A Patreon for Materials

Prizes are a really good way of funding science but are not used enough. All sorts of prizes from longitude to private space have speed up technological development in their area.

Kaggle is an interesting example of current innovation incentivised using prizes. Kaggle defines a metric over a dataset and people try an build models that predict that well. This is then tested over another dataset to prove your predictions are the best. For not very much money a large number of very skilled people work on a defined problem for fun, kudos and the possibility of profit.

1. Typical Kaggle competition lasts 3 months, offers $25,000-100,000 in prize fund and attracts around 1000 specialists

2. At least top 10% of those specialists, ~100 persons are of prime quality, many others 'just' good.
   

Could a similar thing be done for discovering materials with properties we want? There are all sorts of problems that could be solved with materials with new properties. There are commercial incentives to develop many useful materials already. A more efficient solar panel or energy dense battery could have such commercial value lots of people are working on making them already. But some properties of materials are known to be useful but not commercialised yet to have huge competition or budgets trying to create them.

If we agree prizes are a useful incentive. And that we need new materials with useful properties how might a kaggle for such prizes work?

Kaggle has test datasets unknown to competitors held out to prove later which prediction model is best. For a materials version proving specific qualities in the lab would, initially, be too expensive. Relying on the scientific peer review process, of quality journals, would probably be enough initially. Occasionally issues in published materials research comes to light. But that happens in kaggle competitions too. And with prizes fairly low the incentives for shenanigans are not huge. Use a paper being published by a high quality journal as proof that a material has the defined property.

How long would the competitions be open for? The millenium prize for solving known big hard maths problems are open ended. Kaggle competitions are shorter a few month time periods. The time needed for journal papers to be approved and the difficulty of making materials means a year is probably more practical. Having a year competition timeline makes it more open to tinkerers than big grand ambitious challenges. I think 'A prize to someone who makes a wire room temperature superconductor at atmospheric pressure' is too ambitious. 'A prize to someone who publishes the warmest superconductor in a substance that can be turned into a wire by December 2022' is more practical. Competitions for improvements of a defined characteristic over a period of a year or two seem to be the best prize incentives to me.

How much would the prizes be for? Using journals keeps the cost of running the competitions low. But also means huge amounts of money cannot be involved. Also unlike kaggle a company putting up a dataset is not paying the prizes. The prizes would just be donated by people who can see that creating a product with these properties would be useful for improving our lives. As such a Patreon like model where donations are collected would probably be best. Stripe lets foundations setup as non profits set up these sorts of donations. Prizes would probably be in the 100K to -> 1 million range but initially to prove the concept would be much lower. 

What would be a good initial material quality to test this Patreoned Kaggle for materials idea on?

Crowdsourcing Taxonomy

I had an interesting debate on twitter with Panos Ipeirotis and Anand Kulkarni about what counts as a crowdsourcing application.

Wikipeidia defines crowdsourcing as
"Crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call."
And they are even so nice as to give a list of crowdsourcing projects


These seem to fall into a few areas
1. Microwork. MTurk, Freelancer.com, 99designs. You go on mturk you put in a task like "tell me if this sentence is in English" and an amount "1 cent per task" and then you let the people on mturk do the classifications for you.

I think this sort of work will be huge. There are talented people sitting around willing to do something interesting for cash in their spare time just waiting to be harnessed.

Many projects exist to crowdsource advertising ideas. for example IdeaBounty. These advertising ideas seem similar to other microwork projects.

2. Games with a purpose. Galaxy finder, Foldit etc. There is a task like "count the number of spiral galaxies" you put this out there as a 'fun' task and people do it for you free, gratis and for nothing.

This is similar to citizen science projects but explicitly involves the use of fun and game mechanics to get people to do the work.

3. Market mechanisms could be thought of as a form of collective intelligence. In a market the competing forces of supply and demand result on a value being placed on an item. So for example on ebay many people have decided the value of collectible baseball cards. Or on intrade many have decided the probability Obama is to be reelected.

Is market formation a form of crowdsourcing? I think prediction markets are great and should be used more but their placing accurate values on the probability of an event is a byproduct of their action rather than the intention of those operating on it. People would rather if the odds were wrong so they could make money being right.

