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According to a new 16-month study of 1.5 billion tweets, researchers write that Twitter still isn't keeping up with the flood of automated accounts designed to spread spam, inflate follower counts, and game trending topics. Wired reports: In a 16-month study of 1.5 billion tweets, Zubair Shafiq, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa, and his graduate student Shehroze Farooqi identified more than 167,000 apps using Twitter's API to automate bot accounts that spread tens of millions of tweets pushing spam, links to malware, and astroturfing campaigns. They write that more than 60 percent of the time, Twitter waited for those apps to send more than 100 tweets before identifying them as abusive; the researchers' own detection method had flagged the vast majority of the malicious apps after just a handful of tweets. For about 40 percent of the apps the pair checked, Twitter seemed to take more than a month longer than the study's method to spot an app's abusive tweeting. That lag time, they estimate, allows abusive apps to cumulatively churn out tens of millions of tweets per month before they're banned.

The researchers say they've been sharing their results with Twitter for more than a year but that the company hasn't asked for further details of their method or data. When WIRED reached out to Twitter, the company expressed appreciation for the study's goals but objected to its findings, arguing that the Iowa researchers lacked the full picture of how it's fighting abusive accounts. "Research based solely on publicly available information about accounts and tweets on Twitter often cannot paint an accurate or complete picture of the steps we take to enforce our developer policies," a spokesperson wrote.

New submitter meghan elizabeth (3689911) writes Why stop at just mimicking biology when you can biomanufacture technologically improved humans? 3D-printed enhanced "superorgans"—or artificial ones that don't exist in nature—could be engineered to perform specific functions beyond what exists in nature, like treating disease. Already, a bioprinted artificial pancreas that can regulate glucose levels in diabetes patients is being developed. Bioprinting could also be used to create an enhanced organ that can generate electricity to power electronic implants, like pacemakers.

First time accepted submitter hrb1979 writes "Thought I'd share an interview with Kang Zhao — the professor behind the machine learning algorithm which could transform online dating. His algorithm takes into account both a user's tastes (in an approach similar to the Netflix recommendation engine) and their attractiveness (by analyzing how many responses they get) — enabling the machine to 'learn' and hence propose higher potential matches. His research was recently covered in both a Forbes' article and the MIT Technology Review, though this interview provides more depth and color."

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Radio Iowa reports that 155 scientists from 36 colleges and universities in Iowa are jointly issuing a call for action against global warming and calling on the US Department of Agriculture to update its policies to better protect the land. 'The last couple of years have underscored the fact that we are very vulnerable to weather conditions and weather extremes in Iowa,' says Gene Takle, director of the Climate Science Program at Iowa State. Both years were marked by heavy spring rains followed by droughts that damaged Iowa's farmland. 'This has become a real issue for us, particularly with regard to getting crops planted in the spring,' says Takle adding that Iowa had 900,000 acres that weren't planted this year because of these intense spring rains. 'Following on the heels of the disastrous 2012 loss of 90% of Iowa's apple crop, the 2013 cool March and record-breaking March-through-May rainfall set most ornamental and garden plants back well behind seasonal norms,' says the Iowa Climate Statement for 2013 . 'Iowa's soils and agriculture remain our most important economic resources, but these resources are threatened by climate change (PDF)." When the Iowa climate change statement was first released in 2011, 44 Iowa scientists signed on and last year's statement was signed by 137 Iowa scientists. "It's easy to set up a straw-man argument, to say, 'Oh, well climates always change; there have been changes in the past. This might just be natural,' " says David Courard-Hauri. "And often that gets played on the Internet as, 'Maybe scientists haven't thought about the fact that there have been natural changes in the past and maybe this is related.' " Of course scientists have thought about that possibility, says Courard-Hauri, but the evidence strongly suggests the climate is changing faster than could be expected to happen naturally."

An anonymous reader writes "NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter will perform a close 'fly-by' of the Earth in a few hours. To assist with its radio and plasma wave experiment, the mission is asking amateur radio operators to send a 'Morse Code' message to the probe as it passes." The page has all the info you need: "The activity will begin at 18:00 UTC on October 9, 2013 and continue until 20:40 UTC. This page will clearly indicate when you should key up or key down to transmit 'HI' to Juno in Morse Code (see examples below). The Morse code pattern below can also act as a guide. The 'HI' message will be repeated every 10 minutes, beginning at 18:00, 18:10, 18:20, etc. "

Frequent contributor Bennett Haselton is still thinking about prediction markets, and giving away money. He writes: "In an article last December I described a problem with prediction markets, where even markets with cap on betting limits could be manipulated by a single trader willing to spend a lot of money to distort the marketplace odds. So I offered a $100 cash prize to be split between readers who collectively came up with the best solution to the problem. Here's an idea that I think would work." Read on for the rest.

In November I wrote an article arguing that prediction markets like Intrade -- where users can bet on the odds of, say, Obama or Romney becoming president -- were a useful tool for aggregating the wisdom of crowds, but could be manipulated by someone placing a large bet in order to create the illusion that "the markets" were favoring their candidate. If the fake "market odds" were reported in the news, it could have the effect of causing more supporters to switch to that candidate, thus increasing the true odds of their victory and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy before the markets had the chance to correct themselves. The solution, I thought at first, was to have a cap on the amount that individual users could bet (which is one of the rules at the Iowa Electronic Markets), and make it illegal for a single mastermind to pay large numbers of third parties to make bets in order to circumvent the single-bettor limit.

As I admitted in a follow-up article, it turns out this regulation would not work after all. The problem is that as long as long as overseas betting markets like Intrade have no limit on wagers, a market manipulator could place a huge bet on Intrade to cause the odds to shift on that market -- for example, changing the odds of Obama-to-win from 4:1 to 6:1. Meanwhile, the odds in a domestic prediction market with a betting limit -- call it CappedEx -- would initially stay at their non-manipulated value of 4:1. But then "arbitrage players" could spot the difference in the odds being offered, and make opposing bets in the two markets in a way that would be guaranteed to make a net profit. (The details are spelled out in my last article, but basically, any time two markets are offering different odds of an event happening, you can pick appropriate amounts to bet in the two markets so that you're guaranteed a profit whether the event occurs or not.) These arbitrage players would continue making opposing bets in the two markets until the odds being offered in the two markets converged onto the same value -- at which point, the market manipulator has successfully manipulated the odds in the capped market, even without ever placing a bet there. Essentially, the market manipulator has hired all of those arbitrage players and paid them to make bets on his behalf, but done so indirectly to avoid violating laws against hiring an army of bet-placers.

I should be clear about the two different time frames being discussed here. If a manipulator places a large bet on Intrade, causing the odds on Intrade to diverse significantly from the odds on CappedEx, then the arbitrage players should cause the odds on the two markets to converge to the same value very rapidly -- plausibly in less than one minute. (Whoever spots the difference first, gets guaranteed free money. It would be easy to write a bot that could watch for any divergence in the odds in the two markets, and place guaranteed-profit bets as soon as a gap appeared.) Then, as political observers noticed that the odds have shifted (without any real-world event in the news that could plausibly explain the shift), another wave of bettors would take advantage of the distorted odds, to bet on the side of the event whose odds had been artificially lowered by the market manipulation. (The odds favor making such a bet, although it's not as good as a guaranteed profit.) As enough people made these opportunistic bets, the market odds would correct themselves to their original values. However, this second wave of betting would probably take a few hours, because it requires humans to think critically about the events. (One likely case of manipulation managed to shift the odds for a few minutes for just $20,000, so it's not unreasonable to think that a million dollars or two -- still small change by the standards of presidential candidates, especially when it's not subject to spending limits -- could distort the market for several hours.) The danger is that the market manipulation could cause the odds to shift in the capped market almost instantly, but the market correction would not take place until several hours later, and in that time the damage (in altering people's perceptions, and possibly creating a self-fulfilling prophecy) would already be done.

It didn't seem like there was any obvious solution to this problem. The U.S. government could ban its citizens from betting on foreign uncapped markets, but it would be too easy for a U.S. citizen to coordinate with an overseas partner to place the arbitrage bets together and split the profits. Or the U.S. could try to ban prediction markets entirely (capped or uncapped), but many economists argue that they're a useful tool for assessing the wisdom of crowds to assess the odds of an event. You could ban media reporting on the odds given by prediction markets (to try and avoid the self-fulfilling-prophecy problem), but that would probably be unconstitutional in the U.S., and unenforceable anyway if people could get their news from overseas.

So in my last article I offered up to $100 to be split between readers who came up with the best arguments for how to stop prediction markets, even markets with individual betting limits, from being shifted by manipulators who place large bets on foreign markets and then count on arbitrage players to pass on the effects to the capped markets. (I've offered cash prizes to readers who submit winning ideas before, and it usually doesn't take this long to get to the follow-up and pay out the prizes. Some follow-up articles that I submitted got lost in the editors' spam filters, sigh, and then there were some other articles in the pipeline that had to go out first. If I offer prize money for ideas and you submit a winning idea, normally you'll get your money much faster.)

