Archive for the ‘politics’ Category
For one minute, McCain won California
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008It was quite interesting to see all of the interactive election maps that news websites had created for last night’s election. I spent most of my night following CNN on tv at Nelson’s house while monitoring 4 or 5 other interactive maps on my laptop.
Of course I also had to follow the Fox News map. I didn’t notice any bias in their state projections throughout the night, except for one huge exception:
At about 7:50pm, just before the California polls closed, I loaded up the Fox News map. To my surprise California was colored red! Woah!
I hovered over the state and John McCain’s name was also highlighted and checked! At this time last night, the only chance McCain had to win was some sort of a miracle. Something like, oh, him winning California…
However, even if McCain did win California in Fox News land, he still would have have come up short.
I took this screenshot since I knew it was probably an error and sure enough upon page reload it was back to uncalled.
Still funny though.
Vote, dammit!
Thursday, October 2nd, 2008The video told me to tell 5 people. That’s about the number of people that read my blog. Works out pretty well.
Seriously, register to vote, and then vote in November. Or vote by mail if you’re lazy like me.
More Intrade fun: election prediction map!
Wednesday, September 17th, 2008
Intrade has launched a new feature for me to waste time with. They’ve opened up prediction trading markets for individual US states for the upcoming presidential election — and also provided this nifty map to visually translate how those predictions would correlate to electoral college votes.
For some reason the defualt view is the “Average” of electoral votes for each state based on the market values. This really doesn’t make much sense since you can’t split up electoral votes, so I prefer to view the “Leaning” view where votes per state ore given in full based on market values.
I’ve already noticed some significant shifts in just the past day. It’s pretty cool to follow.
OK, I’m wasting even more time writing about this.
Latest Internet Guilty Pleasure: Intrade.com
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008Ask someone who they think will win an election and you might get a biased answer. Have them put money on it and you’re bound to get a more honest answer.
This is why I recently have started monitoring intrade.com, an online predictions market.
Here’s a look at today’s presidential prediction graphs. Looks like some activities at the Republican National Convention created a short spike tonight, but things quickly returned to previous trends after.
Of course you can expand graphs over weeks, months and years. It was very interesting to see how the Palin announcement last week effectively reversed DNC gains made the night before.
I’ll often keep these graphs open all day long, set to auto-refresh, and compare with current news events. It can be pretty interesting at times. (cough cough Google News mashup, anyone?). You can also follow a traditional stock ticker.
Of course you can also bid on or monitor important issues like the Emmy Awards or Britney Spears chances of entering rehab, but I tend to stick with politics.
How is betting on current events legal? It isn’t! Well, not in the US. This company is based in Dublin.
