Apocalypse Now

Work has been submitted using MTurk for more than 12 hours and cloud facotry still shows it as active. We have not received any finished work back and don't know if we ever will. I posted on the scholar's list and another classmate was having a similar issue. Casey was unfortunately fortunate to get in touch with cloud factory support and they acknowledged the issue. Below is the screenshot of when Casey talked to the support rep.

The night is always darkest before the dawn

Night before the presentation day. Nara did a good job on creating a very interesting ignite presentation. Casey and I were modifying the process and replaced the email task with a timer. The assembly line has been running for almost 2 hours and cloud factory still has not finished the work. Others in class are having similar issues. Will wait till tomorrow and see if Nepal is not being invaded by China for stealing cheap labor.

A cry for help

After the process was at a halt due to issues with Cloud Factory and the email process, we decided to bring use our resources at our disposal. First step we took was try to google similar issues. This led us to several others having the same issue, but no resolution. We then looked at the support forums for Run my process, but still could not find any fix. Next we took to the CIS 4140's scholar's list to ask the bright minds for a fix. A young lad, Tim Olsen, suggested we use timers in our process instead of of waiting for work from Cloud Factory. So onto changing the process again!

Rage against the machine!

Sitting at work, refreshing cloud factory over and over. The work which was submitted yesterday still has not come in to cloud factory. Receiving similar reports from classmates about work not coming in. The process is at a halt. In a live situation, the worker and employer would be at each other throat as both did not receive their work or compensation yet.

Edit: The error seems to be with the email task in our process. Cloud Factory does not seem to be emailing our mailbox about work completion and hence its at a halt.

Sweatshop Assembly

So the group started out well in creating an assembly line on Cloud Factory. This assembly line when ran, would post work on Mechanical Turk and would be visible to workers around the world. Since Mturk has more than 500,000 users, we knew it would not be too long till someone finished the work (given the right amount of compensation). Since we were in the testing phase, we did the work ourselves for free (because we are such nice people).  So far so good, all engines were running smoothly.

The Creative Process

Project time! We have been learning about crowd sourcing and our next project will be based on this process. It was weird, we hit our first stump before we even got started. We had the tools and knowledge, just the idea that was escaping us. After several days of brainstorming, Casey finally came up with an idea which we could crowd source. We decided to give work on citing sources. The process included giving raw data such as urls, name of source or anything the user had on hand and the worker would use MLA style formatting to cite these sources. The practical use of this process would be amazing for many people and organizations. The time saved alone would outweigh the costs.