{"id":1208,"date":"2015-10-16T21:54:38","date_gmt":"2015-10-16T21:54:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/?p=1208"},"modified":"2015-10-16T21:54:38","modified_gmt":"2015-10-16T21:54:38","slug":"ignorance-is-bliss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/2015\/10\/16\/ignorance-is-bliss\/","title":{"rendered":"Ignorance is bliss"},"content":{"rendered":"

written on March 21, 2014 and saved for publication until tenure<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

I like to think that I have become more socially conscious since the onset of my adult life. I like to think that when I hear of injustice, I at the very least make the adjustments to my own life in accordance to those injustices. I limit my carbon-footprint-intensive travel to a minimum, I support unions, I no longer shop on Amazon, and so on.<\/p>\n

It’s a learning process. I am sometimes taken aback by my own ignorance when something it first pointed out to me. Such as the day a fellow 350Corvallisite told me that half of our city’s electricity bill goes to water treatment. Half! I have always known that water use is an issue, but I had thought it more of an issue in drought-prone California. I hadn’t thought of the energy-requirements and so carbon-footprint of water use. So, I’ve started looking into gray water and rainwater collection and use.<\/p>\n

What does this have to do with work? Well, I was sitting in yet-another-job-talk that included yet-another-use of Amazon’s mechanical turk to generate and collect data for research. The question popped into my head: “how much do these people get paid? what are the labor issues of this machine?” Given Amazon’s (abysmal) track record in labor practices, I didn’t have high hopes. Turns out they pay 50c to $5 an hour.<\/a> And please don’t get me started on “its okay for someone in India to be making 50c an hour”.<\/p>\n

I don’t know how much my colleagues are offering for mechanical turk labor — perhaps, and I hope, they offer at least minimum wage. If not already, I would hope that NSF would demand minimum labor standards for research they fund.<\/p>\n

addendum September 1, 2014<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Ironically, it is Labor Day and I am working. A colleague just shared this “Guidelines for Academic Requestors [of Amazon Turk Labor]”<\/a> with our faculty email list much to my happiness. It includes guidelines on fair payment and includes information pointing to an at-least-minimum-wage payment is required for ethical treatment of Turkers and arguments to be paying much higher than the US minimum wage standards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

written on March 21, 2014 and saved for publication until tenure I like to think that I have become more socially conscious since the onset of my adult life. I like to think that when I hear of injustice, I at the very least make the adjustments to my own life in accordance to those […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3747,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[187578],"class_list":["post-1208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-post-tenure-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3747"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1208"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1209,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1208\/revisions\/1209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}