Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a slightly bizarre service that outsources simple, repetitive tasks to strangers on the internet, often for laughably tiny sums of money. It’s popular among scientists as a means to carry out research; but recently, Amazon tweaked its pricing in a decidedly science-unfriendly manner.
PBS has an article about the the rising use of Mechanical Turk — Amazon's marketplace for low-paying, one-shot jobs — for academic research surveys. In the old days, psychology students were the primary subjects. Not anymore.
From our earliest dreams of golems and Galatea, people have wanted to create artificial beings with human characteristics and abilities. But in our haste to see a future of walking, talking mechanical humanoids, we're easily fooled by con artists looking to exploit our sense of wonder. Hoaxers and engineers, magicians…