Spears: A few years ago I read an article about the small company ( a few hundred people ) that are employed so that Moby can be Moby

In the US, the vast majority of people who "volunteer" for psychology experiments are college students in the 18-20 age range taking an introductory psychology course. For most (maybe all) of those courses, participating in experiments is mandatory and can affect the final grade. That alone makes me wonder how transferrable the results of many of these experiments really are, since I don't know about you, but I'm really a different person now than I was in 1981 when I took such a class and participated in experiments.

Second Life phallus crisis - This is also fascinating, on a bunch of other levels.