»In which we stop Catherine the Great from cheating

Amazon's Mechanical Turk intrigues and fascinates me. Cooler (not only because one can make money) than the ESP game built by academic researchers, the Turk challenges the human to write, decipher images, select and compare, and all sorts of menial tasks that cannot quite be automated by a machine -- or perhaps already have, but require human approval to refine their decisions. Already the top results for "Mechanical Turk" are polluted with blogs referring to Amazon's API -- but the fascinating, real story can be found in Tom Standage's book and, of course, in the Wikipedia.