Several months ago, Amazon began a beta site called Mturk, a micro-job, micro-payment setup where people could get paid for doing tasks that are still difficult for computers to do, such as verifying titles in CD cover graphics, transcibing podcasts, and the like. Amazon’s system also allowed the public to submit small online jobs that usually paid pennies per task. Earlier this year, someone submitted a task called “Draw a Sheep”, which involved using a rudimentary MS Paint-like application to, well, draw a sheep facing left. The requester paid a whopping $0.02 per approved drawing, and yes, like many others, I took the time to draw one just for fun, thinking the task was probably just software testing for a new java applet or something.

Fast forward a couple of months, and it turns out the task’s requester was a graduate school student named Aaron Koblin, who’s at UCLA. He managed to collect 10,000 of these drawings and so paid a total of $200 (not including Amazon’s fee) for them, as part of a graduate school project. Having paid each online worker $0.02 per sheep at an average of 105 seconds to draw each sheep comes to a labor rate of $0.69/hour. It seems his graduate project was successful, having been exhibited at a local gallery, and he’s now offering to sell the public 20-block stamps of the sheep for $20, or a markup of 4900%!

To be fair, I doubt he expects to get rich from this, but his site, thesheepmarket.com, is definitely well assembled, clean, and worth a visit. It’s fascinating to see all the different sheep that people managed to draw for $0.02 using a rudimentary drawing program. Actually, some of them are really good. What does it say for American productivity that people are willing to draw sheep for $0.02?

And no, the irony of the sheep theme isn’t lost on me!

Investorgeeks is hosting this week’s Carnival of Investing, and it marks my first submission to this ongoing event. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of “carnivals”, don’t worry, I wasn’t sure what they were either up until last week. The short explanation is that carnivals are basically a regular listing of links to posts submitted by bloggers that highlight their work. Usually those who have already submitted a post take turns to “host” the carnival each time. In the area of personal finance, there are three carnivals that I know of: Carnival of Investing, Carnival of Personal Finance, and Festival of Frugality.

The post I most enjoyed this week on Carnival of Investing is called “Jewlers Dangling” over at Mover Mike’s. My husband and I ordered our wedding rings from a jeweler in Spain, where we married, in December 2003, when platinum was around 650 Euros (~US$780) per troy oz. The jeweler was the owner of his own small shop and had given us that figure as his high-end estimate, which he honored a few weeks later when we picked up the rings. He was just astounded at how platinum had taken off in price. In his case, he was simply charging his customers whatever the current spot price of the metal was at the time of their order.

In case you’re curious, as of last Friday, platinum was hovering around $1300 per troy oz!

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Equitrader, the site that’s attempting to bring brains and talent all over the world into the world of daytrading just as Topcoder has done for programming. So far, it’s fared much better than I expected. I’m not sure how much overlap in membership there is between the two sites, but discussions among members in forums have turned technical, with participants discussing ways to create automated programs to do trading. Program trading is not something the average person can probably accomplish easily. And some of the returns are definitely impressive. (Incidentally, if you see me listed on the site, you can believe that my participation is almost entirely passive.)

So the question of the day is the following: assuming there was a trader who performed consistently well (through his own means or, more likely, via a program he wrote), would you consider investing in him (e.g. give him your money to trade) just as you’d consider investing in an actively managed mutual fund or asking a financial advisor to manage your money?

Remember the game 20 questions, where you think of an object and I ask you 20 yes/no questions and guess what you’re thinking of? Someone’s come up with a neural net version at 20q.net that seems pretty darn accurate. It’s probably Bayesian-based artificial intelligence and claims to guess what you’re thinking of 80% of the time and 98% if you let it ask 25 questions. It guessed “carrot” and “glue” when I tried it. If it doesn’t guess what you’ve got in mind, it learns it for the future. Ok, this is my non-finance post for the week, but I guess it tickles my scientist’s funny bone.

Now here’s a pretty radical idea: Entropia, an online sci-fi game (or MMORPG to be exact), has introduced real ATM cards to work with a Versatel ATM network so that players can use them to withdraw real cold, hard cash from the virtual money and accounts they’ve made in this game. Yep, it seems you can now earn earn real money by running space stations and blasting aliens. Entropia is apparently not the first online game to try this, but it is one of the largest, claiming an asset turnover in its virtual economy equal to US$165M (!!) last year.

I know of friends who’ve been so ferverous about online games such as Everquest who put real US Dollars into building characters for sci-fi games. Now it appears they might soon be able to channel that intensity to replace their real-world jobs and salaries altogether.

Since Entropia’s virtual economy is unusual in that assets are actually built and bought using real world money to begin with, it might be some time before kids can get a foothold, but that’ll make keeping them away from gaming even harder, won’t it? Think Jason Fox of Foxtrot.