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Note: This story is over four years old, but I just came upon it and thought other Soylentils might find it interesting.
5 Things That Sound, Move, or Smell Like a Nuclear Explosion:
After most of the world's nations signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, in 1996, they set up a new commission to watch out for clandestine explosions. Since then the commission (CTBTO[*]) has wired the world with hundreds of seismometers, infrasound detectors, radionuclide sniffers, and underwater microphones. The stations send their data to the CTBTO's headquarters in Vienna, Austria, where it is analyzed for signs of a secret bomb. But the system keeps picking up other things, too—which is sometimes a problem for the system and sometimes a boon to science. Here are some of the things that can at first seem like nuclear tests:
In the course of the efforts to detect clandestine nuclear tests, these devices have also detected:
- Space rocks
- Aurora (Northern and Southern Lights)
- Whales
- Tsunamis
- Nuclear-power-plant disasters
- Medical-isotope manufacturing
[*] CTBTO: Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday December 28 2018, @03:09PM
Admittedly amazon turk is older than the story, and the idea is older yet, but a modern spin is surveillance is the kind of work that could be done really well using mturk-alike technology for grunt labor.
Give 9 people one cent to look at a funky nuclear detonation seismograph, then click Y or N on an actual sample seismograph, then if two or more untrained people click Y then pass up to second tier higher trained people. Slip in a real testing seismograph once in a while to verify compliance.
Human labor is in many cases cheaper than electronic labor plus highly paid programmers plus highly paid sysadmins plus security droids plus enough HR to babysit them plus mgmt overhead plus executive bonuses ... F it just put seismographs on turk and pay a simple bill.
Also a side effect is my coworkers who thought it was funny to "drunken turk" as a hobby might end up being the first westerners to discover the next North Korean nuke test, which is weird to think about.
Wonder if they'll be PTSD issues with turk-based cloud surveillance "They told me to click on weird squiggles, so I did, I had no idea it meant Seoul was just glassed and now I need treatment for nightmares about hentai tentacle pr0n"