Like Jeff, I'm a professor who works on crowdsourcing. For one of my current projects, I am working on a tool to make the Amazon Mechanical Turk marketplace fairer for workers. I have developed a Chrome plugin that tracks the length of time it takes to complete a task, and a web site that aggregates the information across many workers. Crowd-Workers.com allows workers to discovery higher paying work by sorting tasks by estimated hourly rate.
Read more about the tool: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~ccb/publications/crowd-workers-pos...
Try out our Chrome plugin and our web site: http://crowd-workers.com/landing