Before reading any further, you might want to stop and try to think of what you would consider to be the best solution to this problem (even if the prize money has already been allocated), and then compare it to what we came up with.

... And, welcome back. Here's what I think is the best answer so far: For each event that the capped markets allow users to bet on, the capped market should also be required to monitor the odds that any overseas uncapped markets are offering on the same event. Then if there has been any recent time period where the odds on the overseas markets differed significantly from the odds on the domestic market (significantly enough to indicate manipulation -- and, similarly, significantly enough that the difference probably motivated arbitrage players to place bets to close the gap), then the reported odds should appear with a disclaimer saying, "There was a recent divergence in the odds on capped vs. uncapped markets, so the odds displayed here may have been manipulated, and should be regarded skeptically." This would help to avoid the self-fulfilling prophecy problem, if people are less likely to regard the manipulated odds as a reflection of reality.

The key assumption here is that if a real-world event happens that changes the probability of, say, an Obama victory, then the market odds in both the capped and uncapped markets should shift at about the same time to reflect that new probability. On the other hand, if the odds have shifted significantly in only one of those markets, that could be taken as a sign that that market was being manipulated. Arbitrage players would still be free to make opposing bets in the two markets to narrow the gap, so the odds in both the capped and uncapped marketplaces would still change in the short term, but in the regulated capped market, the odds would be reported with a disclaimer that they're not reliable. After a few more hours, opportunistic bettors would make bets taking advantage of the distorted odds, and the market would correct itself.

This idea did not come from any particular reader but came up as the result of the back-and-forth I had with several people.

A few readers also had interesting ideas for regulations that could fix the problem if they could be applied to all markets. For example, Nathan Dykman suggested that in order to wager larger amounts, you would have to wager that your candidate would win by a larger margin (e.g. if you can bet $1,000 that Romney would win by 1 million votes or more, or you could bet $10,000 that Romney would win by 10 million votes or more -- so that large "manipulative" bets would stand out more obviously). Andy Jobe suggested "staggering" bets so that high rollers could only bet large amounts by placing lots of small bets in sequence, paced slowly enough that the market would probably detect the manipulation attempt and start correcting for it, before all of your bets went through. Jonathan Pearson suggested mandating that markets report the number of people making particular bets as well as the market odds, so that single large manipulative bets could be easily spotted. Ben Griffin suggested simply requiring disclosure of large bets by certain people (as he put it, the headline "Saudi Prince believes that Romney will win the election. What does he know that we don't?!" contains more useful information than "Romney's odds of victory looking better at Intrade").

I think these points are all correct, but the problem with all of these ideas is that they only work if all of the relevant markets are regulated. And if you allow that assumption, then the problem becomes trivial -- because you can just require an individual betting cap in all of the markets. On the other hand, if there's at least one market anywhere in the world that is beyond the reach of your regulations, then they don't have to disclose any statistics about their bettors or follow any other rules that you make. Then when a manipulator places a large bet in that unregulated market, when the arbitrage players place their many small corresponding bets in your domestic regulated market, the detection mechanisms described above, won't do anything to stop that -- those bets in your regulated market look like real bets because they are real bets.

By contrast, if you require domestic capped markets to monitor the overseas uncapped markets, and disclose if the uncapped odds have diverged recently from the capped odds, this still works even if the regulations only apply to your domestic capped market. People can still place manipulative bets on foreign markets, but if the media reports the current "market odds" by looking at the capped market, those odds will be harder to manipulate without getting caught, because they'll run a disclaimer if manipulation has been detected recently. (Of course if the media gets their "odds" from the overseas uncapped market, and reports those odds as literal truth even when the domestic capped markets are running a disclaimer saying that those same odds have recently been manipulated, we can't do anything about that. The hope is that news agencies, no matter how lazy they may be, will at least choose to report accurate information if it takes the same effort as reporting inaccurate information, and thus would prefer getting their information from the domestic capped market, where they can easily check if there's a disclaimer saying the odds have been manipulated recently.)

Some interesting points made by other readers:

• Carl Pearson mentioned that if campaigns had to start diverting attention to prediction market manipulation in addition to all of their other business, this might hurt small third-party candidates more than big campaigns -- because smaller campaigns have fewer available resources to put towards handling new kinds of problems. (True, I think, but only if the markets can be manipulated. If they can't be manipulated, and they're just a barometer of what people are thinking will happen, then you don't need to waste campaign time fighting on that front.)

• Michael Mendenhall pointed out that even in a capped market, the cap should be high enough to create a high "signal-to-noise" ratio. If the cap is too low, the market odds will reflect the betting of more uninformed people who use the betting as a low-cost opportunity to cheer for what they think should happen instead of what they think will happen. (On the other hand, if the cap is too high, then the market is too easily to manipulate.)

• Marc Beaupré argued that prediction markets can probably never be stamped out anyway, because anonymous payment protocols like Bitcoin make it possible for crypto-anarchists to place best on unregulated darknets where they can ignore caps and disclosure requirements all they want. I'm not sure that's true (how do you place a bet in an anonymous peer-to-peer market -- who enforces the payment from the loser to the winner, depending on the outcome?) but it actually doesn't change the main thrust of my argument -- you can still have a regulated, capped domestic market, which is where the media could go for accurate information about the current market odds. So a manipulator could throw their Bitcoin money away on an unregulated peer-to-peer betting network, but it wouldn't do them any good.

Splitting the $100 in prize money, all 7 of the readers credited here get $15. There may be a simpler idea that we missed, or a different reason why this proposed idea would not work. Either way, I'm always grateful for the high quality of the comments that get emailed to me as part of these contests. Eventually I'd like to run some article contests for people to email ideas for a follow-up article, but without offering prize money, to see if that affects the quality of the submissions. It would be impossible to run a precisely controlled experiment (because you can't write a single article where half of your readers are eligible to submit ideas for prize money, and the other half are expected to submit ideas for free), but if we run contests for a large number of articles, and about half of those contests involve cash prizes while the other half offer only acknowledgement, it should eventually become clear if there's a difference in the quality of submissions. It may be that, unlike prediction markets, idea-improvement contests work just as well when there's no money involved.

Slashdot regular contributor Bennett Haselton writes "My last article on prediction markets contained an erroneous assumption, one whose implications are far-reaching enough that they deserve their own article. (And if you read to the end, I'm offering $100 to be split between the readers who submit the best alternative solution or the best counter-argument to the points made here.)" Read below for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

In my last article, I wrote:

There could be rules and safeguards to prevent abuses of the system (rules that could be imposed by U.S. law, even if they're not enforced by overseas betting markets), such as not allowing individuals to bet more than $500. (This is already enforced by the Iowa Electronic Markets.) That's small enough to stop individual bettors from trying to manipulate the market through enormous wagers (although they might find ways to do that anyway). It's also small enough that it wouldn't be worth it for any one individual to try and influence a political outcome just to win a bet. You could try to enlist your friends to help you place a collective $10,000 bet on a single outcome, but the more people you rope into your coalition, the greater the chances of someone (a) turning you in for violating the betting laws, or (b) taking the $500 you lent them, and then refusing to pay it back if they win their portion of the wager.

There's an error here, but one subtle enough that even all the commenters (with no shortage of the usual snark) missed it. To begin with, consider what happens if two different betting markets are taking bets at different odds for the same event.

Suppose CappedEx, a futures exchange that limits each user to betting $500, is publishing 4:1 odds of an Obama victory. If you bet $40 that Obama will win and he wins, you get paid $10 (from other users on the exchange), but if he loses, you pay out $40. Meanwhile FreedomEx, an exchange that has no betting limit for any user, is publishing 6:1 odds for Obama winning. Bet $60 on Obama, and you get $10 if he wins, but pay $60 if he loses. On both markets, of course you can bet in the other direction as well.

What do you conclude from this? That the un-capped FreedomEx probably has more accurate odds, and that as James Surowiecki (author of The Wisdom of Crowds) said, betting limits "make [the markets] less accurate" and "real money is what makes it work"? Or that CappedEx, with its safeguards against manipulation, is more reliable, and FreedomEx is being manipulated by someone trying to change the reported odds of their favored candidate winning? Or that there is simply some random fluctuation in the odds as reported by various markets, so they'll naturally diverge at times?

The correct answer is: you should stop wasting time "concluding" things, and get online as soon as possible and make bets in both markets, because if they're allowing bets to be placed at different odds, you can guarantee yourself a profit.

Make a $50 bet in CappedEx on Obama to win (4:1 odds), and a $10 bet in FreedomEx on Romney to win (1:6 odds). If Obama wins, you win $12.50 in the CappedEx market and lose your $10 in FreedomEx, for a $2.50 profit. If Romney wins, you lose $50 in the CappedEx market but win $60 in FreedomEx, for a $10 profit. With a little algebra, you can show that any time the two markets allow you to place bets at different odds ratios, you can make a guaranteed profit by picking a ratio somewhere in the middle (in this case, the two ratios were 1:4 and 1:6, so we picked 1:5) and making separate bets in the two markets in opposite directions, for amounts in that ratio. (A commenter on the Marginal Revolution blog describes exactly how he made an almost risk-free profit through this kind of "pure arbitrage play". He said it was "almost" risk free because of other factors like currency conversion fluctuations.)

