Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed

Want to take part in a prediction/forecasting tournament and aid research? Here’s your chance to take part by being a member of a team doing so in national security, global affairs and economics:

Prediction markets can harness the “wisdom of crowds” to solve problems, develop products, and make forecasts. These systems typically treat collective intelligence as a commodity to be mined, not a resource that can be grown and improved. That’s about to change.

Starting in mid-2011, five teams will compete in a U.S.-government-sponsored forecasting tournament. Each team will develop its own tools for harnessing and improving collective intelligence and will be judged on how well its forecasters predict major trends and events around the world over the next four years.

The Good Judgment Team, based in the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California Berkeley, will be one of the five teams competing – and we’d like you to consider joining our team as a forecaster. If you’re willing to experiment with ways to improve your forecasting ability and if being part of cutting-edge scientific research appeals to you, then we want your help.

We can promise you the chance to: (1) learn about yourself (your skill in predicting – and your skill in becoming more accurate over time as you learn from feedback and/or special training exercises); (2) contribute to cutting-edge scientific work on both individual-level factors that promote or inhibit accuracy and group- or team-level factors that contribute to accuracy; and (3) help us distinguish better from worse approaches to generating forecasts of importance to national security, global affairs, and economics.

Apply here.

• Evolution of worldwide stock markets, correlation structure and correlation based
• graphs (Source)
• Debt: The first five thousand years – David Graeber (Source)
• Visualization font (Source)
• The Future of Books. (Source)
• Tesla Sues BBC For Libel Claiming Top Gear Rigged Tests, BBC “will be vigorously defending” (Source)
• Tesla’s statement on Top Gear suit (Source)

For something else I’ve been working on, some readings on first-to-file versus first-to-invent and patent reform.

• Novelty and disclosure in patent law, Rand Journal
• The end of the first-to-invent rule: A concise history of its origin, IDEA – The Intellectual Property Law Review
• From first-to-invent to first-to-file, the Canadian experience, American Intellectual Property Law Association
• U.S. inventors on their markets for race to patent office, New Scientist

Nifty animation of changes in global land use from 8000 BP to -50 BP. I wish it was a little faster and I had to turn off the sound, but still interesting:

More here.

• Top 20 Countries in all research fields (Source)
• Lincoln, Neb. Most Satisifed US City (Source)
• Propagation of Cascades in Complex Networks: From Supply Chains to Food Webs (Source)
• The revival of cookstove research (Source)
• Radiation Dosage Chart (Source)
• Coal from here to eternity (Source)
• The citation cycle (Source)

From an editor at the New Scientist, where the Fukushima reactor would come out if it went straight thru center of earth and poped out other side. Good to know.

[via Die Welt]

Astonishing stuff from ETH in Zurich:

I propose a new early-stage funding nomenclature. Talking in terms of millions of dollars is both too specific and too fuzzy to be useful. Even when you know the amount, it’s hard to put it in context without knowing everything else being funded right now. We need a new system normalized to the current world of seed and Series A venture financing.

Enter the “color”. Based on the recent $41m financing of Color.com by Sequoia and Bain, I propose a system whereby “color” would be the base unit. We would then use metric prefixes to describe financings larger, smaller, etc than that amount.

For those of you unfamiliar with metric (read: Americans), it would work like this:

10 microcolors = 1 millicolor ($41,000)
10 millicolors = 1 centicolor ($410k)
10 centicolors = 1 decicolor ($4.1m)
10 decicolors = 1 color ($41m)
10 colors = 1 dekacolor ($410m)
10 dekacolors = 1 hectocolor ($4.1b)
10 hectocolors = 1 kilocolor ($41b)

So, rather than saying company XYZ raised $20m, we would henceforth say it raised about 50 centicolors, or 0.5 colors, whatever you’re comfortable with. I think it’s easier to say 50 centicolors in cases like that, but the the Financing System Internationale (FSI) would provide that flexibility. Similarly a small seed financing of $50k would be 1.1 millicolors. You see? Much better. [-]

[Kudos to Eric Norlin who did some of the foundational research underlying this new system.]

This is a little like tossing a camera into a washing machine during spin cycle, but a skier in British Columbia with a helmet cam got caught in an avalanche and accidentally filmed the whole thing. [-]

Revelatory stuff in a new SciAm piece about the historical origins of beer:

She cited colleagues who have advanced theories that humans first domesticated cereal crops to make beer, not just bread, and that humans evolved to associate ethanol, which is present in ripe fruit, with satiety. The various lines of evidence indicate that beer may well be as old as cooking itself, which began at least 250,000 years ago. “When people started harnessing fire and cooking, they probably started making beer”

More beer, I mean here.