APM Marketplace: news of a British model home. Highly insulated, carbon neutral, just 40% more$. Not just a demo, it’s going to be the law: all new UK buildings to must be carbon neutral by 2016. Economies of scale are said to reduce or eliminate the added cost by then.
…And A Mechanical Turk To Rule Them All
Paul Bausch has concerns about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk:
I can imagine a world where my computer can organize my time in front of the screen better than I can. In fact, I bet [Amazon’s Mechanical Turk] will eventually gather data about how many [Human Intelligence Tasks] someone can perform at peak accuracy in a 10 hour period. Once my HIT-level is known, the computer could divide all of my work into a series of decisions. Instead of lunging about from task to task, getting distracted by blogs, following paths that end up leading nowhere, the computer could have everything planned out for me. (It could even throw in a distraction or two if that actually increased my HIT performance.) If I could be more efficient and get more accomplished by turning decisions about how I work over to my computer, I’d be foolish not to.
Foolish not to, but who wants to work at the behest of a computer? And that’s Paul’s complaint.