a thaumaturgical compendium

I wasn’t going to post this fill-in-the-country geography test for North Africa & the Middle East, for fear of insulting my erudite readership. Then I was left with countries that existed in my mental map “inside” Africa in no particular orientation: Mali, Niger, and Chad. I also managed to misplace Turkmenistan on my first try. I am certain you will all do much better.

When I was in second or third grade, we had to draw a map of each continent, filling in the borders and country names when given an outline of the continent. And now I can’t? Most tellingly, those countries that have been heavily covered in the press—from the obvious US involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq to the ongoing tensions surrounding Israel to rising Islamicism in Algeria—came quickly to mind, while those we have not invaded become involved with took me a minute or two to locate. Without the list, my performance would have been even worse.

This, by the way, is a great use of Flash as a tool for education. Some have pushed the use of Flash without having a clear target for that use. Such uses are limited, and this is one of them.

Just heard that I lost the race to become treasurer for the Association of Internet Researchers. I’ve already received a letter of congratulations (thanks Eszter!). Truth is that I already have too much on my plate, and that I am not at all disappointed in having that potential responsibility lifted. Besides, this leaves me to do more constructive work, like complain about the expense of the conference hotel :). So congratulations go to Ben Bates, for taking on the role, and to me, for dodging a bullet.

Zempt, an offline blogging tool, is pretty neat. Needs image support. Waiting for the Linux port to see whether it’s an easy port to the Zaurus.

That’s the sound of the shortest new idea in futures research being quickly purged from the collective memory. FutureMAP is no more, it is a dead project. It has passed on, ceased to be, run down the the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible. It is an ex-project.

So, who’s going to be the first to resurect it? If I spent the next couple of days, I’m betting I could put together a rudimentary system that would allow for futures trading. I probably wouldn’t use real cash. Perhaps the person with the most points at the end could win a gift certificate of some sort. I wonder if the government would then try to shut me down. Anyone want to take a shot at it?

Of course, this is what Blogshares orignally was going for, but I don’t know that it made it—people were too interested in gaming the market.

That’s how Sen Byron Dorgan described a new DARPA project (FutureMAP) that allows for trading in global security futures. “Insensitive,” perhaps, “unpolitic” probably, but I don’t know about stupid. Presumably anyone with some cash could bet on a particular event (say, the assassination of a world leader) within a particular timeframe. Of course, this is done casually, both around the water cooler and in op-ed pieces, on a regular basis. If anything, this would democratize the process and allow those of merit to be recognized, leading to better predictive ability. Little is stupid about that.

It reminds me a bit of the Brand & Kelly’s “Long Bets.” It seems likely that attaching some money to a bet makes it both a bit more serious (if only a little) than betting only reputation, and—more importantly—it requires that the prediction be put in concrete terms. All good things.

Of course, there is no small irony that the system appears very similar to one described by Art Bell: Assasination Politics. For those unfamiliar with the idea, it is a double-blind futures market not unlike that described by DARPA. It was also a thinly-veiled mechanism for collectively contracting assassinations. The same thing was seen writ large with the September 11 attacks. The government quickly looked at the London futures market, seeking out those who might have profited from insider trading.

And there is the rub. While such a market uncovers accurate predictions, it acts as a deterrent to the free flow of information leading to such predictions. Winning in such a market requires not only accumulating good surveillance, but ensuring that those around you do not.

Of course, the response to the suggestion of such a market has not been based on a good thinking-through of the idea. Rather, it has been fairly knee-jerk. And it is such a kind of absurd approach that it lends itself to this. Jamie, when she first heard about it, suggested that Fox is probably already salivating at the prospect of a new(s) reality show. But then, she also thinks “Who Wants to Marry My Cell Mate” would be a hit show.

Having recently regained the full use of my hands, I am back to summer work. What work is that you ask? I have a bunch of things I want to complete before the Great International Reset Day (August 15):

• Email: Catching up with two weeks of unanswered email—sorry all.
• NGO hyperlinks:I’m working with Maria Garrido on a project analyzing the hyperlinks among global NGOs. We’re not starting out with the Zapatista-related sites this time, but with the totality of UN recognized NGOs, and trying to see how they might be connected (and perhaps how they should be connected).
• Web methods: Using the overview I presented (pdf) at ICA this year, I’ve been putting together a paper on automated methods and indicators on the Web. I want to have the crawler downloadable, as well as some supporting tools, before submitting. I also want to provide some measure of how valid, e.g., Altavista is for measuring hyperlink networks.
• Debugging: Generally cleaning up the code and dealing with some small bugs in the Informicant, a crawler I use in my research.
• Political coverage convergence: I have articles from several major newspapers over the last three presidential elections. I am comparing their content in an effort to determine whether there has been a convergence in the content of newspaper stories from various sources over the last decade.
• Refereeing: A manuscript for a communications journal.
• Building: A cabinet for the VCR/DVD/etc.
• Maintenance: Getting back on the diet/exercise thing—both of which are much easier when school isn’t in session.
• Class planning: For the two courses I am teaching in the fall.

That should keep me busy. I’ll post as I finish things.

This should be obvious, but nothing wrong with studying the obvious:

In a study examining the links between looks and college course ratings, two researchers at the University of Texas found classes conducted by attractive professors were more likely to win top marks from students… Hamermesh and Parker say the biggest question arising from their research is whether students are discriminating against less-attractive professors or whether they actually learn less from them.

This goes along with some work one of our grad students (Boris Hellman) has done regarding perceived status. If your students think you are rich, attractive, and well-dressed, they think you are a better teacher, and they learn more.

Clearly, the university needs to start paying for plastic surgery and aesthetic coaches. Heck, shouldn’t we be getting head-shots with our applicants for tenure track positions? Perhaps we should extend this to Ph.D. students as well: we need your transcripts, writing sample, grades, recs, and a short video demonstrating your beauty and grace.