Now, any time a good is trading for a lower price in market A than it is in market B, and the costs of shifting the good between the two markets is negligible, traders will start to buy the good in market A and re-sell it for a profit in market B (the traditional definition of "arbitrage"). This increases demand in market A (driving the price up) and increases supply in market B (driving the price down) until the price difference disappears. In the same way, any time two prediction markets have different "market odds" for the same event, as arbitrage players lock in guaranteed profits by placing opposite bets in the two markets, the market odds in the two markets will converge toward each other until the gap is negligible. This is true even if one of the markets has a cap on what people can invest or how much they can stake on any particular outcome.

For Intrade, there couldn't be a worse time for someone to be pointing this out, but it seems logically inescapable: As long as there is a prediction market anywhere in the world that allows unlimited wagering on a particular outcome, all other prediction markets (whether they are capped or not) can be manipulated indirectly, by playing a large wager in the non-capped market. I was wrong to say that you would have to "enlist your friends" to place bets in the capped market, building a large coalition of market-manipulators (and hoping that none of them would rat you out for using them to circumvent wager-limiting rules). By placing a large wager in the non-capped market, and shifting the market odds there so that they're different from the odds in the capped market, you can indirectly "enlist" all the users in the capped market, to place arbitrage bets and make a guaranteed profit. When this happens, the odds in both the capped market and the non-capped market will shift, as the gap between them narrows -- which means you have manipulated the market odds in the capped market, without ever going near it yourself.

In this case, why have caps on the amounts wagered in prediction markets at all? (The Iowa Electronic Markets have a maximum investment balance of $500, and a 2008 paper, "The Promise of Prediction Markets, authored by several prominent economists, advocated the creation of prediction markets with a maximum investment of $2,000.) Presumably the cap is not to prevent unlucky investors from losing their life's savings, since the law already allows multiple ways to do that, by betting on volatile stocks in the stock market. And it won't stop market manipulation, if the capped market can still be manipulated by using another non-capped market as a proxy. Robin Hanson, Professor of Economics at George Mason University and one of the co-authors of the 2008 paper, candidly told me that the cap was just a matter of selling the idea: "As a practical matter, many people's comfort with such markets increases when there is a cap, so they are more likely to accept the proposal with a cap. So it makes one seem more reasonable to propose a cap, if one can get most of the benefits one wanted from such a system that has a cap, relative to one without it."

So is there a solution to the manipulation problem? Actually, is it even a problem? Robin Hansen and Ryan Oprea wrote another paper arguing that manipulators can improve prediction markets, by subsidizing the existing players in the markets and rewarding them for paying attention. (If a "manipulative" bet causes a sudden shift in the reported odds, opportunistic investors can place bets essentially wagering that the odds will return back to their previous level.) Economist Alex Tabarrok makes the same point here. This opportunism also means that the market shift caused by a manipulative bet usually corrects itself within a few minutes.

Presumably, if more people start to take prediction markets seriously, the incentives to manipulate them would increase. As Tabarrok adds, "prediction markets have truly arrived when people think they are worth manipulating". At the same time though, as more people start to take prediction markets seriously, presumably they'll attract more actual users, and since the amount of money required to shift the market is proportional to the amount already invested by everyone else, this means it will require larger amounts of money to shift the market odds to the same degree.

So these economists all seem to think that prediction market manipulation is a good thing, and that the prediction markets themselves are an even better good thing even when they can be manipulated, but now I'm not so sure. If people do think that market odds are worth manipulating, presumably the point is to create a self-fulfilling prophecy: People think that Romney's chances have gone up, so they become more incentivized to support him and vote for him, and soon his chances actually have gone up (although possibly not to the full extent of the boost in the manipulated market odds, so the manipulator may still lose money). If you can boost Romney's market odds even for a few minutes just by spending a few tens of thousands of dollars, how much would it cost to sustain the higher odds for several hours -- and what if those hours were at a crucial time in the election or in the news reporting cycle?

What if, contrary to my last assumption, people start to take prediction markets seriously enough to be influenced by them, but the prediction markets don't see a proportionate influx of actual investors and money -- so the cost of manipulating them remains about the same? IF prediction markets gain more influence in people's actual voting decisions, BUT those markets don't see an influx of new users, AND an election is close enough that the market odds could make a difference depending on when they're reported, AND someone spends enough to sustain the manipulated odds during crucial periods during the election... Well, that's a lot of assumptions you have to grant, but individually they're quite plausible -- and if all of them hold true, you could change the outcome of a presidential election for just a few million dollars spent on the prediction markets.

And in fact, if you successfully swung the election, you'd actually win all the wagers you had just placed -- which means that now rich manipulators can throw their election to their preferred candidate, and make a bundle. It also means that all those opportunists who usually act to "correct" the market odds deviations, by taking your free money when you start placing manipulative bets, could realize that your bets might actually change the outcome, and would decline to take your money -- which in turn means it would be even cheaper for manipulators to change the outcome, creating a self-reinforcing cycle. If smart bettors see that once a behemoth starts the market moving, the behemoth will probably win, they'll just get out of its way and clear an easier path.

The same kind of trick wouldn't normally work on the stock market -- if you're wealthy enough that you can increase the share price of a stock by buying enough of it to shift the market, then when you try to reap your profits by unloading the stock, the price will drift back down as you're selling it off. (Or if your purchases do manage to create a self-fulfilling prophecy -- your infusion of cash into the company enables them to realize their plans and become a genuine success -- well, then you're just a successful angel investor, more power to you.) But a presidential election prediction market would be analogous to a stock where if you can keep the price artificially inflated for several crucial hours on November 6th, 2012, then the price becomes permanently locked in at that point and you can sell it off for a profit, regardless of the value of the underlying company.

So, according to my own reasoning, this idea that I was so gung-ho about a few days ago, could not only be used to create a type of financial instrument that rewards manipulation more perversely than anything we've ever seen, but could also let a Saudi prince pick the next leader of the free world on a bet.

I'm not sure if there's a solution. I'm not a libertarian so I was never in favor of prediction markets as a matter of "personal liberty"; I was in favor of them because they're useful insofar as they can harness the wisdom of crowds to convey important information. But if they can be manipulated to influence real-world events, is it worth it?

In keeping with the theory that money does motivate people to think harder about such things, I'm once again offering $100 to be split between the readers who email me the best-argued solutions to this problem -- or the best counter-argument to any point I've made here. Put "prediction markets" in the subject line. If your submission wins a portion of the award, you can either claim the money for yourself, or to be donated to a preferred charity in your name. (I reserve the right to pay out less than the allotted $100 if there aren't enough worthy submissions, but that didn't happen last time.) Any sufficiently valuable comments are eligible even if they're not strictly counter-arguments or suggested alternatives, and I'll post a follow-up article summarizing what people send in. You can't make as much off of me, as you could have made by taking some market manipulator's intentionally losing bet on Intrade that Romney was going to win the election, but at least it's legal.

Slashdot regular contributor Bennett Haselton writes "My last article on prediction markets contained an erroneous assumption, one whose implications are far-reaching enough that they deserve their own article. (And if you read to the end, I'm offering $100 to be split between the readers who submit the best alternative solution or the best counter-argument to the points made here.)" Read below for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

In my last article, I wrote:

There could be rules and safeguards to prevent abuses of the system (rules that could be imposed by U.S. law, even if they're not enforced by overseas betting markets), such as not allowing individuals to bet more than $500. (This is already enforced by the Iowa Electronic Markets.) That's small enough to stop individual bettors from trying to manipulate the market through enormous wagers (although they might find ways to do that anyway). It's also small enough that it wouldn't be worth it for any one individual to try and influence a political outcome just to win a bet. You could try to enlist your friends to help you place a collective $10,000 bet on a single outcome, but the more people you rope into your coalition, the greater the chances of someone (a) turning you in for violating the betting laws, or (b) taking the $500 you lent them, and then refusing to pay it back if they win their portion of the wager.

There's an error here, but one subtle enough that even all the commenters (with no shortage of the usual snark) missed it. To begin with, consider what happens if two different betting markets are taking bets at different odds for the same event.

Suppose CappedEx, a futures exchange that limits each user to betting $500, is publishing 4:1 odds of an Obama victory. If you bet $40 that Obama will win and he wins, you get paid $10 (from other users on the exchange), but if he loses, you pay out $40. Meanwhile FreedomEx, an exchange that has no betting limit for any user, is publishing 6:1 odds for Obama winning. Bet $60 on Obama, and you get $10 if he wins, but pay $60 if he loses. On both markets, of course you can bet in the other direction as well.

