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Odds-on Science
utopia27 writes "According to article in New Scientist, a UK-based bookie will be taking bets for two weeks on major science benchmarks (specifically, odds of implementation by 2010). The ponies are life on Titan, 10,000:1,
gravitational waves, 500:1,
the Higgs boson, 6:1,
cosmic ray origins, 4:1,
and nuclear fusion, 100:1."
The stock markets are obviously subject to the same risk of illegal insider trading, but they are somewhat protected by stringent rules and enforcement (cf. Martha). An inside trader is basically equivalent to a wise guy, except that being an inside trader is illegal but being a wise guy isn't.
Even if their betting contract says "NASA employees and their families may not participate in the Titan bet" or whatever, scientific information (unlike business information) is generally not under any kind of non-disclosure, so Joe Astrobiologist at NASA can freely tell his buddies about the squirmy things they dug up in the ice and his buddy can freely log on and bet wildly if he wants to.
I've got an impression from reading the article that the bookie company itself will be setting odds (and, thus, Bookies' odds are not straightforward probabilities. They also take into account how much the company can afford to lose in case they have to pay out.).
I always though that the "proper" way to do this is to make people to bet for/against the event, odds are calculated as the ratio of $$ in those two pots. Then bookie loses nothing (and always gets his fee from both winners and losers).
Are they saying that their odds are fixed numbers and To work out the odds on the physics experiments, Lush consulted physicists and astronomers.?
Paul B.
I've been a student of statistics long enough to realize that anything, now matter how unlikely, which can happen, eventually will.
The odds of winning a lottery are remote, yet people do. The odds of three people sitting at a table, with a half dozen raffle tickets cleaning up while everyone else gets zilch nada are pretty remote, but it happened on Tuesday (fortunately they were kind and had enough schwag so I got to walk home with 5 Fullers ESB pint glasses and a nifty bar towel, which I won on my only winning ticket.)
Careful what odds you give people, especially if you're planning to take bets.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Why don't you go to tradesports.net? They have been doing this for a long time and seem to offer "services" covering the political and occasionally scientific as well.
This just seems like a total one-off scam. Tradesports seems to be a legitimate market (in Ireland, where it is located) with quite a few happy users and some scientific research on its accuracy.
However, as I'm an AC, the chances of being heard are 25000:1...
In fact, Stephen Hawking has said that when he places a bet, he bets on exactly the opposite of what he holds to be true. This way, if is he wrong, he wins the bet, if he is right, he loses the bet. Thus, he is always a winner no matter the outcome. He wants to lose the bet(s).
ymmv
I mean I realize were're closing in on 2005, but for some reason when I see 2010 I think to myself "10 years away".
I wonder how the calculate the odds?
Oh I dunno, maybe they just make them up since they don't get a lot of takers when they state the real scientific odds: "A Snowball's Chance In Hell"
Hmm there are other models of electroweak symmetry-breaking than the Higgs mechanism, but something is bound to be found. The hard part is going to be convincing people that what you have found is the Higgs. The next hard part is to figure out which Higgs you have found. There is no a priori reason to have only one Higgs boson. If supersymmetry exists you will be looking for not one but five different Higgs bosons (h^0, H^0, A^0, H^+/-).
This actually happened near where I live
sig?
Uh, sorry, but no. The fusion reaction is not larger than the fission reaction.
The fusion reaction, created by the first stage fission, is used to trigger a second, more efficient fission reaction. That's where the majority of the energy comes from.
I can think of two.
Fire has never caused a steel structure to spontainously collapse before this.
A couple did a few hours before.
And in 1923 in Tokyo, leading to Raymond Moss predicting that "steel structures would no longer be built following the 1923 disaster. This was quite a remarkable statement, considering that he was then the vice-president of a steel company. He noted that, while many steel buildings survived the earthquake intact, they were so damaged by the subsequent fire that they had to be razed."
Also more recently in Kobe on January 17th 1995, when the post earthquake fires caused steel buildings to collapse oddly: "Office blocks built in the 1960's of steel and concrete frequently collapsed in the middle so that a whole floor was crushed but the rooms above and below remained intact". Sound like something that would resemble WTC 7?
A shock to the structure followed by unrestrained fire seems to make steel buildings collapse nicely.
Look, I understand that it is more fun to think that everything has great machinations behind them. Fiction is full of great conspiracies and world (or even galaxy) wide cabals that secretly run everything. It is easy to see faces on Mars and shadow people behind the scenes, but it is also easy to ascribe the sun to a chariot of flaming horses driven by gods through the sky. I have friends who work in Congress. The congress-critters have enough problems trying to figure out how to do their jobs without adding sinister plots. Hell, Nixon tried to be sneaky by taping conversations, and not only was that found out, disclosed, led to a resignation, but now the equipment is in a museum.
Or, applying common sense - if politicians were doing all this secret stuff, don't you think they would use their skills at secrets and coverups to hide all the sex scandals with young interns and male employees?
