Wikipedia Edits Forecast Vice Presidential Picks 152
JimLane writes "The Washington Post reports on the findings of Cyveillance, a company that 'normally trawls the Internet for data on behalf of clients seeking open source information in advance of a corporate acquisition, an important executive hire, or brand awareness.' Cyveillance decided 'on a lark' to test its methods by monitoring the Wikipedia biographies of Vice-Presidential prospects. The conclusion? If you'd been watching Wikipedia you might have gotten an advance tipoff of Friday's announcement that McCain was selecting Sarah Palin. 'At approximately 5 p.m. ET (Thursday), the company's analysts noticed a spike in the editing traffic to Palin's Wiki page, and that some of the same Wiki users appeared to be making changes to McCain's page.'" The article goes on to say that watching Wikipedia pages for the Democratic VP hopefuls would have tipped Obama's choice of Biden, as well. NPR also has coverage (audio).
What's This? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What's This? (Score:4, Interesting)
It is called traffic analysis. An old trick of what used to be called trade craft and probably is by the spooks
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It is called traffic analysis. An old trick of what used to be called trade craft and probably is by the spooks
They could have figured out the same thing if they had paid attention to the increase in pizza-deliveries to the alaska governor's mansion for the two days beforehand too.
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It is called traffic analysis. An old trick of what used to be called trade craft and probably is by the spooks
Except that they used to literally analyze traffic - if you see a lot of cars in a parking lot overnight, it means people are working late hours and that, presumably, something is happening. If you see triple the usual amount of cars parked outside the Department of Defense, it may be something to phone home about.
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"They" didn't use it to analyze literal traffic. "They" used it to analyze the flow of communications, for things like who talks to who. If you have monitoring in place, you can uncover communication hubs that are a) critical to the flow of information and b) are likely command centers who's destruction would leave opposing military momentarily crippled.
The wikipedia stuff is a bit stronger than mere traffic analysis. It is similar, though. We know the contents of edits, and which page they intend to edit.
Re:What's This? (Score:5, Interesting)
So if an event is expected it may pay off to monitor the Wikipedia traffic to the related pages and by that forgo the official announcement.
This poses some interesting prospects. Like if it was possible for party A to beforehand predict that a certain alternative was going to be selected by party B and therefore making that selection problematic.
Only way around this is of course to make sure that the inner circle doesn't use the web for a while before official announcements are done.
And this does of not only apply to politics but also to a lot of other events. Like potential inside affairs when it comes to buying/selling on the stock market. Pattern analysis evolves, and it may not even be necessary to actually listen in to a certain message, just measure the amount of traffic to a certain node to make a statistically based deduction. So even if you encrypt your information it may be traced and therefore provide valuable information.
At least we do live in interesting times!
Re:What's This? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's This? (Score:5, Funny)
Think of the cable news effects.
Olberman: This just in: Oh My God! Traffic analysis on Wikipedia seems to indicate that Michael Moore might pick me to be his Vice President! I'm going to need a private moment, folks. Excuse me.
Re:What's This? (Score:4, Funny)
To commit suicide ?
Re:What's This? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What's This? (Score:5, Insightful)
Only way around this is of course to make sure that the inner circle doesn't use the web for a while before official announcements are done.
The problem is of course that they want the biographies "updated" for all the press and other interested parties that are going to hit Google in the first hour after the announcement.
So much more likely will be that before such announcements, they will update like ten or twenty biographies, to mask which is the real one.
That of course if they care enough.
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So much more likely will be that before such announcements, they will update like ten or twenty biographies, to mask which is the real one.
Perhaps, although personally I would prepare any edits in advance and make them at exactly the same time as any announcement (/leak or whatever)
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This story is completely meaningless.
Anyone can stand up after the fact and say "Hey! I could've predicted this!"
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I had a feeling someone would say that.
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Palin is still a ReThuglican Jew Puppet cunt!
Another 4 years of that Jew Puppet Bu$Hitler Chimpy McHaliburtin
I am sure her down syndrome kid will make a good ReThuglican. It is already smaller than Chimpy the Jew Boy.
Vote for Hope
Vote for Change
Vote for Obama.
Just so you know.... this kind of talk actually hurts your cause... or did you really think someone would read your comment and say "oh wow, she really is a jew puppet cunt; I'm going to vote for Obama now!" ?.
Reverse Troll? (Score:5, Insightful)
This may be an example of a reverse troll. By taking an extreme opposite position, it makes your position look more reasonable.
