So, one of the most entertaining books I’ve read of late has been James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds. Surowiecki examines ways in which people can tap into the collective knowledge of everyone. Some of the cool topics include prediction aggregations, how quickly markets are at getting to the right answer given individuals incomplete information, how hive type interactions occur (siting some fascinating studies on the foot traffic in NYC).

By far though my favorite topic is the emerging field of non-good based futures markets, known as decision markets or prediction markets. The most famous of which is the Iowa Electronic market.

Continue Reading

So, I’ve been on a bit of a non-fiction kick of late, and I thought I’d like to catalog my thoughts, if only to make them a bit more lucid to myself. I just finished reading Dreaming In Code by Salon.com cofounder Scott Rosenberg. He provides some interesting analysis on the development of software. Since I’m in the midst of a development project myself, its given me a lot to think about. I’ll spare you a detailed review, as you could get that from the amazon link below, but I did want to talk about a couple of interesting ideas I ran across.

Continue Reading