For some reason I don't think a prediction market is a crowdsourcing application and none are listed on the wikipedia list.

As an aside I read a brilliant blog post two days ago (that I now cannot find) that pointed out that ebay is essentially a storage device. You sell things they go into the ebay and when you want them back you go on the ebay and find the product again and buy it. Your storage costs are usually just the postage and packing charges. This is similar to the argument that there are two ways to produce cars. One is to build factories and hire people and such the other is to send boat loads of cows to Tokyo where magically you get boats filled with cars back in return.

4. Microlending
Kiva and other sites allow you to lend money to business. Say a guy want to plough my field. 10 people give you 5 dollars each so you can buy a plough. The field gets ploughed. They get 6 dollars back after harvest. This again does not seem like crowdsourcing of jobs as you are lending capital not labour.

Artists using a street performer protocol to pay to get an album made is something similar. Kickstarter is one site that does this

5. Wikies, Forums, social search engines, message boards
People on Forums, give their advise and knowledge almost always for free. It is pretty amazing when you think about it. The fact that some very clever and skilled individual is willing to take their time to tell me the arguments to a Java function are wrong is amazing. The wikipedia page does not class these as crowdsourcing but again I cannot see why not.

6. Competitions, kaggle, Netflix, DARPA, Goldcorp and InnoCentive regularly have prizes where they put out a task such as 'improve on our recomendations' or 'make a car that drives itself' and people try to do the best they can at it. I think prizes as a way to encourage innovation are also going to be massively important in the future.

7. Response to events. The guardian set up a webpage to get people to read through all the mp expenses reports to find things that looked excessive and wikileaks have used crowdsourcing to examine the millions of leaked documents and highlight the most interesting.

8. Crime detection. Crowdsourcing has been used for illegal immigrant spotting in Texas and other similar uses.

9. Missing persons. After hurricane Katrina and Steve Fossett's loss crowdsourcing was used to locate missing people.

10. Politics. Oxfam Novib, Moveon.org and other such sites try to use crowdsourcing to create a community based political movement. If these are counted as crowdsourcing ventures I do not see why hobby sites that try promote brewing or knitting are not.

11. Art. Improv everywhere, mechanical olympics, Flash mobs are all listed as crowdsourcing projects.

12. Citizen science. Digitized versions of old weather or other science reports are made available to people to increase our knowledge of past events. Even the open data movement must have some basis in crowdsourcing. If people are not expected to analyse the data there is not much point making it availible to them.

13 Cartography. Open street map, Waze and other projects hope to use peoples GPS systems to build up a map of the environment. This can include real time traffic data.


Reading through wikipedias list of crowdsourcing projects these are the types of projects that occured to me. Most classes are probably wrong and need to be split or combined. Maybe the hierarchy needs to be different. Please comment or write a rebuttal to if you are interested in what projects count as crowdsourcing.

Analytics X Prize Outside Bets

Black swans are not predictable but are there fairly rare events that could coour this year in Philadelphia that would skew the homicide rate in an area?

I know of nothing that would cause a sudden drop in the number of homicides in one particular area. Except a mass evacuation. There are a few things that could show up as a sudden rise though.

Terrorist attack. Philadelphia is not a well known terrorist target so any attack there would have to be pretty unpredictable. Terrorist attacks are also very rare so I do not think worth considering in a model.

Going Postal: These seem common enough in America. They have their own list here. I doubt you can predict where they will occur though. Might be worth considering.

Religious nutjobs:The solar temples and the kool aid drinkers in general tend to head off into the sticks before topping each other. So I think there is not much chance of a mass homicide by a cult in
Philadelphia.

Riots:Cities kick off on a fairly regular basis, The LA riots in 1992 resulted in 53 deaths for example. Philadelphia has had riots in the past. Riots in America seem to be mainly caused by racial tension. It might be possible to if not predict them localise where they are most likely to occur. Then submit a higher homicide count for that area in one of the analytics x prize submissions as an outside bet.

