A lot of times when using the python Celery library it’s useful to be able to monitor how fast the queue is being consumed. This is useful if you need to do a back of the envelope to see how long a queue will take to chew through, or just to see how the current status of the queue to make sure there aren’t any blockages. So I decided to whip up a simple script to do just that. While this…
I was doing a simple XML integration with SOAP service today and it really struck me that a lot of the data manipulation would be easier if the data was a dictionary. In addition, the XML returned was guaranteed to be fairly small and have only a handful of schemas – so a full-blown SAX parser wasn’t really necessary as there was no risk of overflowing memory with the raw XML data. So I decided to write a simple recursive…
Technologies: Amazon Mechanical Turk, Javascript, Python Alright, we’re back! I know, I know you missed me. Sorry I left you hanging back there with just a HIT and nothing to fill it in with. This one took a bit, but I swear I’m not slacking…I mean, I’m not always on point, but honestly I think a lot of people will benefit from this post so I wanted to make sure I got it right (read: don’t sound clueless). To…
Technologies: Amazon Mechanical Turk, Javascript, Python In the previous section I briefly ran you through why you might want to use Mechanical Turk. In this section we’re gonna start putting the rubber into contact with the road by designing our assignment. Here’s what we’ll cover: Creating a new assignment. Determining how much to pay. Using Javascript to improve the effectiveness of your HITs. Careful assignment design is crucial to getting the best results from Mechanical Turk. You should strive to design your assignments knowing that…
Technologies: Amazon Mechanical Turk, Javascript, Python What You’ll Learn In This Series How to create and customize a HIT. How to figure out how much to pay workers. How to upload assignments using the API. How to download results and pay workers using the API. How to improve your results by requiring multiple workers to complete each assignment. Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is an exciting new technology for businesses and researchers. At its most basic it lets you create tasks for other people to complete. For…