What do you conclude from this? That the un-capped FreedomEx probably has more accurate odds, and that as James Surowiecki (author of The Wisdom of Crowds) said, betting limits "make [the markets] less accurate" and "real money is what makes it work"? Or that CappedEx, with its safeguards against manipulation, is more reliable, and FreedomEx is being manipulated by someone trying to change the reported odds of their favored candidate winning? Or that there is simply some random fluctuation in the odds as reported by various markets, so they'll naturally diverge at times?

The correct answer is: you should stop wasting time "concluding" things, and get online as soon as possible and make bets in both markets, because if they're allowing bets to be placed at different odds, you can guarantee yourself a profit.

Make a $50 bet in CappedEx on Obama to win (4:1 odds), and a $10 bet in FreedomEx on Romney to win (1:6 odds). If Obama wins, you win $12.50 in the CappedEx market and lose your $10 in FreedomEx, for a $2.50 profit. If Romney wins, you lose $50 in the CappedEx market but win $60 in FreedomEx, for a $10 profit. With a little algebra, you can show that any time the two markets allow you to place bets at different odds ratios, you can make a guaranteed profit by picking a ratio somewhere in the middle (in this case, the two ratios were 1:4 and 1:6, so we picked 1:5) and making separate bets in the two markets in opposite directions, for amounts in that ratio. (A commenter on the Marginal Revolution blog describes exactly how he made an almost risk-free profit through this kind of "pure arbitrage play". He said it was "almost" risk free because of other factors like currency conversion fluctuations.)

Now, any time a good is trading for a lower price in market A than it is in market B, and the costs of shifting the good between the two markets is negligible, traders will start to buy the good in market A and re-sell it for a profit in market B (the traditional definition of "arbitrage"). This increases demand in market A (driving the price up) and increases supply in market B (driving the price down) until the price difference disappears. In the same way, any time two prediction markets have different "market odds" for the same event, as arbitrage players lock in guaranteed profits by placing opposite bets in the two markets, the market odds in the two markets will converge toward each other until the gap is negligible. This is true even if one of the markets has a cap on what people can invest or how much they can stake on any particular outcome.

For Intrade, there couldn't be a worse time for someone to be pointing this out, but it seems logically inescapable: As long as there is a prediction market anywhere in the world that allows unlimited wagering on a particular outcome, all other prediction markets (whether they are capped or not) can be manipulated indirectly, by playing a large wager in the non-capped market. I was wrong to say that you would have to "enlist your friends" to place bets in the capped market, building a large coalition of market-manipulators (and hoping that none of them would rat you out for using them to circumvent wager-limiting rules). By placing a large wager in the non-capped market, and shifting the market odds there so that they're different from the odds in the capped market, you can indirectly "enlist" all the users in the capped market, to place arbitrage bets and make a guaranteed profit. When this happens, the odds in both the capped market and the non-capped market will shift, as the gap between them narrows -- which means you have manipulated the market odds in the capped market, without ever going near it yourself.

In this case, why have caps on the amounts wagered in prediction markets at all? (The Iowa Electronic Markets have a maximum investment balance of $500, and a 2008 paper, "The Promise of Prediction Markets, authored by several prominent economists, advocated the creation of prediction markets with a maximum investment of $2,000.) Presumably the cap is not to prevent unlucky investors from losing their life's savings, since the law already allows multiple ways to do that, by betting on volatile stocks in the stock market. And it won't stop market manipulation, if the capped market can still be manipulated by using another non-capped market as a proxy. Robin Hanson, Professor of Economics at George Mason University and one of the co-authors of the 2008 paper, candidly told me that the cap was just a matter of selling the idea: "As a practical matter, many people's comfort with such markets increases when there is a cap, so they are more likely to accept the proposal with a cap. So it makes one seem more reasonable to propose a cap, if one can get most of the benefits one wanted from such a system that has a cap, relative to one without it."

So is there a solution to the manipulation problem? Actually, is it even a problem? Robin Hansen and Ryan Oprea wrote another paper arguing that manipulators can improve prediction markets, by subsidizing the existing players in the markets and rewarding them for paying attention. (If a "manipulative" bet causes a sudden shift in the reported odds, opportunistic investors can place bets essentially wagering that the odds will return back to their previous level.) Economist Alex Tabarrok makes the same point here. This opportunism also means that the market shift caused by a manipulative bet usually corrects itself within a few minutes.

Presumably, if more people start to take prediction markets seriously, the incentives to manipulate them would increase. As Tabarrok adds, "prediction markets have truly arrived when people think they are worth manipulating". At the same time though, as more people start to take prediction markets seriously, presumably they'll attract more actual users, and since the amount of money required to shift the market is proportional to the amount already invested by everyone else, this means it will require larger amounts of money to shift the market odds to the same degree.

So these economists all seem to think that prediction market manipulation is a good thing, and that the prediction markets themselves are an even better good thing even when they can be manipulated, but now I'm not so sure. If people do think that market odds are worth manipulating, presumably the point is to create a self-fulfilling prophecy: People think that Romney's chances have gone up, so they become more incentivized to support him and vote for him, and soon his chances actually have gone up (although possibly not to the full extent of the boost in the manipulated market odds, so the manipulator may still lose money). If you can boost Romney's market odds even for a few minutes just by spending a few tens of thousands of dollars, how much would it cost to sustain the higher odds for several hours -- and what if those hours were at a crucial time in the election or in the news reporting cycle?

What if, contrary to my last assumption, people start to take prediction markets seriously enough to be influenced by them, but the prediction markets don't see a proportionate influx of actual investors and money -- so the cost of manipulating them remains about the same? IF prediction markets gain more influence in people's actual voting decisions, BUT those markets don't see an influx of new users, AND an election is close enough that the market odds could make a difference depending on when they're reported, AND someone spends enough to sustain the manipulated odds during crucial periods during the election... Well, that's a lot of assumptions you have to grant, but individually they're quite plausible -- and if all of them hold true, you could change the outcome of a presidential election for just a few million dollars spent on the prediction markets.

And in fact, if you successfully swung the election, you'd actually win all the wagers you had just placed -- which means that now rich manipulators can throw their election to their preferred candidate, and make a bundle. It also means that all those opportunists who usually act to "correct" the market odds deviations, by taking your free money when you start placing manipulative bets, could realize that your bets might actually change the outcome, and would decline to take your money -- which in turn means it would be even cheaper for manipulators to change the outcome, creating a self-reinforcing cycle. If smart bettors see that once a behemoth starts the market moving, the behemoth will probably win, they'll just get out of its way and clear an easier path.

The same kind of trick wouldn't normally work on the stock market -- if you're wealthy enough that you can increase the share price of a stock by buying enough of it to shift the market, then when you try to reap your profits by unloading the stock, the price will drift back down as you're selling it off. (Or if your purchases do manage to create a self-fulfilling prophecy -- your infusion of cash into the company enables them to realize their plans and become a genuine success -- well, then you're just a successful angel investor, more power to you.) But a presidential election prediction market would be analogous to a stock where if you can keep the price artificially inflated for several crucial hours on November 6th, 2012, then the price becomes permanently locked in at that point and you can sell it off for a profit, regardless of the value of the underlying company.

So, according to my own reasoning, this idea that I was so gung-ho about a few days ago, could not only be used to create a type of financial instrument that rewards manipulation more perversely than anything we've ever seen, but could also let a Saudi prince pick the next leader of the free world on a bet.

I'm not sure if there's a solution. I'm not a libertarian so I was never in favor of prediction markets as a matter of "personal liberty"; I was in favor of them because they're useful insofar as they can harness the wisdom of crowds to convey important information. But if they can be manipulated to influence real-world events, is it worth it?

In keeping with the theory that money does motivate people to think harder about such things, I'm once again offering $100 to be split between the readers who email me the best-argued solutions to this problem -- or the best counter-argument to any point I've made here. Put "prediction markets" in the subject line. If your submission wins a portion of the award, you can either claim the money for yourself, or to be donated to a preferred charity in your name. (I reserve the right to pay out less than the allotted $100 if there aren't enough worthy submissions, but that didn't happen last time.) Any sufficiently valuable comments are eligible even if they're not strictly counter-arguments or suggested alternatives, and I'll post a follow-up article summarizing what people send in. You can't make as much off of me, as you could have made by taking some market manipulator's intentionally losing bet on Intrade that Romney was going to win the election, but at least it's legal.

Bennett Haselton writes: "Online political futures betting is in a legal limbo in the United States. But with the lifting of legal sanctions, and with the addition of one simple new feature, online futures betting could not only provide more accurate forecasts of the merits of different candidates, but also provide a tool for quieting partisan blowhards who think the opposing party's candidate is going to drag the country to hell. Let the blowhards bet!" You'll find the rest of Bennett's story below.

