Category Archives: commentary

commentary, politics

Not the lesser of two evils

Every election, many voters rationalize their choice as the “lesser of two evils”.1

However, for me, this year’s election is not about the lesser of evils.

In fact, for the first time I can remember, I actually like both major candidates in the US Presidential election.

I like Obama more and I voted for him2 — I think he’s smarter, inspires optimism, and has better policies and people surrounding him. But I like many aspects of McCain including how he denounced Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and the extreme religious right they represent.3

If the party of less government could ever manage to stop legislating morality, I might actually consider voting for them. By the opposite logic, I imagine some evangelicals actually hope that Obama wins, thus strengthening their argument that Republicans can’t win without them.

On a related note, I received an email chain letter from a Snopes-averse source4 warning that McCain’s campaign is sending out erroneous absentee ballot applications to Obama supporters in an attempt to disqualify voters. Initially I dismissed it as conspiracy theory. Then, a few days ago, I received an absentee ballot application in the mail myself, even though I had just finished voting! For a moment, I thought I was a target of the scam with the evidence right in my hand. I could feel the blograge composing in my head.

So I investigated. (Read: conducted a few web searches.)

The Wisconsin State Journal (in)concludes that McCain either meddled or messed up, with benefit of the doubt going to the latter. Blackboxvoting.com (not affiliated with Bev Harris’s more cited blackboxvoting.org) paints a picture of more widespread fraud and malicious intent.

And it seems that the application I received was a legitimate and well intentioned mailing from the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund, a left-leaning environmental organization. The application’s return address had one line missing and an incorrect zip code by one digit, but the address was “correct” in the sense that it would almost surely end up at the right place, so I believe this was not part of any intentional plot to mislead.5 Still, the whole ordeal got me thinking that perhaps all unsolicited applications for absentee ballots should be outlawed — there’s just too much room for error, both malicious and inadvertent.

1Likely more a testament to the effectiveness of attack ads than anything else, and one of the many maddening features of a duop-racy.
2If the choice had been between Clinton and McCain, I think I would have had a harder decision.
3I also like the fact that he defied Bush on torture and held firm on the Iraq surge, a strategy that seems to have helped, despite the political consequences. On the other hand, I cringe at the thought of a President Palin, an outcome with a better than 1 in 7 chance of happening if elected, according to one estimate.
4My mom! 🙂
5You decide: The return address on the application is: Middlesex County Clerk, PO Box 1110, New Brunswick, NJ 08903-1110. The correct address is County Clerk, Hon. Elaine Flynn, P.O. Box 1110, 75 Bayard Street, 4th Floor, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1110.
advertising, commentary, economics, incentives, ratings, spam

The seedy side of Amazon's Mechanical Turk

25 Comments

I mostly side with Lukas and Panos on the fantastic potential of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing service specializing in tiny payments for simple tasks that require human brainpower, like labeling images. Within the field of computer science alone, this type of service will revolutionize how empirical research is done in communities from CHI to SIGIR, powering unprecedented speed and scale at low cost (here are two examples). My guess is that the impact will be even larger in the social sciences; already, a number of folks in Yahoo’s Social Dynamics research group have started running studies on mturk. (A side question is how university review boards will react.)

However there is a seedier side to mturk, and I’m of two minds about it. Some people use the service to hire sockpuppets to enter bogus ratings and reviews about their products and engage in other forms of spam. (Actually this appears to violate mturk’s stated policies.)

For example, Samuel Deskin is offering up to ten cents to turkers willing to promote his new personalized start page samfind.

EARN TEN CENTS WITH THE BONUS – EASY MONEY – JUST VOTE FOR US AND COMMENT ABOUT US

EARN FOUR CENTS IF YOU:

1. Set up an anoymous email account likke gmail or yahoo so you can register on #2 anonymously

2. Visit http://thesearchrace.com/signup.php and sign up for an account – using your anonymous email account.

3. Visit http://www.thesearchrace.com/recent.php and vote for:

samfind

By clcking “Pick”

SIX CENTS BONUS:

4. Visit the COMMENTS Page on The Search Race, it is the Button Right Next to “Picks” on this page: http://www.thesearchrace.com/recent.php and

5. Say something awesome about samfind (http://samfind.com) on The Search Race’s Comments page.

Make sure to:

1. Tell us that you Picked us.
2. Copy and Paste the Comment you typed on The Search Race’s Comment page here so we know you wrote it and we will give you the bonus!