Prisoneers: They love a good ruck. In general prison populations have a higher homicide rate. So looking at changes in prisoner ecosystem in Philadelphia might be worth a look

Natural Disasters:After natural disaster people generally think the world turns into something from a Romero film.
The evidence for this is not that strong for example tales of post Katrina anarchy seem to be overblown. Also natural disasters could reduce the homicide rate as people leave an area after one. Philadelphia is unlikely to undergo a natural disaster though.

There are rare events that still occur often enough to make some sort of prediction on. I do not think any of these is worth including in a model with the possible exception of a riot. But predicting that would need more information about riots and Philadelphia than I have at the moment.

Survey the people of Philadelphia

In order to tell if a zip code in Philadelphia is getting more dangerous maybe we should ask people who live there.

So I created a survey here to ask them here. If you are or know someone living in Philadelphia if you could fill that out it would be great.

The idea is to find areas people think are changing in safety and see this turns out to help predict homicides. If it does this could be used to focus police resource in future to help reduce homicides.





I will release any data that is input as I am not the best person to do analysis on them. People going to the effort to submit a survey deserve to get the most out they possible. I will anonymise any data that does contain personal info before releasing it. There shouldn't be any info like this but I will check through the data in case.

I think ideally such a survey would let user place pins in a map in areas they think are improving/disimproving. Any thoughts on the survey? Or the idea of asking people for their local predictions in general?

Analytics X Prize

There is a competition here to try and predict what proportion of murders in Philadelphia will occur in each of the cities 47 zip codes. Many people who are interested in these sorts of puzzles have started submitting predictions.

So how would you go about predicting the murder proportion in each zip code?
Well if nothing changes in Philadelphia you would expect each zip code to keep exactly the same proportion of murders, well with some random variation you could not predict. So my first guess is a repeat of exactly what happened last year.

But in the real world things do change. Say the population changes if every person had the same chance of being murdered then the proportion of murders in a zip code would change proportionate to the change in population. If this was the case the prediction problem would become to find out what changes in population will take place over the year.



The dataset I am using is here and some errors in it need to be removed. Each dot is a zip code. It looks like number of murders does roughly follow population but it is not nearly an exact match. So changes in population are important but they are far from the only thing we need to predict.

How expensive the house in an area are or the average income or the number of people per house might help indicate the murder rate. Here I am looking at number of (murders/population)*10000.





So it looks to me a bit like areas with crowded houses could be more likely to have murders.






House cost looks like it is not connected to murder rate. This could be because zip code is too rough grained for this to be a good judge. Maybe the average cost of a house in a block would be a better measure of risk. Philadelphia has even been broken down into 60ft squares here



Does household income look like it is related to murder rate?

So if the graph is a random scattering of dots then it looks like the independant variable on the x-axis has no relation to homicide rate the dependant variable on the y-axis. If the dots form a line (well not just a line but that is another story) then the homicide rate may be related to that independant variable. It really is not this simple but that's the basics.



As Siah pointed out here young black males seem to be murdered out of proportion. The graph above does seem to suggest that predicting changes in ethnicity of a zip code may improve predictions. Age is another important variable and I do not have data on that so that might be the next thing to get.

There are interesting posts already on this puzzle
"Evaluating Spatial Predictions" and "Second Pass at Analytics X Prize" and "Homicides as non homogeneous poisson processes" are very informative.

Prediction Market In Adwords?

Can we predict how much an adword word will cost in the future? I find prediction markets fascinating but have not talked about them for a while. Here is an interesting game for predicting the popularity of words.

If this prediction market can accurately predict what words people will in the future find interesting and will discuss then you could buy up these adwords in advance and watch their market value (well cost in google) rise. So anyone want to buy a futures contract in the word "Cromulent"?

Sex, science and profits: Kealey

This book asks whether governments should fund science. It starts with a review of the history of technological advancement. This section is like a cross between an economic history of the western world and guns germs and steal. The books title seems to be tying to trade in on the popularity of Guns and Germs which might cause people to dismiss it as pop history and miss its important arguments about current science funding.

The second section is an analyse of the industrial revolution and shows how its discoveries stemmed not from government funded pure scientists providing insights that were then used by industrialists but from tradesmen making gradual improvements to the machines they used every day. These new machines then provided evidence for the theoreticians to build up scientific theories from.

