One Per Cent: Turning crowds into computers

One Per Cent: Turning crowds into computers:  Michael Bernstein, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has developed an editing plug-in for Microsoft Word that looks a little like Word's spell checker - except that it is powered by humans. The plug-in, known as Soylent, can be used to shorten or proof-read documents. It works by breaking the documents up into chunks, which are sent to Amazon Mechanical Turk for editing and then automatically reassembled back in Word.