In fact, Deskin is currently offering bounties on mturk for a number of different spammy activities to promote his site. On the other hand, what Deskin is doing is not illegal and is arguably not all that different than paying PRWEB to publish his rah-rah press release (Start-up, samfind, Launches Customizable Startpage to Compete with Google, Yahoo & MSN, Los Angeles, California (PRWEB) August 4, 2008). And I have to at least give him credit for offering the money under his own name.

Another type of task on mturk involves taking a piece of text and paraphrasing it so that the words are different but the meaning remains the same. Here is an example:

Paraphrase This Paragraph

Here’s the original paragraph:

You’re probably wondering how to apply a wrinkle filler to your skin. The good news is that it’s easy! There are a number of different products on the market for anti aging skin care. Each one comes with its own special application instructions, which you should always make sure to read and carefully follow. In general, however, most anti aging skin care products are simply applied to the skin and left to soak in.

Requirements:
1. Use the same writing style as much as possible.
2. Vary at least 50% of the words and phrases – but keep the same concepts. Use obviously different sentences! Your paragraph should not be just a copy of the first with a few word replacements.
3. Any keywords listed in bold in the above paragraph must be included in your paraphrase.
4. The above paragraph contains 75 words… yours must contain at least 64 words and not more than 101 words.
5. Write using American English.
6. No obvious spelling or grammar mistakes. Please use a spell-checker before submitting. A free online spell checker can be found at www.spellcheck.net.

If you find it easier to paraphrase sentence-by-sentence, then do that. Please do not enter anything in the textbox other than your written paragraph. Thanks!

I have no direct evidence, but I imagine such a task is used to create splogs (I once found what seems like such a “paraphrasing splog”), ad traps, email spam, or other plagiarized content.

It’s possible that paid spam is hitting my blog (either that or I’m overly paranoid). I’m beginning to receive comments that are almost surely coming from humans, both because they clearly reference the content of the post and because they pass the re-captcha test. However, the author’s URL seems to point to an ad trap. I wonder if these commenters (who are particularly hard to catch — you have to bother to click on the author URL) are paid workers of some crowdsourcing service?

Can and should Amazon try to filter away these kinds dubious uses of Mechanical Turk? Or is it better to have this inevitable form of economic activity out in the open? One could argue that at least systems like mturk impose a tax on pollution and spam, something long argued as an economic force to reduce spam.

My main objection to these activities is the lack of disclosure. Advertisements and press releases are paid for, but everyone knows it, and usually the funding source is known. However, the ratings, reviews, and paraphrased text coming out of mturk masquerade as authentic opinions and original content. I absolutely want mturk to succeed — it’s an innovative service of tremendous value, one of many to come out of Amazon recently — but I believe Amazon is risking a minor PR backlash by allowing these activities to flow through its servers and by profiting from them.

commentary, prediction markets

A historic MayDay: The US government’s call for help on regulating prediction markets

6 Comments

May 1, 2008 could signal a turning point for the prediction markets industry.*

Yesterday, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) issued a request for public comments as they mull over the legal and regulatory status of prediction markets.

I read the Concept Release in detail, and I am happy to report that it is a careful, thoughtful, even scholarly document that reflects a solid understanding of the goals of prediction markets, and that appears to signal a real willingness on the part of the CFTC to consider reasonable options and arguments.

In short, this development leaves the optimist in me dreaming of a day in the not so distant future when US companies can try out some truly innovative products.

It’s not often that an industry in its infancy cries out for more government oversight. But the CFTC is certainly preferable to the gambling Gestapo.

Anyone who desires to see more prediction markets in the US, please let the CFTC know what you think!

*Or not.
commentary, prediction markets, probability

Reporting prediction market prices

3 Comments

Reuters recently ran a story on political prediction markets, quoting prices from intrade and IEM. (Apparently the story was buzzed up to the Yahoo! homepage and made the Drudge Report.)

The reporter phrased prices in terms of the candidates’ percent chance of winning:

Traders … gave Democratic front-runner Barack Obama an 86 percent chance of being the Democratic presidential nominee, versus a 12.8 percent for Clinton…

…traders were betting the Democratic nominee would ultimately become president. They gave the Democrat a 59.1 percent chance of winning, versus a 48.8 percent chance for the Republican.