The third section looks at how contemporary science is done and examines if government funding of science increases or decreases the rate of progress (and economic growth). It includes a convincing chapter on why patents serve to harm the public.

This is an entertaining well crafted book that lays out a compelling argument for free market (rather than state subsidised) science. The book seems to have been widely ignored outside libertarian circles where he is preaching to the converted.

One thing the book does not explore is the use of other methods to incentivize science. The use of betting markets and prizes are two ways that are probably underused.

Why would markets tend toward equilibrium?

“For the past 25 years or so the financial authorities andinstitutions they regulate have been guided by market fundamentalism: the belief that markets tend towards equilibrium and that deviations from it occur in a random manner” George Soros

There are all sorts of reasons based on human cognitive bias to believe that markets will not tend toward equilibrium. One fundamental reason is that virtually all systems of even basic simplicity do not tend toward an equilibrium position. Take a rock paper,scissors simulation

No equilibrium position will ever be reached.


A simple foxes and rabbits simulation I first say on a ZX spectrum in the early 80’s wont tend toward an equilibrium why would people think the desires and whims of millions of people will?

Let me be the first to say Holy Shit

*THIS POST IS FALSE the silica hydrogen compound is a room temperature metal and a superconductor but not both at the same time*
I have talked about the possibility of of a hydrogen based room temperature superconductor here. As described in that article I believed a metallic hydrogen could produce a superconductor that would be such an advance as to be reasonably called a paradigm shift.

It turns out someone has made a room temperature superconductor using hydrogen. The pressure required for the compound is not practical. Now that hydrogen has been shown to have these properties more research into practical compounds will be encouraged. The area has recently seen another practical improvement. The first ambient at normal temperature superconductor has been reported in the last few days also.

So what does a room temperature superconductor mean? I have no idea, but it is probably the biggest innovation in electricity since *Nicolas* Tesla. It is something so odd that you are much better spending your time figuring out what do do with it then trying to think what other people are going to do with it. But to give one of a hundred possible examples, with a superconducting power cable you can produce electricity anywhere and transport it without loss. This would increase energy efficiency by over 30%*.

So my bet on what the maximum temperature superconductor by the end of the year is out by at least 110K. If you want to make a bet you can do it here.

*edit. You lose about 10% of electricity to power line loses and about 20% to disparities in usage between different times. You can smooth out these disparities by transporting the electricity during your night to someone elses peak demand time of day.

Why is there more business news then science news?

If almost all economic growth is caused by science why are scientific advances not reported in more detail then some change in bank shares? If science is going to effect the economy and our lives much more then sterling doing badly against a basket of currencies or even a basket of scampi then it should be reported.

For news media "five hours of viewing would yield 71 minutes of politics, 26 minutes of crime, 12 minutes of disasters and 10 minutes of celebrities. Science, technology, health and the environment received just six minutes of coverage (with health and health care accounting for half of that."

One possible way to help fix this is betting markets for science. These would provide
1. a figure on science that the public could understand. For example imagine a news broadcast
"the market odds for 5 degrees global warming in 50 years today moved up 2% to 95%"
2. Provide a way to hedge. Resource futures allow people to guarantee they will earn a certain amount for their produce. Science prediction markets can provide a similar hedge. A company owning port space in northern Canada could bet against global warming to guarantee a certain minimum income.
3.To subsidise scientific research. Scientific prediction markets would reward scientists for being right.

You could claim that scientific market would not provide any mew information as research companies already know this information. If they do the public could still benefit from this knowledge. If they do they are better predictors of science then they are of resource prices which seems unlikely. The market in science futures should be every bit as valuable as the market for resource futures. A coal market might help you plan for electricity supply in 10 years time but so can a market of superconductors or one on fusion power.
Saying there is no need for science futures because private firms carry out research is like saying there is no need for resource futures because private companies grow/mine the materials.

Anyway if you think scientific prediction markets are a good idea or a bad one you can make a prediction here

Is metallic hydrogen a black swan?

