We’ve just completed another successful deliberative poll this past weekend. This time, I did not have to travel to a far away place; the poll was in my own county, San Mateo, CA. The topic: housing. I do however see a parallel with the EU poll. In the EU, the deliberators […]
Although I frequently disagree with Krugman’s approach to politics, he is a brilliant economist. Here is a funny paper he wrote on “The Theory of Interstellar Trade” (via slashdot):
Abstract: This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest rates on goods […]
I was asked by PARC to present again on the psychology of facebook. (Why do some applications go viral? You can read my speaking notes or watch this 1 min 52 sec screencast that is almost identical in content or grab the slides or handout.) But the main reason to reprise that post […]
At an interesting talk today, I found out that behavioral economists cannot use any form of deception in their experiments. I found this norm somewhat puzzling, because psychologists often include mild deception (like confederates) that cause no harm to the subjects but offer new research opportunities. At previous talk, I heard a researcher […]
My friend Richard sent me this interesting link and email in response to my post yesterday:
[Intrade.com is] moving beyond prediction markets that try to determine who will win
the election, towards markets that predict the effect of someone
winning the election. In other words, markets that attempt to predict
the price of oil, interest rates, # troops […]
Here’s a link to the slides from the other presenters from our facebook expo. Lots of interesting ideas and data, even if it’s a little decontextualized without speakers’ notes.
Look ma! Someone decided to post a video of my presentation last night on a prominent facebook blog.
My Stanford class on facebook apps is wrapping up. As a class of 80 students, we created 40 or so applications that run within facebook’s social network. As of last night, more than 16 […]
Blogrunner.com has been relaunched. Blogrunner shows the same stories that appear in the NYTimes.com site, but it gives you convenient access to lists of the bloggers who are linking to the stories in the NY Times. In a real way, it is outsourced letters to the editor on steroids.
What blogrunner does is turn […]
This New Yorker cartoon sums up the legacy media’s (e.g., newspaper, tv, magazine, etc.) attack on the threat posed by the Internet:
In other words, the Internet lacks credibility. Does facebook suffer from the same line of criticism? On facebook, can anyone tell if you are a dog?
I would think so - it’s hard […]
What is the most common form of communication? A greeting! Think of how many times you ask someone “How are you?” even though you know that the only socially acceptable response is, “Good. How are you?” On facebook, the poke has become the virtual equivalent of a greeting. And like […]
I am finally back in the US. After three back-to-back sleepless nights as a global data cruncher, I have the final results of the first-ever European-wide deliberative poll. I’ll have more to say about deliberative polls and this project, but for now, here is a short summary of what we did and what the results […]
I claim that iTunes could earn 40% more revenue than it currently does just by slashing its price from $1.00 to $.50 . Why? Let me explain.
Digital music is a virtual good. As v1.0 approximation, I assume:
Marginal costs are essentially zero (e.g., hosting, processsing and bandwidth)
Customers have limits on the quantities that […]
Scott Reents sent me an email with just a single link, and man did it bum me out.
Lawrence Lessig is a famous constitutional law scholar who teaches now at Stanford Law School. For the last ten years, he has led the charge to redefine copyright in the Internet age as the founder of Creative […]
I have recently become a big fan of StumbleUpon. With a single click, you can transported to wild and wonderful things on the Internet based on recommendations from other web surfers. Using this service, I stumbled on this amazing video on human computation. After watching the video, I realize that StumbleUpon itself […]
About
I am a grad student at Stanford University in the Communication Department and a founder of e-thePeople.org, a digital townhall. A longer, more self-indulgent bio.
Einstein Eightball
"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."
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Please send me email at mike (at) weiksner (dot) com
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