Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Will California Build an Earthquake Warning System?

March 27, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
A Santa Monica apartment building destroyed by the Northridge earthquake in 1994 (PHOTO: SPIRIT OF AMERICA/SHUTTERSTOCK)

On March 27, 1964, a 9.2 megathrust earthquake rocked Alaska. It was the most powerful earthquake to ever hit the United States and 143 people lost their lives. The earthquake lasted almost four dreadful minutes as office buildings in Anchorage folded in on themselves and homes tumbled down cliffs. No one saw it coming. Just as no one could predict Monday's 6.2 earthquake in Guatemala (which thankfully didn't cause any serious damage). There's no surefire way to predict when an earthquake will strike (and some experts feel that as a practical matter the push for prediction should be ... Read More

More like this: Time Machine
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Intrade, We Hardly Knew Ye

March 19, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
intrade

If you're a gambler, you might have noticed that the prediction market known as Intrade shut down last week. Theories abound as to why that happened. It's not clear what will become of Intrade—perhaps it will be back up next week, perhaps we will never see it again. But I wanted to mention some of Intrade's contributions to politics. (At the risk of being presumptuous, I'll be referring to Intrade in the past tense, although I'll be happy to be wrong about that.) If you never used it, Intrade was really a clever gambling device, allowing you to bet on the probability of an event ... Read More

More like this: Seth Masket
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The Tyranny of Today: Not Who You Were, Nor Who You’ll Be

January 11, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment

“Nothing endures but change,” mused Heraclitus, the fifth-century b.c.e. philosopher. (The same sage who, according to Plato, said that you could never step into the same river twice—it’s always a different river, and you’re always a different you.) We learn this lesson, if painfully, sometime in middle school, when the first dog dies, teenage love goes unrequited, or divorce divides the dinner table. The earth shifts, threatens to swallow us up, but soon enough there’s a new beagle, a new Emily, a new normal—Thanksgiving at mom’s house, Christmas at dad’s. Despite ... Read More

More like this: Findings
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Should We Buy Options on Presidential Candidates?

January 12, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Forest Nelson and several academics from the University of Iowa were sitting down to lunch in March of 1988, just after the Michigan Democratic caucus. Michael Dukakis had been predicted to beat Jesse Jackson by a landslide. Instead, Jackson easily pulled off a startling upset. “One of the other two guys said, ‘Boy, if the futures markets in Chicago did as bad a job of predicting the November price of corn as those opinion polls did of predicting the very next day’s election, then those markets wouldn’t exist,’” recalled Nelson, an economics professor still at the university. ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, The Idea Lobby
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I Foresee an Uproar Over an ESP Study

January 6, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

One evening more than a decade ago, I attended a talk by Daryl Bem, a well-known psychologist, at Reed College in Portland, Ore. Bem claimed that humans might be capable of precognition, or the ability to predict the future. As a newly minted Reed psychology graduate, Bem inspired me to write a computer program to test my own precognitive abilities. I happened to tell my boss and mentor at Reed, Allen Neuringer, about my little self-experiment. Allen, a wonderful person and adviser, and a behaviorist interested in hard facts, looked at me, paused for a moment, said "ESP doesn't exist," and ... Read More

More like this: Science, Science & Environment
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Science Plugs Into Prediction Markets

June 9, 2010 • By • 1 Comment

Over the weekend, Warner Brothers released a science-fiction thriller serendipitously timed to feed off public fascination with a real-life scientific breakthrough. Biologist Craig Venter announced May 20, to equal praise and alarm, that he had inserted synthetic DNA into a living cell. Then came Adrien Brody on the big screen in Splice. He gets a little reckless splicing together animal and human DNA — and this is hardly a spoiler alert — he discovers he can't control his creation. "It was an interesting juxtaposition with science and science-fiction," said David Rejeski, who ... Read More

More like this: Science, The Idea Lobby
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Can Hurricanes Be Predicted Decades in Advance?

May 3, 2010 • By • 1 Comment
Woods Hole Researchers

In 2007, a reporter for the Post & Courier of Charleston, S.C., was tired of doing straight stories on hurricane forecasts. So he hired a medium to predict the forthcoming storm season. "The sense we got from emergency-management people here," the reporter wrote, "is that the forecasts had been so wrong that they were hearing from the public, 'Why should we pay any attention to this stuff?'" At the end of the hurricane season, it turned out the medium had been more accurate than the scientists who took it upon themselves to make storm predictions. But research seems likely to soon make ... Read More

More like this: Magazine Feature Story, May-June 2010, Science, Science & Environment
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Professor Predicts Baseball’s Best Teams for 2010

April 5, 2010 • By • 2 Comments

The Yankees lost Sunday night’s season-opening game to the Red Sox, but Bronx baseball fans can nevertheless look forward to a very satisfying season. At least, that’s the projection of New Jersey Institute of Technology mathematician Bruce Bukiet, who has used his number-crunching abilities to predict MLB division winners for the past decade. Bukiet’s revised predictions for the 2010 season, posted on his Web site just before opening day, suggest the Yankees, winner of last season’s World Series, will again dominate the sport. According to his calculations (prepared with Kevin ... Read More

More like this: CAROUSEL, Culture, Culture & Society, Findings
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Can You Run a Government With Prediction Markets?

June 8, 2009 • By • 2 Comments

There are surely many possible ways to design a system of government. But what about a government in which many important decisions — from legislation to administrative rule making to court decisions — are made through prediction markets? Such is the long-shot thought experiment behind Predictocracy, Michael Abramowicz's intriguing field guide to the wide and sometimes wild world of prediction-market applications for government and business. At a basic level, prediction markets operate somewhat like stock markets. In the stock market, the weight of investors' bets drive a company's ... Read More

More like this: Politics
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Baseball’s Best Teams Are … 2009 Edition

April 1, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

Baseball fans on the East Coast have an exciting season to look forward to, with division championship races going down to the wire. That's the prediction of mathematician and Mets fan Bruce Bukiet, who has just released his forecast for the 2009 Major League Baseball season. If Bukiet’s model proves accurate, the Western Division races should be far less interesting, with the two Southern California teams — the Angels and Dodgers — easily winning in their respective leagues. The National League Central Division also looks uncompetitive, with the Chicago Cubs finishing far ahead of ... Read More

More like this: Findings
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