According to the China Daily, there’s a new epidemic in China: sore thumbs:

The mobile phone has brought a communications revolution to China, but doctors point out it is also causing a health problem - with the thumb.

In particular, the popularity of text messaging - known as “thumb culture” - is being blamed for the new phenomenon.

Because of instant delivery and low charges, text messages have rapidly become one of the most popular means of communication among young people….

But young people are now paying for their messaging mania.

I wonder if Japanese kids went through this?

[via Collision Detection]

Tim Oren has posted a good analysis of the DARPA futures market, which points out its connection to the concept of open source intelligence. See also Josh Chafetz, VolkaPundit (who, in a stretch, sees a disgust of capitalism behind Dorgan and Wyden’s opposition), and Mitch Berg, all of whom are supportive of the program; Alex Halavais is more critical.

The more I read, the more this sounds like a serious PR gaffe. Had DARPA kept it nice and low-profile, this wouldn’t have blown up.

Update: Jane Galt (you can buy her stuff here) points out that the system “it creates some rather perverse incentives:” “traders won’t want to prevent attacks, because they don’t get paid unless the attacks happen,” and “insider information in this market is likely to be especially nasty, because it will generally come from being one of the folks planning the attack.”

Update 2: Daniel Gross lists some other problems with the system:

Set aside for a moment the cognitive dissonance of a conservative, faith-based administration using government-sponsored gambling to set policy. And forget that the market represented an effort to meld two secretive cultures that have been discredited for their recent catastrophic failuresWall Street securities analysis and Washington intelligence analysis.

More important, a havoc market wouldn’t benefit from the rationality that regular financial markets require. By and large, markets for futuresas well as stocks and bondsare presumed to be efficient and rational, Internet bubble notwithstanding…. But in the Middle East, many of the figures who would have driven the pricing of PAM securities are not what international relations types refer to as “rational actors.”… Almost all market moverschief executives like Warren Buffett and Michael Dell, mutual fund managerscollectively exhibit a far higher level of rationality than, say, Mullah Omar….

Another potential problem was that the market might defeat itself. [If] people were betting heavily on the assassination of Iraq’s interim president, the Defense Department would start searching for some assassination plot in the hopes of rooting it out. But preventing the assassination would cause all the people who bet on it to lose their money.

Slate also has more on decision markets.

The TIA’s FutureMap project Web site has a bit more about the futures of terrorism project:

FutureMAP will concentrate on market-based techniques for avoiding surprise and predicting future events. Strategic decisions depend upon the accurate assessment of the likelihood of future events. This analysis often requires independent contributions by experts in a wide variety of fields, with the resulting difficulty of combining the various opinions into one assessment. Market-based techniques provide a tool for producing these assessments.

The graphic about the program is also worth the cost of admission.

One interesting detail is that it seems that the market was only going to be open to knowledgeable insiders- “commercial, academic, and government performer,” as the site puts it- and wasn’t going to be “effectively
an Internet casino,” as Sen. Byron Dorgan called it. It sounds more like a social technology for collecting and distributing information within groups- and in fact, this is one of the virtues that supporters claim for these markets. As one Iowa researcher put it (quoted in Technology Review),

There are political ramifications inside a firm that keep information from flowing People in an organization have informationlike the faulty O-rings for the Space Shuttle Challengerthat never makes it to the top. A market is, in a sense, more democratic. You vote with the strength of your belief in your trade.

From the New York Times:

The Pentagon office that proposed spying electronically on Americans to monitor potential terrorists has quickly abandoned an idea in which anonymous speculators would have bet on forecasting terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups in an online futures market.

This may sound incredibly macabre, not to mention insensitive, but the thing is, there’s a non-terrible idea here. The Iowa Electronics Markets have been trading in futures of political events, with surprisingly good results. (Indeed, "The Pentagon, in initially defending the program, said such futures trading had proven effective in predicting other events like oil prices, elections and movie ticket sales.") Technology Review explains it in greater detail:

For years, mathematicians have known that large groups of individuals are fairly adept at presaging outcomes, from company performance in the stock market to sports betting pools. In 1988,  [U. of Iowa] Tippie [College of Business] researchers created the Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM), a system by which people could buy and sell shares in U.S. presidential candidates, producing a more precise result than any pre-election polling data, demonstrating that this method can likely be applied to a wide range of industries. Subsequently, the IEM has set up markets that have predicted box office revenues, the performance of high-tech stocks, and the Federal Reserve bank rateall with admirable accuracy.

Now this concept of trading on the future has made its way into the defense arena, catching the eye of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency…. The agency is interested in using information markets to predict whether defense contractors will deliver projects on budget and on time…. But DARPA aims to use information markets to do more than simply keep contractors in line. According to Michael Foster, program manager for DARPAs Information Awareness Office in Arlington, VA, the next step is to determine whether or not they can predict political unrest in different regions of the world.

Its quite likely there are people in parts of the world, like embassy employees, academics, etc., who have information about that region thats not held in any small group of security experts, says Foster, whose office recently sponsored a two-day workshop on using markets for decision support. We want to tap into those broader sources of knowledge.

Nonetheless, it sounds like the TIA’s proposed implementation was, shall we say, a little publicity challenged. It also reflects, I think, a hesitancy towards gambling, expressed in Paul Starr’s critique of the IEM.

Friday afternoon, just before I was due to go home, I discovered that it’s possible to add geocoding to Movable Type entries. (GeoURL has the instructions.) Despite this wonderful discovery, I did in fact go home and have dinner with my family.

I’ve got it 90% working: the plugin is loaded, my templates are changed (if you go to the permalinked entry, you’ll maybe see a “nearby” hyperlink, right beside the comments link), but I haven’t quite got it working yet. The “maybe” link is supposed to connect to the GeoURL database, and show other blogs or entries in the area. This is something I’ve pined for, and really hope to get it working. Indeed, if I get it working, I might have to go back and add lat/long coordinates for my Korea trip. Like I don’t have enough to do.

Update: I wasn’t giving the GeoURL server enough time to update itself.

As Homer Simpson would say, “D’Oh!”

The feature seems to work fine. It’s a bit labor-intensive (you have to manually insert the lat/long coordinates, surrounded by three brackets, and the plugin then recognizes that as geographical data, and strips it out of the published page), but it is functional.

Now I just need exact coordinates for every place I go, and maybe also every place discussed in any article I link to.

[pause]

D’Oh!