Connected Conversations Politics, technology, et cetera

A local deliberative poll

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 […]

Yes, we can

Inspirational video for obama…enjoy!

btw, Obama is up to 50/50 on intrade.com today. We have a real race here, ladies and gentlemen!

Informed voting via prediction markets

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 […]

Reading the tea leaves

Obama’s win in Iowa was quite impressive for two reasons: it is important and it was indeed unexpected. On Intrade.com’s prediction market, Obama implicit probability of capturing the nomination jumped from below 20 percent on January 1 to 64 percent after the Iowa caucus. See the huge spike in this graph of Obama’s prospects […]

Considered opinions about the European Union

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 […]

“SLOPs” and the unintended irony of “freeps”

SLOPS were originally “self-selected listener opinion polls” and now often refer to today’s ubiquitous “self-selected online polls.” As I found out in today’s roundup on techpresident.com, Ron Paul’s supporters are defrauding every SLOP that they can find. They’ve been excluded from one straw poll for their antics, and succeeded in winning a different […]