More technical talks

Since my blog post arguing that Technical talks should be recorded, I’ve continued to record talks – here are the new recordings since that post, mostly from the Django Boston meetup group:

My award for “best anecdote” goes to Adam Marcus’s talk, which taught me that if you ask 100 Mechanical Turk workers to toss a coin and tell you whether it’s heads or tails, you’ll get approximately 70 heads. Consistently. This either means that everyone’s tossing biased/unfair coins, or (and this is the right answer) that you can’t trust the average Turk worker to actually perform a task that takes a couple of seconds. (Adam Marcus goes on to describe a hierarchy where you start out giving deterministic tasks to multiple workers as cross-checks against each other, and then over time you build relationships with and promote individual workers whose prior output has been proven trustworthy.)

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