Tweenbots are Kacie Kinzer’s little robots that roll in a straight line and rely on the kindness of strangers to get from point A to point B in the city. Nice.

I’ve linked up Dolores Labs before (when they tackled The Trolley Problem). They do fun stuff employing the anonymous army at Amazon Mechanical Turk. Their latest is getting Turkers to judge twitterers on how smart vs. interesting they are.

P.S. From there, I happened to stumble on Cursebird, “a real-time feed of people swearing on Twitter”, and another DL project, FaceStat, where you can upload your photo and have random strangers make snap judgments on you. From here, a fairly amazing coincidence: I get almost no blog-generated e-mail, but within an hour of finding FaceStat I had an e-mail from a fellow who put up a similar, simpler site where you can have strangers guess your age based on your photo. Strangely addictive, and I suck at it. I’m usually off by six years or more.

Crowdsourcing an Ethical Dilemma describes the results of using Amazon Mechanical Turk to pose variations of the Trolley Problem to a bunch of strangers. For example:

…a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?

They varied the scenario and the number of people one would save, and charted the results. (via waxy)