The latter numbers imply an embarrassingly incoherent market, giving the Democrats and Republicans together a 107.9% chance of winning. This is almost certainly the result of a typo, since the Republican candidate on intrade has not been much above 40 since mid 2007.

Still, typos aside, we know that the last-trade prices of candidates on intrade and IEM often don’t sum to exactly 100. So how should journalists report prediction market prices?

Byrne Hobart suggests they should stick to something strictly factual like "For $4.00, an investor could purchase a contract which would yield $10.00" if the Republican wins.

I disagree. I believe that phrasing prices as probabilities is desirable. The general public understands “percent chance” without further explanation, and interpreting prices in this way directly aligns with the prediction market industry’s message.

When converting prices to probabilities, is a journalist obligated to normalize them so they sum to 100? Should journalists report last-trade prices or bid-ask spreads or something else?

My inclination is that bid-ask spreads are better. Something like "traders gave the Democrats between a 22 and 30 percent chance of winning the state of Arkansas". These will rarely be inconsistent (otherwise arbitrage is sitting on the table) and the phrasing is still relatively easy to understand.

Avoiding this (admittedly nitpicky) dilemma is another advantage of automated market makers like Hanson’s. The market maker’s prices always sum to exactly 100, and the bid, ask, and last-trade prices are one and the same. Auction-type mechanisms like intrade’s can also be designed better so that prices are automatically kept consistent.

advertising, commentary, gambling, yahoo

Gambling advertising legal silliness

10 Comments

Google AdSense ads on intrade.comThe absurdity of gambling laws in the US leads to such silliness as:

  • In 2007, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! paid millions in penalties for placing gambling ads, something they haven’t done since they were told to stop in 2004.

  • Yahoo! can quote prices from intrade, but can’t link to intrade.

  • Google can’t advertise for intrade/tradesports, but can place AdSense ads on intrade.com and tradesports.com. In other words, Google can’t sell eyeballs to gambling sites, but can sell eyeballs on gambling sites.
commentary, fun, prediction markets

The proverbial wisdom of crowds

3 Comments

I am fascinated by thingnaming.

In some ways there is no more straightforward way to certify your influence on the world than to count the number of times people use a word or phrase you invented.

On this count, James Surowiecki is a champion.1 His catch phrase the wisdom of crowds — a brilliant feat of thingnaming — has in four short years spread to over 2.1 million nooks and crannies around the web.2

In fact, BusinessWeek reporter Jennifer L. Schenker recently termed it the “proverbial wisdom of the crowd”. [Finding faces in the e-crowd, Businessweek, Dec 24, 2007, p.70]

At first I meant to poke fun at Schenker for attributing this adjective associated with adages of ancient origin to a four-year-old artifact.

However, digging further, I noticed that Schenker is right. Another use of the word proverbial is “having become an object of common mention or reference”, for example “your proverbial inability to get anywhere on time”.

Interestingly, a pun on Surowiecki’s phrase appears in the same issue of BusinessWeek. Stephen Baker’s long (yet remarkably content-free) piece on cloud computing is titled Google and the wisdom of clouds.

It’s amazing how crucial a good thingname can be to the success of a thing. Thanks James!

1Of course, beyond thingnaming, Surowiecki wrote a fantastic book that helped catalyze an industry, among his other plentiful contributions and accomplishments.
2For examples of unsuccessful thingnaming look here and here.
commentary

1 year is more than 1% of your life

2 Comments

“No duh,” you might say.

Or, “no it’s not,” you might say.

Still, I find it a powerful thought. One year seems like almost nothing — it can pass in a flash. I’ve procrastinated many projects and reunions well past one year without blinking. Yet 1% of a life seems monstrous. Thinking of a year in this way seems to put it in perspective.

Coming soon: 3.65 days is 1% of a year…
53 minutes is…

commentary, fun, oddhead blog

The Economist makes up

2 Comments

Here’s an update on my fractured relationship with The Economist magazine.

To my pleasant surprise, Alan Press, Vice President of Marketing & Circulation at The Economist actually posted a comment on my blog agreeing to cease and desist their renewal scare tactics!

We agree, the language is bad. We are discontinuing the use of this letter going forward, and will replace it with a message that makes clear how much we value readers like you.

(I didn’t notice the concession at first, as his comment got stuck in my Akismet spam folder for several days.)

I thought this was a stand-up gesture. I temporarily felt all warm and fuzzy about the good old days when The Economist and I first met. In all seriousness, I do appreciate the public comment and the prompt/effective action.