Republicans did this about 10 years ago, by pretending to be really annoying Democrats, calling people at inopportune hours, etc.
Re:Reverse Troll? (Score:5, Interesting)
>Republicans did this about 10 years ago, by pretending to be really annoying Democrats, calling people at inopportune hours, etc.
[CITATION NEEDED]
Searching republican "false flag" robocalls [google.com] brings up hundreds of good hits on it.
Here's the first hit [talkingpointsmemo.com] describing a series of MORE THAN 20 harrassing calls, pretending to be from the Democratic candidate. The Republicans act like jackasses making harrassing robocalls, trying to trick people into thinking the Democrat is the evil jackass, so that people will get annoyed and vote Republican.
Republicans have done it countless times across the country. Here's the Slashot story [slashdot.org] on it. It cites it happening in 53 Congressional districts in 2006. So these false flag tactics are a common Republican ploy. The only problem with the original post is that it said "Republicans did this about 10 years ago". Republicans still do it. I hardly expect them to stop just for the 2008 election.
If you, or anyone you know, gets annoying robocalls "from Democrats", they are likely from Republicans. They also like to run bogus phone "polls". They will ask wildly biased questions like "Candidate X voted against a law to protect children from pedophiles, does this make you more or less likely to vote for candidate X?" Where of course candidate "X" is the democratic candidate. By inserting "facts" about their opponent into "questions", they make it sound like innocent neutral information from an innocent neutral source, to hide the fact that they are actually wildly biased and distorted accusations being flung by a Republican smear campaign.
-
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Nor are misdeeds limited to one political party.
Completely agreed.
Politics sucks. Both parties suck.
However it would be a fallacy to suggest that makes them equal.
Both parties can engage in misdeeds where the misdeeds of one party are comparatively rare and/or minor while the misdeeds of the other are comparatively common and/or more severe.
There's not one unified Republican body, nor one unified Democratic body.
Both parties do have a leadership and command structure, and both parties have state and local l
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The Democrats used to be the lesser of two evils, but they're just not in the same class of evil as the Republicans anymore.
As someone smarter, or at least wittier, than I said here on Slashdot a couple or three years ago, "The Republicans are the party of evil, and the Democrats are the party of stupid."
I'm still willing to consider them the lesser of two weasels, however.
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More than likely he's an agent provocateur from the other side. /.
Stranger things have been seen on
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Which is likely why it was anonymous, as it's real intent was to damage the person it supposedly was promoting. In the political scene it has often proven advantageous to smear the person running for election based upon the fringe elements of their supporters and where that proves insufficient actually using agents provocateur. Pointless on slashdot as it was bound to get -1 troll.
From a foreigners point of view it seems rather, well, bizarre to focus to much attention on who the running mate is, what, d
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this kind of talk actually hurts your cause
One possibility is that is someone deliberately playing troll and mixing random offensive stuff, or it was obviously a racist Republican. Republicans routinely hurt their own cause with racist comments.... those evil Democrats make Republicas "unfairly" lose votes whigning about Republican comments.... so that would be a clumsy attempt at "turnabout is fair play" trying to make Democrats lose votes by pretending to be a Democrat making racist comments.... so that t
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[quote]
On the DNC's website, the entire period from 1848 to the end of the 19th century is conveniently missing. Perhaps they'd like to sanitize the fact that they were the Party of Slavery, secession, Jim Crow, lynching, Segregation, KKK terrorism, and opposition to 100 years of Republican civil rights legislation . . . but we do not forget.
[/quote]
Yes, it's true. American "democrats" (who are not really "democratic") conveniently rewrite history to make themselves look like the good guys.
Completely forget
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Personally I think the Dems were the better party up until after JFK. (And after the whole slavery thing.)
Lyndon Johnson created the big government programs and turned them into the welfare party.
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Yeah. It was originally a Republican president that freed the slaves and Democrats controlling the South and passing and defending racist laws. It's funny how the two parties can so completely reverse on things in a half century. Now nearly all blacks and an overwhelming majority of Jews and Asians and others are welcome in the Democratic party. And so the racist asshats have fled-from and are terrified-by the minority-loaded Democratic party. They fled to, and now infest, the Republican party.
It's kinda sa
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I've been so engulfed by Jewish culture here in Pikesville MD, and have been part of it for so ling that I sometimes forget that this sort of bigotry is actually still out there.I'm equally astounded that someone even considers a persons religious background as more than a biographical note when forming an opinion of them.
