Three questions

Today at the UIST conference (User Interfaces and Software Technology) Andrew Cross, Edward Cutrell and William Thies from Microsoft Research India presented a really neat idea — using a single camera to look at people holding up paper containing Augmented Reality tags in order to inexpensively conduct a poll of hundreds of people at once. The technology can also be used to enable truly affordable class polling of students in India.

At one point, to demonstrate their technology they asked three questions. Whoever got all three right would get a present. I really love these questions, so I will share them with you:

(1) What was the original Mechanical Turk for? (A) To predict the weather; (B) To play chess; (C) To do magic tricks; (D) To multiply large numbers.

(2) Where did the word “crowdsourcing” first appear? (A) At the SIGCHI conference; (B) At the UIST conference; (C) in Wired magazine; (D) In the New York Times.

(3) Which of the following was not sent into space with Voyager I? (A) The sound of a wild dog; (B) A one hour recording of a brain wave pattern; (C) A photo of Boston; (D) A schematic of the Cray supercomputer.

I won’t give any of these away just yet, since you might want a chance to answer them. If you’re going to try, do it it without using a search engine or other reference.

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