to count 43 thousand swimming pools from digital mapping?
Maybe a task for a graduate student, a really smart one.