So are we getting back together?

That’s none of your business!

In any case, I’m happy to see blogplaining/freedbacking actually have an effect.

advertising, commentary, prediction markets, yootleoffer

Predictions: Apple bites, Google eats

1 Comment

Happy 5768 everyone!

Time for some predictions.

  1. Apple bites into PC pie. Apple Computer (remember them?) will attain at least 30% PC market share by 5772.

    Probability: 40% ; Willing to stake: $Y20

    On the front lines, silver Powerbooks are infiltrating in droves. At techie conventions and computer science conferences, penetration has gone from almost zero to something approaching 1/3 by anecdotal evidence. Wandering about these venues, it’s not terribly uncommon to see a table of three or four who apparently all agree to think different. At Yahoo!, more and more of Jobs’s ministers are simply preaching to the converted. In our Yahoo! Research New York office, for example, laps are topped at least two to one with half-eaten half-glowing apples. Even tech celeb Marc Andreessen has returned to the fold.

    But can the Apple bug jump from geeks to grandmas? (Well, my daughters’ grandma is already infected.) I’m guessing so. After all, these same alphadopters led the way to mp3s, Google, Wikipedia, Slashdot, blogs, Firefox, Digg, and Homestar Runner, unlocking remarkable truths along the way like “web search can be monetized”, “Really Simple trumps Really Smart”, and “give up now, Friendster has already won”. (Oops.)

    Why is there an Apple renaissance on the desktop? A big reason is that the OS’s natural monopoly is not so natural anymore. Today, the browser is the most important piece of software on your computer, and a viable cross-platform browser (Firefox) exists that almost every web site designs to. A second reason: it turns out that Intel chips are faster and better than PowerPC chips after all, despite decades of vehement Apple fanboy arguments to the contrary. Third, Apple’s built-in iLife software suite really is astonishingly useful and well designed and speaks to the new killer apps of the desktop: pictures, music, video, web, and email. A final reason is, well, Apple is cool, and technology is at least as much about fashion as function, or at least more than geeks would like to admit.

    Disagreers can accept my yootleoffer or put your play money where your mouth is on related bets at PPX and Inkling.

    (Side note: My take on Apple’s fumbled iPhone price cut: I believe that Apple reacted in fear of the looming gPhone. However, if history is a guide, that fear may be an exaggerated fear of the unknown.)

  2. Google eats its own dog food. Google buys an advertisement by the end of 5768.

    Probability: 60% ; Willing to stake: $Y20

    Google is the king of selling advertisements. So they must believe that advertising is effective, right? Then why doesn’t Google advertise for itself? (I’m not counting recruiting ads.) I’m guessing the reason is that they don’t have to. As a media darling, they get more than enough free press to catalyze their already monstrous word of mouth. I expect that as the glow wears off, as some of the not not evil jabs — deserved or not — start to stick, and as they settle into Big Company mode, you will start to see Google spots on TV and elsewhere.

2007/09/17 Update: Sean McNee noticed that Google is advertising Google Apps to enterprise customers on VentureBeat and the Seattle Times [example ad image]. As a result, let me update my prediction to “Google buys a TV ad for Google.com aimed at mass consumers”.

2007/09/19 Update: Maverick blogger, Maverick owner, Yahoo! benefactor, and uber alphadopter Mark Cuban is dancing with the Steves.

2010 Update: I was right, just 1.5 years too early. In other words, I was wrong.

commentary, fun

My ugly breakup with The Economist

11 Comments

Have you ever broken up with someone and their reaction was so ugly that that it made you realize how glad you are to be out of the relationship?

Me either.

But that’s how I felt after dropping my subscription to The Economist magazine.

Here is the text of my final renewal notice:

Dear David Pennock,

Your timing could hardly be worse.

Just as the world is connecting,
opening up unprecedented opportunities …

…you go and break your connection to The Economist.

Is it the bottom line? Cost cutting? It’s true you’ll save a bit by cutting The Economist. But think what you’ll lose. Bottom lines don’t replace communication lines. Won’t you please use this opportunity to reinstate your subscription and restore your special world-connection?

Or, as I interpret it: “Please please please, you stupid cheapskate.” I guess there’s nothing like a pretentious magazine marketing department scorned.

Sorry, Economist, you have a lot going for you and I enjoyed our time together, but it’s time to move on.