I'm starting to remember why I don't bother with that outside world much.
I'm originally from Maryland, you need to get outside a little more. You'll see it as soon as you get out of the b
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The method of analysis is quite a bit more mundane than you seem to be implying here. Every Wi
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Just one more example of wikipedia's "neutrality" NPOV policy being used to promote exactly 1 point of view, silencing all others.
As has been the point of half the comments on this story ... I don't think anyone's surprised at all.
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They didn't "ban Senators" from editing, but they did call into question edits that apparently came from congressional office IP address ranges that attempted to whitewash biographies on Wikipedia.
People are generally discouraged from editing their own biographies on Wikipedia, although fixing factually inaccurate information is not explicitly prohibited. This certainly isn't a problem restricted to biographies of politicians either.
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What's that? It's easy to see trends from nothing leading to something after the fact..?
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Leaks to Wikipedia (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Leaks to Wikipedia (Score:4, Insightful)
And that edit could get picked up by tons of people and spread around, even if it's not accurate.
Re:Leaks to Wikipedia (Score:5, Funny)
And that edit could get picked up by tons of people and spread around, even if it's not accurate.[citation needed]
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But the problem with that is some random jackass could see "Oh, so-and-so is PROBABLY going to be picked, so I'll edit it to say they were picked, since it's going to happen anyway."
Aye. Had wikipedia existed back in 1948 someone might have written [wikipedia.org] "Dewey and Warren won a sweeping victory in the presidential election yesterday. The early returns showed the Republican ticket leading Truman and Barkley pretty consistently in the western and southern states."
Re:Leaks to Wikipedia (Score:4, Informative)
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and WTF where you doing watching Fox 'News' may i ask?
Pre hoc, ergo propter hoc (Score:2)
So basically, TFS says that wikipedia edits are made to a relevant article prior to an event, and therefore, these wikipedia articles were caused by the event.
Come on! Some skepticism please. You need a lot bigger sample size than this to make any sort of statement in either direction.
Oh, and yeah, cue jokes about wikipedia's supposed lack of skepticism.
Re:Pre hoc, ergo propter hoc (Score:5, Informative)
So basically, TFS says that wikipedia edits are made to a relevant article prior to an event, and therefore, these wikipedia articles were caused by the event.
The tip-off seems to be that the same people were editing both the Presidental and (eventual) Vice-Presidential candidate pages. The same pattern was observed with Obama/Biden.
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So... people interested and informed in politics?
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The tip-off seems to be that the same people were editing both the Presidental and (eventual) Vice-Presidential candidate pages. The same pattern was observed with Obama/Biden.
And now we need someone to whois all the IPs that were doing the editing so that we can see just who had advance notice.
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Biden was a much more predictable pick, so it's not surprising that his page got extra attention. He was one of three people commonly cited in the media as on being on Obama's shortlist. His trip to Georgia boosted his profile. Then the day before the announcement, it was leaked that neither Bayh nor Kaine were going to be the VP, leaving Biden as the obvious choice. (Chet Edwards not withstanding.)
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This whole thing is nonsensical. I did some research on this myself earlier in the day wading through hundreds of diffs.
On the democrat side:
We had a very good idea days before the official announcement it was Biden. Obamas people said their pick would be no surprise and it was common knowledge most of the other runner ups were not chosen essentially leading to Biden.
On the republican side:
There was a small edit war starting on the 28th for Palin someone kept writing it was her and other people changed it
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So what are they missing now? What's the opportunity cost of all this insufferable coverage of minor insects like Joe Biden and this Alaskan twit? What's the big story of the decade that we're not hearing about?
Your mom revealing that she really didn't mean to bring such an angry child into the world.
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Subject intentionally left blank (Score:5, Insightful)
Hindsight is 20/20. Now try using this to _predict_ something correctly.
Re:Subject intentionally left blank (Score:5, Funny)
I predict that people will interpret the findings of this article as meaning more than they do.
- RG>
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The world will end within a year, i've seen it on wikipedia!
They should monitor my care levels (Score:2)
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Let me ask a question (Score:1)
Thats why it was edited. Cause no one knew who she was.
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And if traffic spikes, edits will naturally spike also.
It's interesting, but not predictive. (Score:2)
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Ah, but it's not about the base. It's about the swing voters. In this case, stealing dissatisfied Clinton voters.
