InfernalMachine's dashboard

@anaverageamerican
Don't be anxious. Now that you've alerted us all to this, I'm sure we all will take advantage of it. Thanks for the tip.

Any chance we'll be able to get a text box to say something about ourselves as an alternative to the blog url? Maybe that's what you mean by wall? That would be excellent. Social's good.

I agree with this. I'm not entirely convinced that the plot of tv shows and the progress of reality shows is even Entertainment news. I'd accept award shows and maybe things like Pop Idol and its children shows (because they are very popular and they aren't pre-recorded later in their season, and mostly because the results are actually reported as news). But shows like Survivor aren't really reported as news any longer. Maybe I'm being too harsh here, but definitely Destry's point must be heeded.

I agree. This should be added to the rules and guidelines. Even if you follow this board, it's getting harder and harder to keep up with every new topic. I wonder if it's possible to "follow" new topics, so you can opt to get email each time a new topic is posted (this wouldn't mean you are following the new topic itself yet - you'd have to actually choose to do so).

But isn't 100km offshore well within the geo-political boundaries of Chile, which is part of South America geo-politically? I may be wrong, but I thought most countries on oceans claimed 200 miles.

I agree with the general point though. Much chaos is to be found at the boundary of things. At some point, some real attention is going to have to be paid to designing protocol for determining set membership, as well as dealing with what numbers mean and don't mean in scientific reportage. Problems with settlements are going to become a major hassle otherwise.

In this case, you can't really fault the question-creator with being too vague, and yet it turns out there's an arguably valid questioning of whether or not the settlement is correct. We're going to need a fairly detailed and exhaustive "fine print" addendum to the rules with extremely precise and clear rules for deciding questions, I believe.

And if you say only one question for Roadies, then does that also apply to possibly more popular questions about American Idol and Lost and Survivor. I see the difficulty at your end. A possible idea: in another thread here I brought up the idea of adding Comments to user pages so that we could communicate with others outside of the question threads. One benefit of this would be we could bug our friends to play our questions (the ones we wrote), and that would perhaps then allow you to add a quorum to markets in terms of participation (how about a minimum of 10 players?). With a quorum, there's less call for anything that might seem like censorship of questions.

In-play is addictive (and like most addictions it's all-encompassing until you realize that you're watching two sets of meaningless numbers go up and down all day long, and finding that really exciting). But I swear it's not the reason people are at the top of the leaderboard (it was perhaps in the early days of February, when a couple thousand up or down made a big difference to the top twenty standings). But all of the top five have impressive scores in one or more non-business categories. If there is an unfair profit to be made with in-play, it's likely to be found in the low-participation markets I talked about, because a few people are picking up 10-20K daily, simply for showing up. The Dow action is more about the gambling bug, and most lucky people don't get out in time to keep their winnings. In both the short and long term, I break even -- it's too volatile to impose a certain system on it, and besides, the cash-out costs restrict the winnings of high-turnover wagering. The only way to make a killing is to at some point buy into the unknown final correct answer, hopefully at ridiculously low odds, and still have that wager at settlement time That's the advantage that day-traders have: they can sometimes buy the "correct" tickets at 1% during the day, while they were 20% before the market opened. But they're only at 1% because everyone else trading at the moment really don't think it's going to be that result.

I thought the day-trading was the reason for wealth too. But a look at the leaders in the various subtopics shows a very different picture. It's kind of reassuring, but at the same time a bit depressing to see how well some people are doing at strict prediction.

Personally, other than the community aspects and the fact of being a news junkie, I find the discovering that markets "work" to be the most interesting thing about Hubdub. I'm still unsure of the predictive ability in general - I'm pushing for measurements of predictive correctness elsewhere - but the truth of the idea that markets are in many cases self-correcting I witness daily. But they do require certain pre-conditions to "work". Liquidity and participation, for sure, and maybe other things.

But the question in question was really not about e-bay auctions per se, but about a quirky news aspect possible regarding the satellite. I'd say it was legit (even if the satellite don't fit), especially with the stipulation that it had to be reported somewhere reputable as "news".

You make excellent points here, and I don't disagree with your thinking. As a Canadian, I love the questions that pop up from time to time about Canadian issues, not only because I have knowledge in them, but out of interest. But I also love the rugby and cricket questions, about which I know next to nothing, but which take me intellectually all over the world. So I'm agreed about the international and regional aspects you're talking about.

I see your point about discouragement regarding leaderboard display, but as you say, that will change over time.

However, I don't believe that the day-traders on Dow questions are gaining unfairly. A person who wagers once before the market opens and leaves it at that still wins what they were promised. Day traders make their money from the mistakes of other day traders, and from the fact that the odds jump around fairly dramatically and rapidly. For most of us, it's a way to lose money, or just break even, and winning big one day is no guarantee of not losing over the week. If you look at the Business leaderboard, you see that no-one has more than half of their gainings in that category, and that most of the top twenty have not earned their position with such earnings at all - they're actually good at predicting things.

But what I say about the other in-play markets (ie Asia and Europe exchanges) is based on a fair amount of experience (I have done okay on these), and the observation of some "odd" phenomena. I mean, if only 3-5 people are following the market and its question, then the only competition is who plunks the 10K bet first when it becomes clear what the result is going to be -- there's almost zero risk and a nice payout to be had. I'd say with such low participation there is a good argument to be made for these being handled the way sports questions are (suspend at open, not close). I'd certainly miss the in-play fun, but I do believe fairness comes into it somewhere.

I think, in general, that many of us are more than willing to try our hand at various questions about which we started knowing nothing. Perhaps, as you say, part of the problem is a certain difficulty in finding questions at the moment, which I assume will change. Scottish football - I'm there! Hibs or Hearts? But I'm not sure your example entirely wipes out the concerns I'm expressing in my original post. I mean, how many multiple-choice questions in general end up with less than 4K activity and one choice at 95%? Almost none that I have seen, with the exception of questions that become "obvious" while they're open. And this is not one question I'm pointing at, but a weekly series of many questions. And this is not the only such series.

So I appreciate your concerns about disincentives, but there's got to be some kind of restriction, or we're going to be awash in esoteric questions that most of the community, no matter from where they hail, have no interest in (no matter how much a citizen of the world they wish to be). At the least, the question of accuracy of suspend times should matter.

Maybe I overstated my opposition to FOX, but it wasn't stated that they were good for stats (which they well may be). What was said was that FOX was second in a "hierarchy of publications in settling US politics questions". To put that into the actual rules as stated opens Hubdub to a certain amount of ridicule from anyone who has followed the questionable editorializing of the news in favour of the Administration during the past 7 1/2 years. Not trying to make your job harder. Just thinking you might want to flesh that out a little, and maybe move FOX a little further down the list. Politics questions aren't all about primary pop. votes and delegate counts, and the NYT (as "paper of record") would in general be a preferred source to FOX, I believe, no matter one's political affiliation (excepting of course the recent controversial McCain piece!).

Thanks for the resettlement. I didn't stand to lose or win very much, but it's the principle (rather than the principal) ;-) that counts.

I can see how recalculating the current worth of all predictions second to second is probably not required, but the cash value not changing on transactions is disturbing. So it would be nice to have that functionality back, even if the predictions amount doesn't immediately reflect the transaction.

Now they're back convincingly in first. 270K to 65K and then up to 370K. That's some crazy action.