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I suppose I should have also stated that fusion has been accomplished by man (the H-bomb or fusion bomb is an example), but controlled fusion that produces more energy than it takes to maintain the fusion process has not been established yet.
A dollar a week is worthless.
A major lottery winning in a lifetime is overwhelmingly valuable.
Factor in entertainment value and social bennefit for the proceeds, and the lottery makes sense.
... not that I play of course :-)
The only silly part is not buying all your tickets in one lump sum. With the odds against you, inflation is against you, and the money does you the most good when you're young.
I think I'll assume I'll live to ~70 or so and go out and buy 52x40 lottery tickets. I'll never have to worry about forgetting to play, and I can claim for a long while at least, that I buy a ticket every week.
The only problem is the money taken in by lotteries is often used to justify cutting taxes, etc. I.E., the amount of money going through government doesn't really change. At least in NY, where the lottery revenue "earmarked" for education barely makes up for the simultaneous cut in non-lottery based state aid.
/.ers don't play the lottery, I'd suppose ethics aside most of us don't have a problem with such a system...
Anyhow, would you rather the government be taxing the poor (aka desperate, bad at math, people who for some reason spend $40/week on the lottery) to make their budget or use an actual progressive taxing scheme? Of course, seeing as how most of
Green-voting, republican-registered, socialist-libertarian.
(And the Higgs found first will almost certainly be the lightest Higgs, since they'll be scaling energy up rather than starting off full steam ahead. The LEP pretty much eliminated any chance of Higgs under 130 GeV, and Tevatron has pushed that envelope up another good bit.)
To follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. ("Ulysses", Tennyson)
the Higgs boson has two problems, with this bet. firstly, they have to find it. this can only happen if it falls within a narrow energy band *and* the detectors run well enough, sufficient luminosity is attained.
secondly the Higgs boson must actually exist. I don't know exactly how they're defining it - does it have to be exactly the boson that they're searching for, or will any boson that gives the massive particles mass via any form of symmetry breaking (like SUSY) do? it's quite possible that mass isn't arrived at via symmetry breaking anyway. perhaps the biggest reason to doubt it is, clever as Higgs's mechanism is, it can only relate to intertial mass. gravitational mass (which has a history of matching up with inertial to a remarkable degree) will need some quantum gravity thingy. now of course, we can still have a higgs boson, just as we'll still have the electron even when we build a new model for it. but we don't yet have any idea what the Higgs might look like in any of the mooted quantum-gravity GUT candidates.
nope, I'd bet against Higgs. at least, whatever your view, 6-1 are ridiculously short odds. theorists may have spent decades desperately trying to find something other than Higgs, and failing - which is why we still have Higgs. but that's not enough reason, IMHO, to give much credibility to Higgs.
Most of IF's predictive markets are based on economic benchmarks, but a month or so ago you could bet on when iTMS would sell its 100,000,000th song.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
TradeSports.com allows anyone to trade futures contracts on all manner of assertions, including assertions on the coming U.S. presidential election.
Checkout this site, which displays an electoral vote projection and map based on the state-by-state contracts for the 2004 U.S. presidential election. According to the TradeSports.com/InTrade market, the U.S. presidential election is tight, with Kerry projected to win 262 EVs to Bush's 242. 32 EVs are too close to call.
- James
Buildings ARE designed to withstand airplane crashes. It works too, as was demonstrated when the Empire State Building survived having an American B-25 Bomber crash into it in 1945.
From the stuff that I've heard regarding the WTC, it would have been the explosion from the initial impact that would have stripped away the insulation. Most fire cladding systems are only rated for a couple of hours. The thinking is that either sprinklers will kill the fire in the early stages so you don't get a big fire, or in a couple of hours you will have got everyone out and the fire service will have done their best.
Most fires burn in the region of 1800F (1000C). This is wood, or anything.
As far as I know, jets burn kerosene rather than diesel (would make an odd sound running a diesel jet engine)
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World" 1 John 4:14
It is a straight forward event, and it baffles me that people would not choose the simplest explanation and would seek some "tin foil hat" explanation that has all manner of interlaced conspiracies.
For a building that has steel columns, once the columns get to about 600C (1100F), they lose all strength and would collapse.
I don't know a lot about WTC7, but the plaster board cladding systems that are typically used to protect steel columns would have been compromised just by the duration of the fire (working on typical ways that these systems are rated) burning all day. There would not need to be damage to the cladding by explosion.
You're right re collapses post earthquake. Water for fire fighting is usually compromised during an earthquake, and with the large number of building fires it isn't improbable that the fire department can't get to all fires before the building collapses.
Most high rise fires are extinguished either by sprinklers or fire fighting efforts and not left to burn themselves out.
Warehouses which are typically built with steel, collapse readily in fire, as they are usually easier to let burn down than to try to fight from inside.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World" 1 John 4:14