The Wisdom of Crowds

Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations

On prediction markets

Does this idea seem ludicrous? Since 1988, the University of Iowa has run the Iowa Electronic Markets, which allow people to bet on the outcome of presidential elections. As a predictor, the Iowa Electronic Markets have produced extraordinarily accurate judgments, often doing better than professional polling organizations. In the week before each of the last four elections, the predictions in the Iowa market have shown an average absolute error of just 1.5 percentage points, a significant improvement over the 2.1 percentage point error in the final Gallup Polls. Or consider the Hollywood Stock Exchange, in which people predict Oscar nominees and winners, as well as opening weekend box-office successes. Here, too, the level of accuracy has been exceptionally impressive, with (for example) correct predictions of thirty-five out of forty Oscar nominees in 2002.

[...]

Surowiecki might object that some crowds can be wise even when ignorance is widespread. Consider the astonishing accuracy of the Iowa Electronic Markets (and other prediction markets), in which good judgments come from groups of investors that include many people who know little and are perhaps more likely to be wrong than to be right. But we cannot easily generalize from prediction markets, because they have several distinctive features. Most important, they do not simply rely on the median or average judgment of a randomly selected group of people. They are genuine markets, in which people voluntarily choose to participate, presumably because they think they know something. In addition, people are permitted to buy and to sell shares on a continuing basis. In these circumstances, accurate answers can emerge even if only a small percentage of participants have good information.

In the Iowa Electronic Markets, it turns out that 85 percent of the traders aren't so smart. They hold onto their shares for a long period and then just accept someone else's prices. The market's predictions appear to be driven by the other 15 percent--frequent traders who post their offers rather than accepting those made by other people. The broader point is that to work well, prediction markets do not require accurate judgments by anything like the majority of participants. In this sense, prediction markets are very different from judgments by ordinary crowds. Surowiecki's claims about group wisdom don't adequately emphasize the unique characteristics of these markets.

From the BBC:

The world's most difficult word to translate has been identified as "ilunga" from the Tshiluba language spoken in south-eastern DR Congo.

It came top of a list drawn up in consultation with 1,000 linguists.

Ilunga means "a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time".

• Windows XP icons
• IconFactory
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Icons

Threading in UI

Excel VBA code to convert collection into an array

Function collectionToArray(c As Collection) As Variant()
    Dim a() As Variant: ReDim a(0 To c.Count - 1)
    Dim i As Integer
    For i = 1 To c.Count
        a(i - 1) = c.Item(i)
    Next
    collectionToArray = a
End Function

The Fidelity Investment rewards card is a good deal. You get 1.5% cash back into your Fidelity investment account. And there is no annual fee.

[Furl]

[Hyperlinkomatic]

There's a registry key for newer Internet Explorer versions, which sets the maximum amount of instructions to be done from a script before IE decides that it is an infinite loop and stops the execution:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\InternetExplorer\Styles\MaxScriptStatements

SCOTUS turned down a non-custodial parent's suit to overturn the use of the Pledge of Allegiance for its use of "under God" today. Rehnquist is cited here:

In his minority opinion, Rehnquist wrote, "To give the parent of such a child a sort of 'heckler's veto' over a patriotic ceremony willingly participated in by other students, simply because the Pledge of Allegiance contains the descriptive phrase 'under God,' is an unwarranted extension of the establishment clause, an extension which would have the unfortunate effect of prohibiting a commendable patriotic observance."

So I take this to be an argument of three parts:

1. It's constitutional because it is patriotic;
2. It's constitutional because children do it willingly;
3. It's constitutional because the parent has no standing to bring suit.

I have to say that (1) and (2) are ludicrous, and (2) particularly so. We have a body of experts who decide constitutional matters of American law, and that is the Supreme Court. That a justice on SCOTUS should decide to defer to the estimates of school children as authorities on constitutionality is absurd.

I had hoped the Supreme Court would acquit itself more admirably than this. In my opinion, this is a case of government endorsement of religion, but if SCOTUS is going to dismiss the case, at Least it could come up with better reasons than these.

[Scorecard for becoming a better person]
[Advice for others: STFW]
[Lindy hop exchanges]

A great article on the legendary blues song, St. James Infirmary:

I went down to St. James Infirmary,
Saw my baby there.
She was stretched out on a long white table,
So sweet, so cold, so bare.

Let her go, let her go, God bless her.
Wherever she may be,
She can search this whole wide world over,
She ain't never gonna find another man like me.

Visio Object Model

Magnifier and Narrator
[Win+U]

[Twenty questions]

[Thread.Suspend/Resume)]

[Worker thread wrapper class]

[Winforms: merge and acceptChanges]

dsChanges = dsOriginal.GetChanges();
CallToDBUpdateMethod(dsChanges);
dsOriginal.Merge(dsChanges);