That’s fascinating – I wasn’t aware that the UK applied minimum wage laws to microwork. Any sense as to how or why that happened?

The larger implication of your comment is that I (or maybe some other folks involved in this conversation) are wrongly conflating innovation in crowdsourcing with labor law de-regulation. I was definitely not trying to say that. Rather, the probem I’m trying to point towards is that it’s not clear to me that wage laws should be applied to the things people do in their spare time. Certainly there are some folks out there who rely on crowd work as a primary means of income and, although it might be debatable exactly who falls into such a category, I think those folks ought to be paid a fair, living wage for their efforts. At the same time, I’m much less certain that someone who drops into Mturk for a few minutes or even hours a day while they’re bored with their other job or their schoolwork or whatever is entitled to the same treatment. Likewise, what do we do about the fact that many people pursue the exact same crowd work in exchange for virtual currency? What constitutes a fair wage in those contexts?

I have a hard time imagining how such fuzzy standards might be translated into formal policy (or code), but I do think that the nuances of the situation merit very careful consideration before a judge decides to apply existing labor law to requesters on Mturk and other crowd work systems.

It’s one thing when individual reporters, like Jonah Lehrer, fail to adhere to basic ethical principles involved in truthfully reporting the news, but when their entire institutions are willing to, as a matter of policy, abandon ethical codes and standards simply to save money, I think it’s clear that American journalism as an institution is in peril. At this point, news agencies have stopped hiring journalists and are now hiring legions of foreign, poorly trained, poorly paid men-on-the-street instead.

Love to see other Berkmanites following track!

I think this is a weird argument you’re making. The coin toss may be statistically fair, but statistical fairness is not the point of sport. If it were, we would just go through a 137 round coin flip contest to determine which U.S. citizens get to go to the Olympics.

( Having a global coin flip tournament actually sounds like a really fun global crowd sourcing experiment — it would be easy to setup a site for organizing it, we could show the coins flipped for each round, generate statistics about the head/tail odds of various coins and currencies, end up with national champions for lots of countries for folks to cheer on, and so on )

But that’s not the point of a foot race, which is to see who ran run the fastest. The reason a separate run off is a little dissatisfying is that it’s a secondary contest that rarely happens and operates under a slightly different set of rules (for sprints, the main difference is that the athletes have carefully peaked themselves for a particular day, so running a few days or week after messes up that schedule, and especially can be effected by other races run).

The thing is that soccer playoffs and such are already built into the rules of the sports. So championship soccer players are not just playing 11-v-11 soccer, they are playing, planning on, and training for 11-v-11 + possible-shootout soccer. The shootout is fair because it is part of the rules, and both teams can plan and train for it. I get that there’s an unsatisfying departure from being able to have a championship just for 11-v-11 soccer, but that’s a logical impossibility, and I don’t see how introducing statistical fairness through a coin flip is more morally fair than having athletes compete in a closely related game of skill.

In the running case, the closely related game of skill is much closer to the real game, so I think the case for the fairness of a runoff is much greater. Unfortunately, the runoff was not in the rulebook, so the whole thing is less fair in that sense. But then again neither was the coin flip.

And a runoff would be really, really fun to watch in a sport that desperately needs more attention.

-hal

Secondly, the ‘disclaimer’ is a poorly worded reminder of moral rights, that it is dishonest to modify a work and present it as the original (even implicitly), or to misrepresent someone (even implicitly).

Unlike copyright (a privilege) moral rights are not held, nor are they powers of control to be wielded by a holder as they see fit.

The root of the problem is that people are no longer educated as to what rights truly are (natural) – vs what the state now prefers them to be thought of (granted by the paternalist state).

See The Copyright Clause That Never Was.