Boris Smus

As a follow up to my last post, I posted a HIT on Mechanical Turk asking 20 turkers if they know Java. I paid them 5 cents to answer the question. Surprisingly, 9 of 20 claimed to know. I was amazed at how strong selection bias was in this case, since surely not 50% of turkers know how to program!

I then asked those turkers who know Java to complete the following trivial Java method. If they wrote it correctly, I paid them a 45 cent bonus. read more…

Last semester at CMU, I was involved in a research project involving Mechanical Turk. The goal was to get Mechanical Turk users (turkers) to collaborate on creating online wikipedia-style articles. Prior to my team’s involvement, an undergraduate created a mediawiki-based platform to allow turkers to collaborate on articles. Despite a high compensation, few turkers completed the task. My team tackled the problem and came up with some interesting videos on the way. read more…

In late March, I was completely thrilled to hear that the Carnegie Mellon University Human Computer Interaction Institute accepted me into their Master’s program! In addition to admission, they offered a very juicy scholarship to spend part of the time on the beautiful island of Madeira. CMU was my most far fetched reach school, so I attribute this wonderful fortune to a clerical error made by the admission committee.

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I’ve been collaborating with my dad on an experimental web-based guitar chord editing service. It’s still a work in progress, but we are ready to launch a beta version. Please visit http://www.guitarunleashed.com/ to check it out and provide feedback.

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At the core of the traditional HTML/CSS developer’s toolkit is a set of nested boxes describing offset, margin, border and padding, known as the box model. Variations on the box theme are sufficient to describe most page layouts, but in some complex applications, it’s necessary to render something more interesting, like diagonal lines, or polygons. There are currently two relatively well-supported web graphics technologies: SVG and Canvas. There are significant performance differences, however, which I would like to discuss in this article.

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