07/18/2012: Mock-Up I spent most of the week play with Mechanical Turk. Ethan put of a Mock up of the webpage to see how well it worked. I took the survey. Also for the intro we were looking for strong examples that would hopefully help create some idea of what we were looking for without directly telling them, "This is a very good lead" and "This is a very boring lead." I spent quite a long time reading a bunch of beginnings to articles from The Best Science Articles book. I found some good ones. Unfortunately most of the good ones were really long. I mean the first paragraph was larger than most of the leads we normally read. I was starting to wonder if great articles always have long intros but because we maxed out a 200 word count limit on the leads I thought it best not to think about that too much at the moment. I did manage to find two articles: one that I thought was very entertaining and written well and the other that was pretty boring and just a list of facts in paragraph form. Additionally, the three of us undergrads created an account on Mechanical Turk for both the sandbox, which is where you can test a survey without paying people, but mostly it is there to work out any kinks. You can actually see what it will look like to the user. We spent a little time discussing the order of the questions and the color scheme at our last meeting. It was a good thing that we all tried loading the page on all our computers because Ani's computer had different ratio specs for the screen which made the webpage for the survey look different. With that I spent the rest of my time working on the progress report that I needed to do for the DREU. It was nice to get things down on paper and see all that I have done so far, which is a lot more than I expected. I think I mean we have worked on a lot of things instead of focusing on one thing. I think this is good because it's nice that this is a learning experience. I'm here to learn!