Musings of a computer scientist on predictions, odds, and markets
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- Why Mitt Romney Won’t Pick Chris Christie as His Running Mate - Yahoo! News February 2, 2012Professor John A. Tures, LaGrange College (via Yahoo! Contributor Network) reacts to my analysis of the most likely Republican vice presidential pairings, arguing (well) against Chris Christie. Nice article. […]
- Jacob Abernethy - Google+ - Following up on the previous post, I've had something on my… February 1, 2012nice summary of piracy issue by Jake Abernethy […]
- Romney-Christie, Gingrich-Rubio are most likely ticket pairings January 31, 2012I'm block quoted here […]
- Ingraham: Maybe the Tea Party isn’t as strong as the media thinks « Hot Air January 31, 2012I'm block quoted in this article […]
- Yahoo data scientist: It’s Romney-Christie or Gingrich-Rubio — Cloud Computing News January 31, 2012I'm quoted/cited in this (not particularly good) gigaom article: "According to a predictive analysis experiment by a Yahoo data scientist, U.S. voters can expect to see either a Mitt Romney-Chris Christie or a Newt Gingrich-Marco Rubio ticket to face off against Obama-Biden in this year’s presidential election. The experiment, which author David Pe […]
Explainers
The wisdom of the ProbabilitySports crowd
One of the purest and most fascinating examples of the “wisdom of crowds” in action comes courtesy of a unique online contest called ProbabilitySports run by mathematician Brian Galebach. In the contest, each participant states how likely she thinks it is that a team will win a particular sporting event. For example, one contestant may [...]
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Find where your polling place isn't
Just in time for Election Day Tuesday November 4, 2008, here is an extremely un-useful mapping service to help you find exactly where not to go on election day in order to cast your vote.
Click here to find where your polling place isn’t for this election
For example, here is precisely where I would not go to vote if I lived where I work which I don’t:
Ok, what’s the point of this you ask?
Well, first, there is little point — it’s mostly a joke.
Beyond that, it’s meant as a satirical commentary on the inability of computers to understand satirical commentary.
Search engine algorithms and search advertising algorithms can’t distinguish well between “polling place is” and “polling place is not”.
Enough googlebombing and I’d wager the above link could rise in the ranks for search queries like polling place.
Enough money and a griefer serious about policing the Internet’s un-seriousness could advertise the link to people searching for their polling place in battleground zip codes, keeping the ad text perfectly factual with a few well placed negations, bypassing human editors at least for a few crucial hours.
In a way, it’s a thought experiment into our future as robots replace humans in the workforce, in this case librarians and editors.
The site is not meant to fool people, even foolish people, only computers.