Did you have a strongly felt prediction about the 2012 elections that went against the conventional wisdom? Then you could have placed a bet at the Iowa Electronic Markets website (with real money); yet most people don't know the website exists. Indeed, it's only able to exist at all because of an exemption from U.S. laws that make other political betting websites illegal. The Irish-based online political betting site Intrade doesn't even accept American customers (you can't wire money to them from a U.S. based account), and their late CEO reportedly told John Stossel he was afraid of being arrested if he set foot in the U.S.

That's too bad, because I think that legalized Web-based betting on political outcomes could serve two valuable purposes in American politics: to provide forecasts of the relative merits of living under either of two candidates, and to force partisan blowhards to seriously consider whether they actually mean what they say. But in order to make this happen, in addition to the government lifting any legal restrictions on the ability of such sites to operate, I think a valuable additional feature would be the ability to place "if-bets", betting on particular events (the level of unemployment, for example) if a particular candidate were elected.

In September I happened to stop by the King County Republicans booth at the Puyallup Fair, and asked one volunteer, just for the sake of argument, what he thought was the best case against re-electing President Obama. (I'm a liberal, but I spend more time reading conservative blogs and opinion pieces than liberal ones, partly just to see what pieces I might agree with.) He said flatly that if President Obama were re-elected, unemployment could rise as high as 20 percent, and listed some other dire figures.

Well, I didn't consider that an "argument", but I asked him, "Would you be willing to bet on it?" -- not proposing that we actually wager, but asking him to think seriously about whether he would be willing to wager, if it were an option. In other words, if Obama is re-elected, and employment rises to 20 percent some time in the next four years (or perhaps if average employment over 4 years is above some designated threshold), then I pay my new Republican friend $100. If Obama is re-elected and no such thing happens, then the Republican pays me $100. If Obama is not re-elected, then the whole wager is void. After I spelled this out, the volunteer got a thoughtful look -- as if he were thinking, for perhaps the first time, whether he really believed what he had been saying. (Of course I've probably made similarly ill-thought-out predictions about politicians that I disliked, where the offer of a wager would have made me stop and think harder about what I actually believed.)

It would be easy for Intrade and similar companies to support these kinds of conditional "if-bets". Then their website could list data on, for example, what the bettors currently think are the odds of unemployment reaching 20% (or 15%, or 25%) if Obama were re-elected, or if Romney were elected. Ideally there would be a different betting market for each percentage point -- and you could aggregate all the market odds for those percentages into one simple graph, with a bell curve showing what the market thinks are the odds of employment hitting 10%, 11%, 12%, etc. under either Obama or Romney.

The first benefit of such a system would be obvious: to the extent that betting markets are an accurate predictor of political outcomes, this would be an easy way to see what conventional wisdom projected for unemployment, inflation, infant morality rates, or any other statistic that Intrade accepted bets on, if either candidate were elected. As long as either candidate had a realistic chance of winning, the people wagering on the "if-bets" would have to take them seriously. (If one candidate had virtually no chance of winning, then the "if-bets" conditional on that candidate's victory might not show anything useful, since everyone expects the bets will be declared void. So it wouldn't work for evaluating the merits of a long-shot candidate like Jill Stein - who might have some good ideas, but the "if-bet" betting markets wouldn't be able to tell us that.)

The second benefit would be that whenever anyone claimed projections that departed radically from the market odds, you could simply ask them, "Why not go to Intrade and bet on it?" If a person really believed that their dire predictions were more likely than the market seemed to think, then they could wager accordingly. Even if they don't think their prediction is likely to come true, as long as they think an event is more likely than the market seems to think, they should still believe that they could make money in the long run by betting accordingly. (For example, if you think there's only a 1-in-3 chance that Romney will win, but the market says 1-in-5, you should bet that Romney will win, at the 4-to-1 odds offered by the market. If you bet on lots of separate events where you think the probability of event occurring is 1/3 but the market says 1/5, then if you're right and the probabilities really are about 1/3, you'll lose 2 out of 3 times, but every 3rd time you'll make back 5 times the amount of your wager, and come out ahead. Assuming that you really are smarter than the market, of course.)

There could be rules and safeguards to prevent abuses of the system (rules that could be imposed by U.S. law, even if they're not enforced by overseas betting markets), such as not allowing individuals to bet more than $500. (This is already enforced by the Iowa Electronic Markets.) That's small enough to stop individual bettors from trying to manipulate the market through enormous wagers (although they might find ways to do that anyway). It's also small enough that it wouldn't be worth it for any one individual to try and influence a political outcome just to win a bet. You could try to enlist your friends to help you place a collective $10,000 bet on a single outcome, but the more people you rope into your coalition, the greater the chances of someone (a) turning you in for violating the betting laws, or (b) taking the $500 you lent them, and then refusing to pay it back if they win their portion of the wager.

At the same time, the $500 limit is large enough that anyone who makes a bold claim about the future, could not plausibly claim that it's not worth their time to go over to Intrade and make a wager. (Well, billionaires could claim it's not worth their time. We could have a higher limit for higher-income individuals, but the problem is that for someone like Donald Trump, any betting limit large enough to get him to take the wager seriously, would also be large enough to allow him to manipulate the market. So we might just have to get by on ignoring Trump the old-fashioned way.)

However, even if Intrade implemented "if-bets", and even if futures betting were made unambiguously legal under U.S. law, we'd have to overcome a certain amount of cultural taboo against betting on politics, especially for members of certain professions. When Joe Scarborough called Nate Silver a "joke" for saying that Obama had a 75% chance of winning, Nate Silver gave exactly the right response: "Wanna bet?" (for charity). However, the New York Times Public Editor (an office that I've dealt with in the past) rebuked Nate Silver for offering the wager, although in a 600-word essay, the Public Editor wrote only one sentence saying why she thought it was a bad idea: because it "[gives] ammunition to the critics who want to paint Mr. Silver as a partisan who is trying to sway the outcome". This doesn't make much sense, since Nate Silver had already staked his reputation on the outcome, which was worth astronomically more to him than the $1,000 (so to the extent that he had any conflict of interest, it would have already been in place anyway). Still, for anyone in a profession that placed a high value on "perceived objectivity", they might be able to use that as an excuse for not placing a wager.

Even for the rest of us not in danger of finger-wagging from the Times Public Editor, I think there would be one big obstacle to using the markets to tell blowhards to "place your bets or shut up": people would come up with dumbass excuses not to do it. I can't even anticipate the kinds of excuses that people might make, because I think I just think too rationally (at least by my own definition), so I tend to anticipate semi-logical objections like, "I think Romney will win, so I don't want to support a system that says he will lose." To that I would say: If you think the market odds are wrong, you should place the bet anyway, and if you win, you'll be taking money from the people who bet that Romney would lose, not "supporting" them. And in fact by placing the bet, you will slightly increase the market-reported odds of Romney winning. So you'll be taking money from the people who bet against your guy, and shifting the reported odds in favor of a Romney victory, which ought to be a win-win. Even better, if you're sure he'll win, you'll have winnings afterward that you can donate to the Republican Party.

So while I don't think that's a valid objection, it at least has the form of a logical argument, which is what makes it possible to answer it. The excuses that I think people would actually give, would be along the lines of, "I don't do that." Well, if you want to support your candidate and you're confident in your predictions, why not? Or, "I think it's wrong to bet against the future of our country." Hey, if you place a bet that unemployment will go up under Obama, then that will be reported in the aggregate forecasts of what the market thinks will happen under the two candidates -- which will actually slightly increase the chance of a Romney win (which is presumably what you want), right? Besides, you realize that if you have life insurance on your spouse, you're "betting" every month that they will die? How much more ethical is that?

But for everyone else who wouldn't come up with excuses not to bet on the outcomes, I wonder, in what might be hopeful naivete, if the available of online political "if-betting" might bring our partisan extremes closer together. When my Republican counterpart and I were discussing the future of the nation under Obama or Romney, if we were forced to confront the possibility of betting on the result (not betting on who would win, but betting on what would happen if a particular candidate won), I think several things would have gone through my mind. First, I might realize that despite any stridently partisan statements I had made, I didn't really know with much confidence what would happen. Second, the humility of realizing that I would want to check the online prediction markets, because I think the rest of the world collectively has more wisdom on the matter than I do. And third, if the online prediction markets showed projected similar outcomes (for unemployment, for example) no matter who is elected, then we could calmly accept the fact that neither candidate is going to be able to perform miracles, but neither candidate is going to destroy the country either, so we can accept the fact that the country will probably do OK no matter who wins, and go have a beer.

Assuming, of course, the other guy felt the same way. I can get along fine with people who don't agree with me, but I don't think I'd get along with someone who didn't even want to seriously consider whether he really believed the things he was saying. However, if the various competing futures markets would implement "if-bets", and if the U.S. government would just give the OK to online futures betting generally, I'd be perfectly happy to take the guy's money.