You use scare tactics to get the base out to vote (convince them that they really don't want Obama) and you use appeasement to get the swing voters to vote for you (oh, a woman).
I'm not saying she wont make a good candidate; we'll see when the dirt gets dug up. It would be fun for the Republicans to get a woman in the white house before the Democrats do. I think it's a nice touch, even if it
Re:It's interesting, but not predictive. (Score:4, Insightful)
If that is the strategy, I don't think that it is going to work particularly well. Sure, Sarah Palin is a woman, but that's where the resemblance to Hillary Clinton starts and ends. She's an evangelical Christian who thinks that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in the classroom. She says she's not convinced that global warming is the result of human activity. She opposes abortion even in the case of incest or rape. When the environment and industry are at odds, she's squarely on the side of industry. She does have good qualities, but she actually pushes the ticket to the right in terms of values and issues. As a centrist Democrat, the chances of me voting for McCain have just gone from slim to none.
Of course, that may be intentional: McCain may be trying to shore up his support on the right. If so, then that's a bad sign. The Democrats are enthusiastic and Obama has built a powerful political machine; that McCain is still trying to figure out how to generate enthusiasm this late in the game is not a good sign.
Re:It's interesting, but not predictive. (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps, although his campaign raised $4 million over the Internet [reuters.com] in the 24 hours after the announcement. Their previous single-day fund-raising record was under a million. So at least he seems to have figured it out. :-)
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As for Democrats voting for McCain because of the sex of his Vice it will happen and as evidence just look a the various Republicans the Obama camp has brought out who say they are voting for him because of his race. Also if you go
Re:It's interesting, but not predictive. (Score:4, Insightful)
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I think your analysis is spot on, even though I'm decidedly not a registered Republican. If only 5% of Hillary's supporters were so based primarily on her gender, McCain would still pull 2% from the Democratic base. That's could easily be enough to sway the election (they've been really close lately, if you haven't been watching). And yes, I just pulled those numbers out of my hat; it's political debate. :-)
Palin has the "maverick" image that McCain has made central to his campaign, while simultaneously
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Was that not the blatant plan?
1) Hillary fails to sell Obama to her supporters (how hard would it have been to say "i did some silly things when i thought i was the best candidate, but now i realise...")
2) McCain suddenly announces a female VP who he barely knows.
had hillary sold obama to her supporters (or just been less of a bitch in her campaign trail) then there is no way McCain would have gone with palin.
Cold & hard? (Score:2)
I dunno. I don't think someone as chatty as Biden can seem cold and hard. Those two traits go along with aloofness, which he doesn't seem to have.
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Cite, please? The current polls [rasmussenreports.com] don't appear to back up your claim.
Democrats are a bit stronger among women overall, and Republicans among men, but it sounds a lot more complex than your overly simplistic "mostly men"
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You must not be a Republican; if you were, you would've known better than to make that assertion. McCain was in the doghouse with the base over his "maverickyness" (for lack of a better word). If he'd picked a lib like Lieberman (or Tom Ridge, for that matter), he would only have driven more Republicans to stay home. Instea
why I don't believe in conspiracy (Score:5, Interesting)
Invariably someone will slip up and do something to give the game away and such traffic analysis will give the game away. All that is required is that someone look.
This is especially true for government conspiracy. For the most part, too many people have to be involved, and too many people are looking.
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It just goes to show... (Score:5, Funny)
Too late (Score:5, Funny)
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Text of NPR story (Score:2)
If you don't want to put up with listening to audio:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94118849 [npr.org]
It's not as complete as the WP story though.
Cyveillance are slimy (Score:4, Interesting)
I get lots of hits from cyveillance addresses to my web servers, and the hits from the cyveilance robot are masquerading as IE users, and they don't even bother to try and retrieve robots.txt...
If you contact them about it they will offer to remove your address range from the spider, but this is also a lie, after contacting them and supplying address ranges for them to stop spidering they simply started spidering from a different source address, this time the whois record for the ipblock shows nothing unless you directly query cogent's whois server which again reveals the ranges are registered to cyveillance. This looks like a very poor attempt to hide their actions. Their spider also has a very recognizable pattern, so it would be easy to pick up anyway.
When i attempted to contact them again, they simply ignored all of my mails.
Incidentally, after being explicitly told their company has no permission to access my web servers, their continued attempts amount to unauthorized access.
