Alkahest my heroes have always died at the end

December 23, 2007

Information markets

Filed under: Technical — cec @ 5:32 pm

One of my projects at work involves information markets: tools to extract aggregate knowledge from groups of people.  For example, at Intrade, you can buy and sell contracts on questions like, “who will be the democratic nominee for president?” or “how likely is it that the US economy will slip into recession?”  The market price reflects the cumulative belief that a given event has a certain probability.

IEEE Spectrum also recently did a piece on information markets which talked about Microsoft’s use of a market in 2004 to predict the likelihood of an internal product meeting its production schedule.  By opening the market to its employees, who presumably had knowledge of the issues with the product, Microsoft predicted that it would ship three months late – which it did.

All of that got me to thinking about how much fun (and subversive 😉 ) an employee operated information market would be.  The questions are great: “how likely is it that we’ll be re-organized my March?”  “will the next good job go to the boss’s friend, neighbor or gardener?”  “which product will be selected in the next RFP?”  “how likely is this project to fail (or succeed)?”

If anyone wants to set up something like that, I’ve got some code, or you can use Zocalo.

Break-in Update

Filed under: Personal — cec @ 4:43 pm

It’s been about a week and a half since the attempted break-in.

On Tuesday, I replaced the window they broke out.  I called around to a couple of different places and everyone said that they could send someone out to give an estimate, but it would take a few days and then the part would be on order for another 3-5 days.  Fortunately, on local glass shop said that if I brought them the sill in the morning, they would be able to replace the glass that afternoon.  So I spent the morning taking apart the window.  It turned out to be easier than I thought, but I did have to take off the lower sill to get to the upper.

I got the sill to the glass shop and they managed to replace the glass by the 5:15.  I brought it hope and replaced the window in just a half hour or so.  Yay!

Today I found out that the same morning someone was broken into down the street on the same day as our attempted break-in and in the same way.  For a variety of reasons, they suspect contractors at the two construction sites in the neighborhood.  They’re chasing down the details of who was on site, etc.  Hopefully they can track down enough information to identify the burglars.

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