Hugh Pickens writes "The Iowa Republican Party is boosting the security of the electronic systems it will use to count the first votes of the 2012 presidential campaign after receiving a mysterious threat to its computers in a video urging its supporters to shut down the Iowa caucuses .... 'It's very clear the data consolidation and data gathering from the caucuses, which determines the headlines the next morning, who might withdraw or resign from the process, all of that is fragile,' says Douglas Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa who has consulted for both political parties. The state GOP fears such a delay could disrupt the traditional influence of Iowa's first-in-the-nation vote. 'With the eyes of the media on the state, the last thing we want to do is have a situation where there is trouble with the reporting system,' says Wes Enos, a member of the Iowa GOP's central committee. The GOP is encouraging party activists who run the precinct votes to use paper ballots instead of a show of hands, which has been the practice in some areas so the ballots can provide a backup in the event of any later confusion about the results. 'There is really only one way — and it needn't be a secret — to help assure that results cannot easily be manipulated by either Anonymous or by GOP officials themselves,' writes Brad Friedman. 'The hand-counted paper ballot system, with decentralized results posted at the "precincts," is the only way to try and protect against manipulation of the results from either insiders or outsiders.'"

dzou writes "David Rumelhart, a pioneer in building computer models of cognition and behavior, has died at the age of 68. Rumelhart conducted early research on artificial neural networks and helped develop the idea that cognition can be modeled through the interaction of many neuron-like units. In the 1980s, he was instrumental in developing neural networks that could learn to process information. At the time, although researchers understood how to train networks to solve linearly separable problems (like an AND gate), those networks could not solve linearly inseparable problems (like XOR), which would be crucial for modeling human cognitive processes. Rumelhart and his colleagues demonstrated that networks that solve these types of problems can be trained using the backpropagation learning algorithm. In turn, this has led to breakthroughs in areas like speech recognition and image processing, as well as models of human speech perception, language processing, vision, and higher-level cognition. Rumelhart suffered from Pick's disease in the last years of his life. An annual award in cognitive science, the David E. Rumelhart Prize, is given in his honor by the Glushko-Samuelson Foundation."

fm6 writes "Wednesday was the 40th anniversary of the Carterfone Decision which brought to an end AT&T's monopoly on telephone terminal equipment. Ars Technica has an opinionated but informative backgrounder on this landmark, which pretty much created the telecommunications world as we currently know it."

Mick Ohrberg writes "Scientists at NASA have now heard proof (called 'Saturn kilometric radiation') that Saturn has a phenomenon similar to the earths' Northern Lights (aurora borealis). Talking about the eerie sounding noise, Dr. Bill Kurth with the University of Iowa, says "We believe that the changing frequencies are related to tiny radio sources moving up and down along Saturn's magnetic field lines." It couldn't sound any spookier if they added a Theremin."

k2enemy writes "The Iowa Electronic Markets have created two markets where traders may buy and sell contracts based on beliefs of Google's market cap at the end of the first day of public trading. The first market, GOOGLE_LIN, trades contracts with liquidation values linearly dependent on the market cap. The second, GOOGLE_WTA, trades six unique and exhaustive contracts in a winner-takes-all market. The markets are currently suggesting a market cap around $30-35 billion. The IEM is also popular for its political markets, which have been very successful (more accurate than polls) at predicting political elections."

k2enemy writes "The Iowa Electronic Markets have created two markets where traders may buy and sell contracts based on beliefs of Google's market cap at the end of the first day of public trading. The first market, GOOGLE_LIN, trades contracts with liquidation values linearly dependent on the market cap. The second, GOOGLE_WTA, trades six unique and exhaustive contracts in a winner-takes-all market. The markets are currently suggesting a market cap around $30-35 billion. The IEM is also popular for its political markets, which have been very successful (more accurate than polls) at predicting political elections."

k2enemy writes "The Iowa Electronic Markets have created two markets where traders may buy and sell contracts based on beliefs of Google's market cap at the end of the first day of public trading. The first market, GOOGLE_LIN, trades contracts with liquidation values linearly dependent on the market cap. The second, GOOGLE_WTA, trades six unique and exhaustive contracts in a winner-takes-all market. The markets are currently suggesting a market cap around $30-35 billion. The IEM is also popular for its political markets, which have been very successful (more accurate than polls) at predicting political elections."

k2enemy writes "The Iowa Electronic Markets have created two markets where traders may buy and sell contracts based on beliefs of Google's market cap at the end of the first day of public trading. The first market, GOOGLE_LIN, trades contracts with liquidation values linearly dependent on the market cap. The second, GOOGLE_WTA, trades six unique and exhaustive contracts in a winner-takes-all market. The markets are currently suggesting a market cap around $30-35 billion. The IEM is also popular for its political markets, which have been very successful (more accurate than polls) at predicting political elections."

k2enemy writes "The Iowa Electronic Markets have created two markets where traders may buy and sell contracts based on beliefs of Google's market cap at the end of the first day of public trading. The first market, GOOGLE_LIN, trades contracts with liquidation values linearly dependent on the market cap. The second, GOOGLE_WTA, trades six unique and exhaustive contracts in a winner-takes-all market. The markets are currently suggesting a market cap around $30-35 billion. The IEM is also popular for its political markets, which have been very successful (more accurate than polls) at predicting political elections."

Anonymous Explorer writes "Fresh off of its fly-by with the Saturnian satellite Phoebe, the Cassini-Huygens craft is set for Saturn Orbit Insertion on June 30, 2004. Cassini-Huygens has a planned four year mission ahead for Saturn and its many moons. With 450 watts of power for the electronics, this mission has plenty enough horses to run the stretch with plenty-o-pep to spare. Thanks to all that power, and the plethora of electronics on Cassini and the Huygens probe, we can now hear sounds from Saturn. Pretty cool stuff! Festivities are scheduled to begin on June 29th with a broadcast of Cassini Saturn Orbit Insertion Press Conference on Nasa TV. SOI [PDF link] will occur after Cassini fires its main engine for 96 minutes, in order to slow down and be grabbed by the pull of Saturn. As always we extend an invitation to everyone to join #cassini on irc.freenode.net and help us celebrate this historic mission."

matt writes "Widernet is a program run at the University of Iowa to provide developing countries access to information. Most of the universities they work with (mainly in Nigeria) have no internet access or have a very expensive, limited one. So Widernet ships hard drives with a data dump of about 100G to place on the local network. Students have access through the eGranery. Some the of the problems they are dealing with are how to provide updates to the already distributed libraries, how to provide the eGranery such that it can be setup with little or no IT knowledge, and how to stretch a limited budget and donations. I sadly had to turn down an internship with them, but would still like to contribute. Surely we can help with time, resources, and/or knowledge." And you thought sneakernet was dead.

Slashback tonight with more on whether Princeton really hates open source (hint: No.), the outcome of Australia's mp3s4free.net case, the Farscape-to-return saga, and other updates to recent and semi-recent Slashdot stories. Read on for the details.

"Frankly, sometimes the guy just ... says things." An anonymous reader writes "In a recent Slashdot article, it was reported that Howard Strauss, manager of technology and outreach at Princeton University, wrote a paper bashing the open source community. Princeton has now publicly denounced this article and stated its official policy towards open source."

(I don't know that it's fair to call Princeton's response a denunciation, but the school makes clear that a) Strauss was speaking on his own, not on behalf of the university and b) that Princeton uses, likes, supports, and develops plenty of open source software.)

Oh, they're only votes! tklancer writes "Remember the voting machine failures earlier this month? Well, now Fairfax County is going to investigate the failures in (hopefully) a bit more depth. Now if they'd only start talking about adding a paper trail ..."

Lik-Sang and Microsoft, back on merely uneasy terms. D4rkUnderlord writes "For those who forgot, Lik-Sang was taken down last year by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo for selling "Modification devices" (see CNN.com December 16, 2002). Lee sent us this article coming from a HK newspaper: [QUOTE] Have Found this tuesday in the South China Morning Post. Microsoft always get what it want Lee [/QUOTE] Read it here (scan of newspaper article). Note that lik-sang.com has been sold and put under new management last year, so nothing of these trials can or will affect lik-sang.com"

I wish people'd been this worked up about Northern Exposure. calethix writes "There's a news post over at Save Farscape regarding the return of Farscape as a 4 hour mini-series. There aren't a lot of details yet but it's supposed to air next year and has been confirmed by a solid source."

Much as I loathe and mock online petitions ... Hey, if it worked for Farscape, a television show with Alf at the wheel ... Dagrush writes "As you know, there was a slashdot story about how Saruman wa being cut from LotR:RotK. Now there is a petition to put the 7 minutes of Saruman back in the film. You can go here to add your name to the petition, as well as you comments. There are over 17000 signatures right now."

Follow the money, just don't say "terror." Best ID Ever! writes "CNN is reporting that the Policy Analysis Market is set to return, albeit without futures on 'violent events,' and without DARPA or other government involvement. As you may remember, the former DARPA project, under retired admiral John Poindexter's office, was shut down after being roundly condemned by politicians on both sides, leading to Poindexter's resignation. There seems to be a lot of interest in such 'information markets' lately, from the recently announced MIT Market to the long running Iowa Electronic Markets."