I have set up a prediction market for superconductor temperature here. One problem with this bet is black swan events

When betting on the price of gold or the score in a football match you know it is very unlikely to move outside certain ranges. Scientific knowledge does occasionally make huge advances though.

To take one example say someone creates metallic hydrogen at reasonable temperatures. This substance is estimated to have a superconducting temperature at near room temperature. Well 230 85 K but the upper end of this is at the level to completely change the world (with the huge assumption that the pressure metallic hydrogen existed at is practical).

In this case the prediction for the superconductor temperature is in two forms
1. Something similar to the current rate of change happens. A few degrees a year.
2. Something completely new comes along with really different properties (figure 2 here).


Metallic Hydrogen would not even be that novel. It has been modeled theoretically and we know people are trying to make it. Usually in prediction markets you have scoring rules that give out money/points based on how close to the answer you were. In these cases where huge changes have a reasonable chance of occurring these sorts of scoring rules might be unfair.

Say there is a 90% chance that research will continue along its standard path to 188K. Say there is a 5% chance that nothing will change. And say there is a 5% chance the maximum temperature will suddenly jump up to 270K. Does this mean that the market will sit at 193K? Will people in the lab who create a room temperature superconductor go out and bet heavily on their side moving the market (and making them money)? Will people ignore the black swan of room temperature superconductor and move the market to a “sensible” level? Humans do have a bias to ignore unlikely highly risky possibilities.

Could this bias make scientific prediction markets more profitable for those that create huge innovations?

Is anyone interested in science prediction markets?

I set up one to find out. Please go here and make a prediction. The bet is on what the highest temperature superconductor by January 1st 2009 will be.

You need about 20 predictions to have a reasonable estimate. Real money prediction markets have the advantage of giving a greater incentive to be correct. I think it would be funny to have physicists in finance doing physics for a change.

Superconductor betting. How and why.

Setting up a superconductor betting/information market would
1. Provide publicity to superconductor research
2. Provide incentives to develop and publish theoretical models of
metallic superconductors. Publishing the models would move the market
in the way you have already bet on.
This would make more cash for the model developer. The theoretical
models should aid the actual production of the materials.
3. Provide some incentive for the development of superconductor materials.
4. Provide some evidence on whether these sorts of information markets
work. Whether they encourage research and results. If they do they
could be used for other research areas.
5. It would provide an estimate as to how well markets predict and incentivise scientific development. There are results on how well they predict elections and sports games but not much on science. If these markets are useful at predicting and incentivising science they would be very valuable.

It to set up would need
1. To get someone famous to talk about it. One of the aims of the market is to provide publicity to the area of research and nothing provides publicity like a celebrity bet. Stephen Hawking famously loves a good bet.
http://hanson.gmu.edu/press/natureNov02.pdf
2. To live in Ireland. We seem one of the only countries that allow this
sort of betting.
3. To figure out if this could be classed as a charity. You are
sponsoring scientific research. However you are also engaging in
betting which is illegal in most of the USA.

I will describe later the mechanism of a science prediction market that also allows donations to sponsor those that advance knowledge.

Useful Superconductors

FX prediction market has a bet on the likelihood of an alloy high-Tc superconductor by 2017. The current market value of this places it at 65% likely.

77 kelvin is given as the useful figure because this is the boiling point of Nitrogen. Liquid nitrogen is in fairly cheap plentiful supply so if you can get a superconductor that works at that temperature it is useful for commercial applications.
Being malleable and ductile would also add to the practical applications of the superconductor. Malleable and ductile in this description are slightly ambiguous, I assume only metallic compounds can have these qualities but I could be wrong. So replace malleable and ductile with metallic in the post if that is a better description.


Superconductors have all sorts of known useful applications. It is such a weird property that trying to figure out what you can do with them is like a bronze age swordmaker trying to figure out all applications of iron.

This is an in depth description of the superconductivity phenomenon. Figure 12 shows the historical evolution of the maximum superconducting temperature.



If you look at this graph you can see that a metallic superconductor if current trends continue a metallic superconductor would be nearing the temperature of liquid nitrogen. This of course assumes that a metal could superconduct at this temperature.

