Past surveys on the demographics on Mechanical Turk users indicated that most of the workers come from the US, are younger and more educated than the general population, and work on MTurk as a way to get some spare cash.

Since the last survey, a few things have changed. First, Amazon allows now workers in India to get paid in cash in rupees, essentially encouraging many people from India to start using Mechanical Turk as workers. Second, the recession has affected many households, leaving many people at home looking for cash to cover their needs. These two forces has changed the demographics of the participants, so a new survey was needed to capture the new demographics of the Mechanical Turk workers.

Demo Girl

Siri is a virtual personal assistant that lives in your iPhone.  It can help you find a place to get a bite to eat, show you movie listings, and even remind you to call your Mom on her birthday.

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MetaLab: Re:DESIGN - Musings on design, business & the ampersand

We get ripped off a lot. I often spot a button image that’s been repurposed, or a layout that’s just a little bit too inspired by a previous design we’ve done. Generally, we find it really flattering and have a good laugh - if nothing else, it makes us feel that we’re probably doing something right if people are so eager to plagiarize. But earlier today a friend linked me to Mozilla’s new JetPack design and my jaw dropped.

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Stickybits: Portal to Another Dimension or Graffiti for Nerds?

You scan a Stickybits barcode that you place or find on some thing or some place (perhaps on someone) and you can see all the multimedia that's been associated with that barcode before and add your own.

(image) Erick Schonfeld covered Stickybits this morning on TechCrunch and called it a way to unlock "the secret lives of objects." Commenters on that post brought up far more questions than Stickybits has answered so far.

Database of Early Computer Art |

compArt Database Early Computer Art is a growing repository of persons, works, events, publications, institutions, and more. They belong to, and constitute, the domain of early computer art. "Early" refers to the timespan from 1950 to 1979 (in 1979, the first Festival Ars Electronica took place in Linz, Austria). "Computer art" refers to digital art in general, and algorithmic art in particular. In those early years, not much of other forms of digital art existed. Digital art has its predecessors in analog art. It has its relatives in art.

"compArt | center of excellence digital art" is a project at the University of Bremen, Germany. It is dedicated to research and development in computing, design, and teaching. It is supported by Rudolf Augstein Stiftung and the University of Bremen.

(image) Sequoia-backed Bump Technologies Inc. is closing in on 10 million downloads for its nifty contact and data-sharing app. With iPhone and iPod Touch sales estimated to be around 80 million, co-founder Jake Mintz says this means the company’s apps are on more than 10 percent of Apple’s phones.

The company launched last year with a simple, yet provocative demo. The app let you literally bump two phones together and pass contact information like phone numbers, names and e-mail addresses between them (see the video below).

11:10 a.m. | Updated Corrected the name of the AJ Bombers restaurant.

Foursquare, a location-based social network, plans to distribute a new analytics tool and dashboard in the coming weeks that will give business owners access to a range of information and statistics about visitors to their establishments.

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