Next time they get tied to dingos. An anonymous reader writes "Australian University students Peter Tran, Charles Kok Hau Ng, and Tommy Le avoided jail when they were sentenced today. Charged with Internet piracy for running a file trade site the three copped a plea to reduced charges. Tran gets an 18-month suspended sentence and a $5,000 (Australian) fine. Ng got an 18-month suspended sentence and 200 hours community service. Le was only given community service. Needless to say the Australian record industry is complaining the three should do time, which could have meant five years behind bars. The judge ruled prison was not called for."

dafz1 writes "According to an article at CNET News, Motorola has announced they will create a new company from their Semiconductor Products Sector (SPS), which builds chips such as the PowerPC. Reasons cited include 'surrendering to IBM a key role in delivering the PowerPC for Apple Computer's top-of-the-line desktop'. This follows earlier news that Motorola's CEO will step down, citing a 'difference of opinion' with fellow executives."

deglr6328 writes "On the 21st of this month the Galileo Space Probe, which has been orbiting Jupiter for nearly eight years, will plummet fatefully into the crushing pressures and searing heat of that planet's interior. The spacecraft's 14 year journey has brought the discovery of, among other things, the first moon orbiting an asteroid, the first remote detection of life on earth when Carl Sagan used data from an onboard infrared spectrometer to observe the spectral signature of Oxygen in our atmosphere, it has caught snowflakes of Sulfur Dioxide as it flew through the plume of an erupting volcano on Io, snapped pictures of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 as it smashed into Jupiter's atmosphere and most importantly, provided proof a >60 Km deep ocean on Europa with hints of oceans on Callisto and Ganymede(listen to Ganymede's eerie sounding plasma wind). And all this with scarcely more computing power than a late '70s video game and a maximum data transfer rate of ~120 bits/s over a distance of more than 600 million Km. In a mission spanning three decades, the Galileo space probe has answered many of humanity's questions about space and presented us with the knowledge to ask many more which will be answered by the next generation of Jovian explorer. Goodnight Galileo."

Koyaanisqatsi writes "With detection instruments on NASA's Voyagers, Galileo, Cassini and other spacecraft, University of Iowa physicist Dr. Don Gurnett recorded waves that course through outer space. Gurnett converted the plasma waves into sounds which inspired a 10-movement musical composition called "Sun Rings." Sample the sounds from Galileo, Voyager and Cassini. (Full Story)"

tiltowait writes In response to the incredulity expressed in this story about the technical prowess of libraries, I'd like to present a short essay titled "Librarians: We're Not What You Think" - read on for more. Update: 10/20 18:15 GMT by M : The author has also put up his essay on his own webpage. From the spinster librarian in It's a Wonderful Life to the crochety archivist in Attack of the Clones, librarians are often portrayed (in everything from movies, musicals, children's books, literature, science fiction, comics and cartoons to pornography - yes, pornography) as something less than noble or admirable. The perception of librarians has been a popular topic recently, with several articles focusing on the fringe-type librarians (ska, rockabilly, bellydancing, modified, bodybuilding, laughing, and lipstick). Although something of an anti-stereotype, these people illustrate the range of librarian personalities.

Many people may hold the image of a librarian as a shushing school marm who does little more than stamp and shelve books because that's all they've seen librarians do. Well think again - that's about as inaccurate as believing that Alan Greenspan is nothing more than a glorified bank teller. The job titles may change but the mission of the profession remains the same: organize information and help people find it. Libraries have been around a lot longer than the Internet, and even library technology can hold its own with the best out there. For example, Google's savvy results ranking was hardly the birth of citation analysis (next up: metadata - cough, cataloging, cough), and there are enormous library systems that also predate the Internet.

Although library geeks and technology nerds may have contrary images, in today's world the boundary between the career of the librarian and the information technologist is disappearing. Librarians today not only administer Web servers and dynamic databases to help manage large digital collections and thousands of electronic resources, they teach people how to use library systems. And just as enlightened computer engineers are advocates of noncommercial software and campaign for online rights, the library profession has a long history of staunchly defending freedom - from book burnings to the FBI's Library Awareness Program to the latest copyright battles and almost all other current issues in intellectual freedom.

Check out LISNews.com (recognize the format?) and some library blogs if you're interested in reading more about real librarians.

KeelSpawn writes "CNN is running an article about "sounds in outer space", which begins: "University of Iowa astrophysicist Donald Gurnett first heard the sounds on a spacecraft in 1962 and it reminded him of music. The sounds, which resemble whistles, bird chirps and booms, would not be heard by someone in space but are picked up by sensitive radio equipment. The sounds will be blended into a performance this autumn by the Kronos Quartet when they play at Hancher Auditorium at the University of Iowa in Iowa City." The U. of Iowa has a page about the concert.

c170 writes: "The position of results that point to Yahoo's pages have changed since Google and Yahoo inked their alliance." Definitely an interesting article, but not really enough statistics to prove anything ... still, definitely enough to keep your eyes peeled in the future.

capncook writes "There is a cool new tool out there called Napster that allows anyone to become a publicly accessible FTP site- tapping in to that huge resource of personal mp3 collections that everyone has, but have not been able to share. It's still in beta, but the bugs are mostly harmless, and it certainly does the job- although no Linux version is yet available. RIAA should be scared out of their minds because users are not logged on permanently, so it's hard to track them down to take legal action. "

stew1 writes "In an unprecedented move, the Students for George W. Bush spammed everyone at the University of Iowa today (~40,000 people). The Powers That Be says they had to let the &%^*#@ers do it because of the Freedom of Information Act, an interesting argument. Are there any laws or rulings that would counteract their position? "

An excellent use of FOI laws, IMHO, but probably not such a great use of computing resources. I'm assuming the scenario went like this: our young capital punishment enthusiasts filed a FOI request with the University seeking the usernames of every student at the University; which the University provided. Is there more information about the FOI request? Colleges tend to fight these tooth and nail. Now, the second part seems murkier: FOI law certainly doesn't say anything about the school having to permit any student or group to spam 40,000 people. If it was done from a student account, they ought to rm -rf * that sucker. If it was done from outside, still, it's fairly obvious who's responsible, right? Fry 'em. -- michael

stew1 writes "In an unprecedented move, the Students for George W. Bush spammed everyone at the University of Iowa today (~40,000 people). The Powers That Be says they had to let the &%^*#@ers do it because of the Freedom of Information Act, an interesting argument. Are there any laws or rulings that would counteract their position? "

An excellent use of FOI laws, IMHO, but probably not such a great use of computing resources. I'm assuming the scenario went like this: our young capital punishment enthusiasts filed a FOI request with the University seeking the usernames of every student at the University; which the University provided. Is there more information about the FOI request? Colleges tend to fight these tooth and nail. Now, the second part seems murkier: FOI law certainly doesn't say anything about the school having to permit any student or group to spam 40,000 people. If it was done from a student account, they ought to rm -rf * that sucker. If it was done from outside, still, it's fairly obvious who's responsible, right? Fry 'em. -- michael

Dr. Wild wrote in to tell us that Sony has announced their portable dog/robot. We've mentioned this here a few times before, but now its official. The article actually spends most of the space talking about how the robot might be some crafty trick to sneak Sony technology into the US market place. I just thought it was a little robotic dog. Guess I'm naive.

Bill Lynch wrote in to send us a quick quote from John Carmack's most recent .plan update: "Q3test, and later the full commercial Quake3: Arena, will be simultaniously released on windows, mac, and linux platforms." The plan also has a pretty lengthy discussion on the new Apple boxes and games. Comments about Code Warrior for Linux and the like. Interesting stuff.

