Nate Silver rates New York Citys neighborhoods… and Jason Ruspini objects.

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Nate Silver rates New York City&#8217-s neighborhoods.

Jason Ruspini:

The piece is problematic insofar as it underweights proximity to areas where people work, which results in high ratings for distant neighborhoods and low ratings for central ones, on top of the effect of higher rents in central neighborhoods. True, if you work from home, it might make more sense to live in the outer boroughs. But if you have a one hour + commute every day, it doesn&#8217-t really help that you happen to live near a subway stop and thus have a relatively high &#8220-transit&#8221- rating.

For the restaurant category, he seems to be considering quantity but not quality. How else does Long Island City have a higher rating than Gramercy/Flatiron, where 9 of the top 50 Zagats restaurants are located? I don&#8217-t even think that Long Island City beats Gramercy/Flatiron in terms of quantity either.

Ultimately, of course, preferences are too subjective to give one ordinal ranking, but the distance-to-average-work-location issue seems glaring, and increases the outer borough bias.

New Product Innovation: Enterprise Prediction Markets Can Help.

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Via the New York-based Yahoo! Research scientist who was video-interviewed by the New York Post, the other day- Teck-Hua Ho &amp- Kay-Yut Chen:

New Product Blockbusters: The Magic and Science of Prediction Markets
Teck-Hua Ho &amp- Kay-Yut Chen
50/1 (Fall 2007): 144-158

New product innovation is a strategic business activity that involves significant financial resources and managerial attention. Most new product launches fail because existing methods are unable to forecast their commercial successes accurately. In this article, we describe a market-based method to address this gap. This method capitalizes on the power of the “wisdom of crowds” by allowing people to interact in organized markets governed by well-defined rules. The working of these markets relies on five scientific principles referred to as I4C (pronounced as “I foresee”). These markets motivate people to share information freely through a price discovery process. Prediction markets seek information aggregation from a large group of diverse individuals by encouraging active participation. We demonstrate the power of the markets with real application examples from a wide variety of industries.

More:

The principles are incentive, indicator, improvement, independence, and crowd.

New Product Innovation: NewsFutures, Inkling Markets, Consensus Point and Xpree can help.

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New Product Innovation: Enterprise Prediction Markets Can Help.

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Via the New York-based Yahoo! Research scientist who was video-interviewed by the New York Post, the other day- Teck-Hua Ho &amp- Kay-Yut Chen:

New Product Blockbusters: The Magic and Science of Prediction Markets
Teck-Hua Ho &amp- Kay-Yut Chen
50/1 (Fall 2007): 144-158

New product innovation is a strategic business activity that involves significant financial resources and managerial attention. Most new product launches fail because existing methods are unable to forecast their commercial successes accurately. In this article, we describe a market-based method to address this gap. This method capitalizes on the power of the “wisdom of crowds” by allowing people to interact in organized markets governed by well-defined rules. The working of these markets relies on five scientific principles referred to as I4C (pronounced as “I foresee”). These markets motivate people to share information freely through a price discovery process. Prediction markets seek information aggregation from a large group of diverse individuals by encouraging active participation. We demonstrate the power of the markets with real application examples from a wide variety of industries.

More:

The principles are incentive, indicator, improvement, independence, and crowd.

New Product Innovation: NewsFutures, Inkling Markets, Consensus Point and Xpree can help.

Prostitution is inevitable, so we might as well legalize and regulate it.

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That&#8217-s what many libertarians think, right? But Nicholas Kristof has a piece in the New York Times that is well informed and balanced&#8230- and that could change the mind of some libertarians&#8230-

&#8220-Kristen&#8221- (outed in today&#8217-s NYT), photographed in a French port&#8230- (Saint Tropez, it is said, but I&#8217-m not so sure&#8230- St-Trop, as I know it, is a fishermen&#8217-s village&#8230-)

Kristen

Kristen

More on the Eliot Spitzer scandal from Slate&#8230-

Inside the Emperors Club V.I.P.

Suspicious Activity Report filed by Mr. Spitzer’s bank

Eliot Spitzer&#8217-s bio

Justin Wolfers is a wise man.

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Zubin Jelveh highlights this piece of wisdom (which I didn&#8217-t quote in my previous post):

It seems to me that the truly important violations of the public trust are when the power we give our government officials is sold, rather than what government officials choose to buy. Yet our political scandals are too often dominated by private mistakes, rather than public misdeeds. This is why I&#8217-m more worried about what the SEC is selling than what Eliot Spitzer has been buying.

Psstt&#8230- CNBC will have a special Eliot Spitzer piece starting at 8:00 PM EST, tonite (Wednesday, March 12), I&#8217-ve just heard.

Psstt&#8230- And &#8220-Page 6&#8243- has the pic of that woman, that &#8220-Kristen&#8221-&#8230-

Kristen

Room 871:

Room 871

The information technology that caught Eliot Spitzer

No GravatarEliot Spitzer

Read the previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • I get a kick each morning out of spying on the rich, famous, and powerful people updating their LinkedIn profile and connections. (Go to “InBox”, and click on “Network Updates”.)
  • ??? BetFair bet-matching logic ???
  • Eliot Spitzer has simply demonstrated once again that those who rise to the top of organizations are very often the most demented, conflicted individuals in any group.
  • Business Risks & Prediction Markets
  • Brand-new BetFair bet-matching logic proves to be very controversial with some event derivative traders.
  • Jimmy Wales accused of editing Wikipedia for donations.
  • What the prediction market experts said on Predictify

Faulty polls screw up the political prediction markets. – REDUX – The no polls case, now.

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Two days ago, I stated brashly that political prediction markets aggregate the polls, mainly. (Mike Linksvayer nuanced my propos, in the comment area.)

GOP Keeps Senate, Loses House, Betting Site Says. – [US political prediction markets] – by Ronald Kessler – 2006-10-24

One theory is that prediction markets are influenced by the results of opinion polls. But if that were true, individual polls would also influence each other. Moreover, long before the Internet and opinion polls came into existence, election betting was accurately predicting election outcomes. From 1884 to 1940, betting was conducted on Wall Street by specialized brokers called betting commissioners. The betting odds for each candidate were published daily in the New York Times and other papers. The so-called New York betting markets correctly predicted 12 of the 13 presidential elections between 1884 and 1940, according to Koleman S. Strumpf, Koch professor of economics, University of Kansas School of Business, who co-authored a paper examining the markets. In the one exception, the betting swung to even odds by the time the polls closed. The Gallup Poll, the first scientific opinion poll, began in 1935. The arrival of opinion polls and stricter anti-gambling laws drove out the New York betting markets. The Internet has led to their revival.

Paper: Historical Prediction Markets: Wagering on Presidential Elections – (PDF) – by Paul W. Rhode and Koleman S. Strumpf – 2003-11-10

My Question: Before 1935 (that&#8217-s when George Gallup crafted the first scientific polls), what the hell those political prediction markets were aggregating, for Christ&#8217-s sake??? And where is our good doctor Koleman Strumpf when we need him?

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Become “friend” with me on Google E-Mail so as to share feed items with me within Google Reader.
  • Nigel Eccles’ flawed “vision” about HubDub shows that he hasn’t any.
  • How does InTrade deal with insider trading?
  • Modern Life
  • “The Beacon” is an excellent blog published by The Independent Institute.
  • The John Edwards Non-Affair… is making Memeorandum (twice), again.
  • Prediction Markets = marketplaces for information trading… and for separating the wheat from the chaff.