Lonely Lion

I’ve been treading water this week, and haven’t been keeping up with the blogosphere.

So, I’m behind, but wanted to link to Everyblock…you know…so it’s linked.

Really great stuff, congrats Blockheads.

So, according to the Pragmatic Programmers you should learn a new language every year (two? I don’t remember for sure.)

Last year I specifically ignored this rule, and instead opted to learn Python more. I watched some Google Videos, read some books, spent more time looking at other people’s code, and generally didn’t gloss over the details that I had in the past. I dove deeper into the language, and am a better Python programmer this year than I was last year.

Which brings us to 2008. My side-learning-project time has been cut back by the glorious birth of the inheritor to the vast Lion-Empire I’ve built, Mr. William Christopher McAvoy. I’ve been paring down projects like a madman. Plus, my day job became tremendously satisfying, which always helps remove the need to do stuff on the side. That said, what little time I do have is currently taken up with tweaking old web projects, helping a friend with a new site, and helping (however small-ly) with Pycon.

Other than the constant old project tweaking, my schedule is relatively clear starting in mid-March. Which got me thinking about maybe learning a new language. I talk about this an awful lot, and rarely follow through, but it can’t hurt to talk about it again, right? I’m thinking it should be one that has little practical purpose, other than a joyous exploration of all things computer. So, something like Lisp, Scheme, Lua, Erlang, Haskell, or Lisp. Notice I said Lisp twice, Lisp is on the short-list.

I’ve posted these sorts of posts before, they usually go nowhere, so take this all with a heaping tablespoon of salt. Sometimes, I’m all talk…no action. We’ll see how this works out.

And really, as I sit here and think, I haven’t written a Tastebud article in ages, just bought an Arduino in the hopes I’d build something cool with all these wires and capacitors I own, and I recently committed to a new writing project that I’ll talk about later. So, really, maybe I don’t have time. Whatever I do, there will be extra points for a language I can learn on the train. As that’s about the only time I’ll really have to do any significant reading. Seriously though, I probably will just stick with what I know, and put any new creative energy I can muster into some of these other projects I’ve been messing around with.

Oh, and I like to play Eve, and got Mass Effect for Christmas. Two total nerd-time-sinks.

Register now for early bird prices.

Chicago! Hurray!

Thanks to Brian Ray for making it happen.

Live soul music always beats studio soul.

This is a few years old, but it’s clearly the greatest hip hop video of all time.

Slate.

Everyone playing these markets is using the same sources of information for their buys. The markets almost directly mirror the polls pre-caucus. So, really, what’s the point? The “wisdom” of the crowd is really only as good as the sources of information the crowd has available to it. Prediction markets are really supposed to aggregate opinions from a group, if the entire group has the exact same sources of information, and none of them are capable of adding any new ways of interpreting the information, then the “prediction” part of the market fails, and it really just becomes a mirror market.

In this case, it mirrored a bunch of failed polls. So, really, why aren’t these guys asking why the polls failed?

Paul Krugman, Justin Wolfers.

So…the wisdom of crowds sometimes doesn’t work out. Kind of like how mob mentality doesn’t always work out.

The paper I mentioned last week was published. It’s a pretty interesting read. I’ve only skimmed it, but I did find the bits I was interested in, how does the market work? They pick questions with 4-5 possible answers, like “how many gmail users will there be a) 1 million b) 2 million…” and run it for a quarter. At the end of the quarter, the securities pay out. Which backs up my belief that in order to be successful, a prediction market needs a feedback loop. It can’t just be abstract, there has to be an outcome for each security.

Ever since I started playing the Hollywood Stock Exchange, I’ve been interested in the idea of prediction markets, specifically ones that are used inside big companies to judge direction. I’ve heard that Google, Motorola, and some other biggees have them. In a guest blog post from Justin Wolfers on the Freakonomics Blog he writes that a paper will be presented at the upcoming annual meeting of the American Economic Association. From the post,

Finally, I’m really excited for a paper by Bo Cowgill, Zitzewitz, and myself that we will be debuting at this conference called “Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence from Google.” I can’t say too much about the paper (yet), but I hope to describe it in a future post. Let me say that Zitzewitz and I are working with Cowgill, the Google whiz who set up an amazing set of prediction markets within Google. We use these prediction markets to track very precisely how information flows within the Googleplex and beyond. The three of us are optimistic that this may be one of the most far-reaching assessments yet of what can be learned from corporate prediction markets.

Hopefully it’ll be posted online. I don’t really understand how a prediction market can be successful without pretty direct price adjustments based on real world events. The reason HSX works (in my opinion) is because the prices are adjusted based on the actual performance of the movie. Other prediction markets, like the O’Reilly Buzz Game don’t work because there’s never adjustments based on actual performance, only adjustment based on buying and selling the shares. The price is purely based on the market, not on any performance feedback. It’ll be interesting to see how Google does it.