About The goal of this blog is reporting evidence concerning the reliability of Amazon Mechanical Turk as an online subject pool for experiments in economics, psychology, and social sciences in general. Using AMT to run web-based experiments allows researchers to obtain large quantities of data in a cheap and efficient way. However, there is lack of evidence regarding the actual reliability of AMT’s workforce as a subject pool; as any new instrument, AMT requires to be tested thoroughly in order to be used confidently. This blog aims at collecting any individual effort made in order to validate AMT as a research tool. It reports results from experiments that increase or decrease the reliability of AMT as an online subject pool, as well as general guidance for running experiments through this service.

SciencePipes is an environment in which students, educators, citizens, resource managers, and scientists can create and share analyses and visualizations of biodiversity data. It is built to support inquiry-based learning, allowing analysis results and visualizations to be dynamically incorporated into web sites (e.g. blogs) for dissemination and consumption beyond SciencePipes.org itself. For more information: * further introduction * presentations * status of the site * NSDL article about SciencePipes.org Alpha functionality demos: * uploading and running a Kepler workflow * editing a pipe in the SciencePipes.org authoring environment SciencePipes is a project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Information Science Program and is funded by the National Science Digital Library.

Performing human-subjects experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk offers many benefits, including very low experiment costs, quick turn-around rates, and relatively simple approvals from human subjects boards. But you have to be careful to avoid bias and error; we describe some techniques below.

In this hands-on learning programme a team from Murdoch Library helps you explore free online tools that can be used for teaching, learning, research and managing daily work. It runs from 23 June to 28 July 2009. Each Friday information about two or three Things , plus exercises about each will appear on this blog. You can complete all of this from home, or if you booked in you can attend workshops offered by the library.