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You have no persmission to read my comments.
Since you are still reading this comment, this is unauthorized access! Sue You!!
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They don't download robots.txt, so how would they know. A Robot should also pay attention to User-agent: * as well. Finally, the robot masquerades as Internet Explorer.
Blocking the IP range would seem to be the best solution.
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Yes, masquerading as a legitimate client is completely underhanded... None of the big search engines do that, and they all honor robots.txt.
I did block the ip range, but note the original post where they just came back from a new range some time later. I have no idea how many ranges they have, and they seem to change their spidering ranges all the time.
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So, firewall all traffic coming from their IP addresses, and publish your blacklist so that others may do the same.
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Other people have already blacklisted cyveillance, and they know this, which is why they have connectivity through multiple ISPs and a number of different address ranges, which get changed on a regular basis.
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Incidentally, after being explicitly told their company has no permission to access my web servers, their continued attempts amount to unauthorized access.
Bullshit. If the web were to work that way, it would kill it.
You don't want them spidering your public website, then don't make it public.
If I were you, I would fuck with them. Pollute their data. You've obviously been able to figure out which accesses are there's - use that knowledge to feed them disinformation. If you are lucky, you might even able to manipulate their clients in a way that can end indirectly making you money.
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Because they keep acquiring new address ranges to spider from.
I had already blocked their original ranges after the first time, where they agreed not to continue spidering my sites. Then they came back with a new address range.
So how would you propose i keep track of their ever changing address ranges?
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If you don't block them they won't change address? Then start feeding false pages to those ip numbers ;)
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The law doesn't work that way...
An unlocked door is not an invitation to trespass.
In this case, their original ranges were blocked, but they went to extra lengths (acquiring new addresses) to bypass this block.
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The net doesn't work that way. If you don't put a password on a website it is available to everybody.
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No, it doesn't...
I am well within my rights to deny you access.
However requiring a password would be an unreasonable burden assuming i wanted to allow everyone else. By telling you that you're not permitted access, and blocking the address you access it from should be enough. If you access it from a new address intentionally to evade the technical measure in place (the ban) while you have knowingly been denied access then it's illegal.
It's all down to intent, if you intentionally access something which you
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Bla bla bla.
I just knew you were going to answer the one where you could troll.
Yes it does. Try and go to court and we'll see who loses.
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Oh and: Game over.
prediction markets; race and polls (Score:5, Interesting)
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Wait.. what kind of F'd up white racism would lead you to *claim* you're voting for the white candidate, then actually vote for the non-white one?
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The February Scientific American had an article [sciam.com] that treated prediction markets with skepticism. Some of the evidence that people have been quoting in favor of prediction markets is apparently bogus, and nobody has the faintest clue how they really work.
Well the basic idea behind the Iowa Electronic Markets is that people, anyone, can bet money (a limited amount) on who they think will win an election. Basically, polls ask people who they want to vote for, but arguably you'd have a better idea of the outcome of an election if you ask people not who they want to vote for but who they think will win. It's called the wisdom of crowds. Show a certain amount of people a jar full of pickles and they'll tell you about how many pickles are in, the more people you
works both ways (Score:2)
Racist black people can lie to pollsters
about race-related opinions.
Brilliant Pick Indeed (Score:3, Funny)
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It perfectly counters the 3 electors Obama picked up from Biden's state of Delaware!
Yeah, not like Joe Biden would have any influence on Pennsylvania, being born therOH WAIT A MINUTE!!
Reality 2.0 (Score:2)
For some reason this kind of politically-motivated editing reminds me of the words "he who controls the past, controls the future".
Oh, for... (Score:2)
"Open source" is not a synonym for "public records!"
WikiCourthouse, the public filings that anybody can edit!
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Re:Another indicator (Score:4, Informative)
http://tafkac.org/politics/pentagon_pizza.html [tafkac.org]
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Not saying this is the case, as I don't live in Alaska and don't care, but if she's a lousy governor than it would make perfect sense for her Wikipedia page to focus on things she screwed up.
Honestly, if she is/was a good governor, then edit the page to reflect that, don't just bitch that the page is "unbalanced" because it doesn't spend an equal amount of words on her good points and bad points.
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Bloggers suggested Palin months ago. But that won't show up on Wikipedia.
A bunch of people in the "internet community" pushed to have the "Snakes On A Plane" made too since it would be better than everything else!
We all saw just how god-awful that went.