Using these two graphs and this bet we can have some evidence of what the current trends in these class of superconductors is and also how likely people believe these trends are to continue. From this information we can estimate if actions have an effect on the development of this class of superconductors.

One way to encourage superconductor research would be to offer a prize for new metals that increase the highest temperature of superconductivity. Superconductor research is materials research that is not overly expensive. However it does require a reasonable level of investment. As such any prize for the development of new superconducting materials would need to be considerable. The producer of a metallic superconductor could expect to make significant commercial results from the discovery.

Theoreticians however do not need as much money. They could make a prediction on the properties of metallic superconductors and not have to go through the cost of actually producing the materials.

So if you could give a prize to the most accurate prediction of the future of metallic superconductors this would slightly encourage experimental research into metallic superconductors. It would I believe more strongly affect theoretical examination of the problem.

I believe we should use a form of betting market to incentivise research into superconductors. I will describe how this market would be designed and the pros and cons of the scheme in another post.

If you have any opinions on how to phrase the question so that knowing the answer requires more knowledge in this area to be acquired. How to judge the question reliably and in a trustworthy way is another important question.

Prediction markets: For realreal or for playplay?

When running a prediction market is it more accurate to use play money (karma) or real money? This paper here and the easier to read presentation description here provide evidence it does not effect the markets accuracy. Both result in accuracies much greater then the average opinion of the people in the market.

This means that people with more confidence betting larger amounts tend to be more accurate. People without strong opinions being less involved in predictions seems to increase accuracy.

It is interesting to wonder why money does not seem to benefit accuracy. Could it be that using money attracts some of the wrong kinds of bettors? Would some combination of real and play money provide more accurate predictions? In this case there would have to be different types of bets in the real and play money that both happen to be of similar accuracy.

If it is the case that people bet the same with real and play money could it be that money is just a karma substitute?

One important factor with the use of real money is that it rewards those who are right in a way that they can eat. Karma does not butter any parsnips. For using prediction markets in science I think you should reward those who make accurate predictions in a way that aids their making predictions in future.

Why use prediction markets for science?

I got a very good comment on this article

“Cold fusion cannot be confirmed by a popularity context, or by politics, and not even by asking experts. There is only one way to confirm that it exists: by experiment…. Objective, replicated instrument readings are the one and only standard of truth in experimental science.”
This is correct, if everyone in the world thinks the world is flat it is still not. The only standard of truth is experimental science. However prediction markets do provide scientists with publicity, understandability and money. All these are useful.

Prediction markets give the public a readable figure on how likely *people think* a certain event is*.

They provide a method to clear FUD from scientific debates. For example when climate change skeptics are asked to bet on their prediction they suddenly become less supportive of their criticisms.

""Richard Lindzen says he's willing to take bets that global average temperatures in 20 years will in fact be lower than they are now." (thanks to William Connolley for the tip). Given his widely-promulgated views, I took this quote at face value and contacted him to arrange a wager. A payoff at retirement age would be a nice top-up to my pension.

Now here's the kicker. Richard Lindzen will indeed accept a bet - but only if offered odds of 50:1 in his favour!"

Another advantage of prediction markets is they provide a way for scientists to make money by being right. Being right is something we should encourage scientists to be. If the market is inaccurate you can make money betting against it.

The scientific method does change over time

That talk gives the following additions to the scientific method over time.
2000 BC - First text indexes
200 BC - Cataloged library (at Alexandria)
1000 AD - Collaborative encyclopedia
1590 - Controlled experiment (Roger Bacon)
1600 - Laboratory
1609 - Telescopes and microscopes
1650 - Society of experts
1665 - Repeatability (Robert Boyle)
1665 - Scholarly journals
1675 - Peer review
1687 - Hypothesis/prediction (Isaac Newton)
1920 - Falsifiability (Karl Popper)
1926 - Randomized design (Ronald Fisher)
1937 - Controlled placebo
1946 - Computer simulation
1950 - Double blind experiment
1962 - Study of scientific method (Thomas Kuhn)

There is a big push at the moment to have papers properly blinded so reviewers do not know who they are reading.