When I put out my call for Geek Christmas Gift ideas, I had no idea what I was in for. But after the storm of email that followed was washed away, I was left with a list of toys that any geek would be excited to give or get this year for whatever holiday it is you celebrate this time of year. Hit the link below and read the list if you're curious. Random Stuff There were a few things that were suggested, that, well, I bet Santa won't come through for them. Hemos asks for Nanites. Thats all he wants. Nanites. Somebody smack him. Nima Negahban says "I would like the beowolf cluster avalon for christmas, dont worry about it fitting it under the tree. " david yates wrote in and simply said "Half naked Princess Leia ,as Jabba's prisoner, action figure." I'm sure his mother is proud. He can have the Action Figure, I want 1976 Carrie Fisher. Games Everyone and their brother wrote in to say that Nintendo 64's and Playstations are great. And the game of choice is definitely Zelda 64. I second that motion. I suggested it to my dad as a Christmas Present. Terrible idea- now I gotta wait until xmas to find out if he got it, and if he *didn't* I gotta buy in on Dec 26. Hard as hell to find. Folks suggested other things like the original Kings Quest or Leisure Suit Larry. Prince of Persia. Commander Keen. Ultima. All those games that aren't around any more, but with their original packaging. Finding a 5.25" drive to play them with might be a tad tricky tho. Clothing It's a well known fact that its better to be clothed at least part of the time. And no self respecting geek should be without a vast array of appropriately political t-shirts to pad out your closet full of suits, jackets, and ties (cough). Daniel suggested checking out the Free BSD Mall for BSD clothing. Jonathan Moore suggested the ever popular KMFMS t-shirts for your local microsoft hater. If thats a bit to exotic for you, how about the classic that Doug Boettcher sent us: the Hack Naked shirt. Since we're mentioning all these t-shirts, we ought to mention that CopyLeft has several shirts including my Don't Fear the Penguins ones, and Slashdot ones too. Software Several folks wrote in to say that they were buying Linux CDs from any of the various places that sell them, and giving them away to the needy. I tend towards Linux Central, and in addition to them Cheap Bytes OpenBsd.org and The Linux Mall were all suggested as places where you can buy the stuff we like. Hardware By far the largest catagory for gift ideas was of course Hardware:The Gift that Costs to much. Of course, anyone would want a a Palm III- it's hard to think of a better stocking stuffer. And besides, they're practically money in the bank now that you can use them to collect automobiles of the rich and famous. But if you've already got a Pilot, James A. Hillyerd suggests a GoType keyboard as the perfect accessory. If the pilot isn't your bag, but you want to read on the road, Mahlen Morris suggested A Rocket E-Book which is basically a tablet computer that is designed to replace books You can get them here. And apparently they have some sort of deal with Barnes & Nobles so you can get content to read on it. They're pretty sweet looking- someday we'll have a wireless version with net access, then we can forget paper. But for now, this'll do.

Have trouble remembering passwords? Digital Persona sells sweet hardware that that you can use to do finger print identification. Suggested by Andrew Lepisto. The pdQ was suggested by Adam D. McKenna. Its a cel phone with an integrated Pilot. Another fairly common suggestion for geek gifts was cel service from your local provider, and a cel modem for the laptop equipped gift getter. Sean McPherson suggested a Kodak DC210+ digital camera. Saves big bucks on film, and is supposed to be supported by SANE. I'm actually planning on getting a Digital Camera before the upcoming string of conferences, and I'll probably look at this one (unless Santa already has one in his bag for me, although at $400 a pop, I highly doubt it) Steven McDonald suggests that we look at DVD RAM Drives as a new huge backup device for storing your MP3s and Porn. Oh, and legit data too.

Mike Miller sent us several suggestions including the Happy Hacking Keyboard. I played with one at ALS- they're not bad. Just as cool are the new Color Gamesboys. I suppose tetris wouldn't be vastly improved by color, but its still pretty sweet. For those with a hugeass budget, How about your very own Alpha Cluster? Obviously Jakob is a lot more hopeful for Saint Nick than I am this year *grin*. How about a vt320 Terminal? Daniel Morrison suggested it, and I think it sounds pretty cool. I had a terminal attached to one of my Linux boxes for awhile. I Let it tail log files and stuff. Kinda fun for reading documentation and stuff too. Can't afford a Multi-Head X-Server, video card, and spare monitor anyway. Plus you can run them into another room and check your email from your kitchen/dining room/bathroom.

Matthew J. Allen sent us a pricey one, but its oh so sweet: Remember those Huge Flat LCD Screens from SGI? I sure do. I wake up after erotic dreams about them. (SUBLIMINAL MESSAGE:Hey SGI: Give Rob one of those things for banner ads. You've got a spare one just sitting around, right?). Matthew also suggested an Iomega Clik Drive if you're on a more reasonable budget. Those things do look pretty sweet. Do cables piss you off? How about the gift of a tangle free workspace? Scott Donovan sent us a link to Cordless Mice and Keyboards from Logitech that will free you up for spinning on your swivel chair really fast until you fall over from getting dizzy instead of getting tangled up in your keyboard cable.

Toys By far the single most suggested toy of all was the Lego Mindstorms. The robotic legos are quite possibly the coolest toy in the history of toys. They aren't cheap, but they are oh so sweet. Else you could consider X-Files Action Figures suggested by E. Waugh. Home Entertainment and Audio Gear The Panasonic Portable DVD Theater was sent in by Joel Telling. Its a tiny portable DVD player obviously designed to make me froth at the mouth like a rabid dog. Several folks wrote in to suggest something I would like, but I wouldn't want to froth on. The Empeg Car CD Player. We've mentioned this before, and although they won't be ready for christmas, they are pretty amazing. 2.1 gigs of MP3s in a car stereo. They need a 9 gig version mounted in a home stereo component too.

Jon Jones (is that a real name? *grin*) wrote in to send a link to ADB I/O which you can use to automate your home for the ultimate in comfort and/or laziness. For the true audio junkie, how about the THX Speakers sent in by Chad R. Henry. Sure, they cost more than my car, but I bet they sound amazing. If you're on a more modest budget Cambridge SoundWorks has some slightly more reasonably priced speakers that I'm told sound awesome. Andrew Hobgood suggests checking out Panasonic SJ-MJ70 MiniDisc Player (portable). Pretty sweet if you aren't willing to chance it on the Diamond Rio (which was also one of the most common suggestions). Frankly any geek should be excited to get either. Rob Sheehy pointed out that Philips has 42 inch widescreen flat TVs that you could hang on your wall if you happen to be rich and wanna watch letterbox movies. This one has a VGA input too.

Random Terry A. Braun suggests that geeks need to get into making our own beer. Sounds like a great idea to me, although I tend to screw up toast. But if you're man enough to try it, you can get Your Own Grain Mill. Alan Mathews wrote in to suggest a A dilbert M&M dispensor McPhee's has some strange stuff, including a Punching Nun suggested by Glen Lipka Tom Berger suggested A VI Command Set Mug STriker RedWolf sent us a link to a chocolate bar shaped like a Pentuim II Chip.

Jason Grundy suggests the $6 card game Kill Dr. Lucky and a Card both from the aptly titled Cheapass.com. Rob Pelkey sent in a pair of gift ideas that are a world apart. The first is An Authentic Moon Rock and the second is a Jesse Ventura T-Shirt or Bumper Sticker. One is probably worth a little more than the other. The concept kitchen has this wierd Finger Stylus Thingee that you can use instead of a pen for some pen machines. Kinda wacky. Sent to us by Wyatt Earp.

Justin Higgins suggests that geeks should all own a copy of the Star Wars Radio Drama. Sure, it costs almost a hundred bucks, but at 15 CDs, it balances out to almost be a bargain. They ought to package it on 1 CD full of MP3s, throw a copy of the script on the disc and sell it for $20. I'd never heard of the Leatherman Wave before, but several folks emailed me to say they are cool. And then I noticed that they were actually advertising here. Shows how much attention I pay to who advertises on my own site I guess. But still several people raved about them, claiming that they're ideal for mucking around inside computer cases with. And Traci Earl sent a link to a site that makes nice Leather Cases for them.

Do you think stuffed animals are stupid? Well how about a Stuffed Plush Space Shuttle? Dave Brunberg sent us that gem. Stirling Westrup sent in a link to something called the Hoberman Sphere which basically is a crazily designed sphere thingee that expands from 9.5" to 30". Crazy looking. If you're looking for something caffienated that you can put in your mouth, several folks reminded us about caffienated penguin mints.

Wrap Up Well this was fun guys. Spending hours looking at crazy things that I can't afford has convinced me to take up cracking banks as an evening hobby. But what is quite obvious is that 1998 is a good year to be a geek. And maybe in 1999 Hemos can have his nanites. Nah.

And lastly, with all the commercial hub bub that tends to go on during this season, don't forget the true meaning of Christmas: Ham.

Microsoft expects Windows to have competition from Linux, according to its annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission: "Over the past year the Linux operating system has gained increasing acceptance, and leading software developers such as Oracle and Corel have announced that they will develop applications that run on Linux." Indeed, the first salvo of the war has perhaps been launched with the recent changes to the smb encryption defaults making Samba more difficult for newbie system administrators to setup (section 8 of the current samba-bugs FAQ) Thanks to Oxymoron ;-) for the second reference.

Finally, a few minutes to clear out the submissions box. First up Dave Whitinger wrote in to tell us that Three Point's news has expanded in 3 lists (Press, Security and Software News). Han-Wen Nienhuys sent us a link to a project he has been working on called LilyPond. It is a sheet music layout program ala TeX. Looks pretty excellent (if you're into that sorta thing :) Bill Lynch wrote in to warn us that Dave "Zoid" Kirsch (Linux Quake Port Guy) would like some comments on support of linux libraries. Stomped has a link to Dave's .plan file. Albert Strasheim wrote in to plug a Linux t-shirt design contest. Winners get Amazon credit and free shirts, so you designers out there may want to hop over (wonder if I should submit DFTP:) Finally, Brian Vincent sent us a link to something from Graphon called GO-Global that accelerates X apps 300-1000%. AIX and Solaris already use it, but now there's a linux port.