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Joshua Schachter (of del.icio.us fame) recently ran a simple study around expected value, and got about 2100 responses in an hour for the low low price of around $30 on Mechanical Turk -- enough to get some interesting results really in just one night, and be able to at least make some interesting observations about human decision making. Mechanical Turk, for the uninitiated, is Amazon Web Services' offering for micro-payments for micro-work. The other main use for it, so I hear, is cracking captchas. This may have potential to replace those annoying psych surveys that undergrad psych majors have to take over and over again. That's right, kids in Psych 1 may no longer be required to subject themselves to the myriad of strange and boring questionaires created by grad students trying to massage the data into something statistically significant. I love the Internets. Seen on Hacker News