An mp3 talk on how the scientific method has changed is here.

So it might be odd but it is not heretical to suggest that the funding of science or even some elements of the scientific method can be altered to take markets into account. This will not alter the place of experiments but could alter the rewards and incentives available to scientists.

*edit. As Dunc correctly pointed out.

How likely is cold fusion?

How likely do people think it is that cold fusion is a real phenomenon? Based on how likely people view cold fusion it can be used to decide whether to spend time/money/effort investigating it.
The Fx prediction market has a bet
“Cold fusion of deuterium in palladium can produce over 10 watts/cc. net power at STP (standard temperature and pressure). Cold fusion is discussed on the fusion newsgroup.”


The judging of this statement could be quite difficult due to ambiguities. However the statement is currently thought to have a 12% likelihood of being true. This means there is about a 1/8 chance that cold fusion is a real phenomenon according to the market. I believe that if people really believed cold fusion was this likely more mainstream research would be studying it. The market could be inaccurate in that
1. The question and judging of it are viewed as too ambiguous to trust.
2. Because real money is not used in this market the market is distorted by irrational bettors.

One problem with the field is that it has attracted cranks and conspiracy theorists. This now makes it difficult for a legitimate researcher to look into the area. The 12% figure could be accurate and some grand conspiracy against cold fusion exists. It is a feature of conspiracy theories that this hypothesis is likely to be supported by believers in such a conspiracy even though other explanations may be more accurate. Another possibility is that the 12% figure is accurate but that researchers fear being dismissed as cranks if they research the area.

Imagine the case where the market was overly optimistic and it used real money. A researcher with evidence against cold fusion could bet heavily against it. Then she would publish a result that showed it to be less likely. When the value of her bet (idea futures) increased she could then sell her “no cold fusion” bet and make a profit. As shown in this post people who provide evidence against conspiracy theories are frequently the subject to abuse.

So how likely do you think cold fusion is?

Will the seed vault be used?

PPX has a bet on whether the doomsday vault designed to hold 4.5 million samples of plant life will be needed in its first year. The seed vault is a bank of biodiversity to counteract the problems of farming moving to a low number of species. If a plant becomes endangered seeds of the plant can be taken from the vault and used to reintroduce the plant. Storing seeds of many varieties means that if conditions devastate one species of plant being grown other similar species with different genes can be used to resist the unfavorable conditions.


The PPX market currently places the chances of the seed vault being used in its first year at 25%. This is a very high probability as if the seed vault is used a serious environmental problem must be underway. The vault is only a final insurance policy against conditions leading to species extinction rather then something for common usage. Imagine you invented a insurance policy that people believed had a ¼ chance of being used in its first year. You would wonder why no one had this policy before?

PS3 makes a comeback

The PPX betting exchange has a bet that the PS3 will be more popular then the Wii or the Xbox360 in the final quarter of 2009. Betting exchanges only says what people believe is likely to happen. They have been very accurate predictors in the past.

This bet of the PS3's success this bet has shown a general decline in value from 50% likely to under 10% at its lowest. There has been a recent upsurge in the value of this bet. This means people are starting to believe it is more likely that the PS3 will win the console war. Some possible explanations for this are that betters believe that
1. The victory of Blu-Ray over HD-DVD means that people will now buy the PS3 as a media player.
2. The Xbox360 will be replaced by another console
3. The Wii’s popularity is a short term event.



For the probability of the PS3 winning the console war to go from 10% to 30% indicates a major change in attitude to the PS3. This could be important to game developers/reviewers who need to decide what console to concentrate on. It could also affect consumers who want to decide which console to buy as the most successful console tends to have more games options available.

Why research stem cells?

Can we use markets to answer how likely the "may" in "Stem cell research may provide us with cures for diseases" is?
According to the PPX market the stem cells are 94.50% likely to cure a disease by 2015. So roughly if you bet 19 dollars that stem cells will cure a disease by then you would only get 20 back.

This means stem cells are viewed as highly likely to cure human diseases in the near future. This information is useful as stem cells which come from human embryos are highly controversial. When defending any such controversial action is is useful to be able to estimate its eventual usefulness.