From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Wed Aug 06 2003 - 04:43:49 MDT
Giulio:
>Here:
>http://www.americanactionmarket.org/
> Their website does not say too much, it would be interesting to know more.
http://wired.com/news/print/0,1294,59879,00.html
Bush Impeached? Wanna Bet?
By Leander Kahney
02:00 AM Aug. 04, 2003 PT
Though there was an outcry over the Pentagon's terrorism futures market, a
similar online exchange is in the works to predict what the U.S. government
is up to.
The American Action Market will offer various Washington "futures" that can
be bet upon and traded. Examples include:
* Which country will the White House threaten next?
* Who will be the next foreign leader to move off the CIA payroll and
onto the White House's "most wanted" list?
* Which corporation with close ties to the White House will be the next
cloaked in scandal?
The AAM will begin registering traders in September and plans to open for
business Oct. 1 -- the same launch date proposed for the Pentagon's
terrorism market, until it was shelved.
Like the Pentagon's scrapped Policy Analysis Market, the AAM lets traders
"bet" on future events by buying and selling futures as though they were
stocks. The higher the price, the more likely the market believes the event
will occur. But instead of predicting terrorist strikes, the AAM will
predict things like the next White House staffer to quit.
"The idea is to answer some of the most pressing questions in the world:
What will the White House do next?" said one of the founders, Andrew Geiger,
an American programmer living in Paris.
The AAM market is the brainchild of a half-dozen academics from various
colleges, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale
University, New York University and the University of Montreal. Most,
however, are keeping their identities quiet until they get an institutional
go-ahead.
The market was organized on Nettime, a politics and culture mailing list.
"It's quite amazing, the Pentagon and the White House are very fertile
imaginative fields these days," Geiger said. "(The AAM project) sounds
humorous, but that just shows how far things have gone. We've entered the
realm of fiction. Things really are Dr. Strangelove."
The AAM project complements another academic project, the Government
Information Awareness project. The GIA was built in response to the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency's Terrorism Information Awareness program.
Its organizers hope the market will attract academics, politicians, civil
servants and other insiders to provide accurate predictions of White House
behavior. Geiger said even those who read the newspapers are qualified to be
traders.
"Our goal is to have people with insight into how the White House works,"
said Geiger. "There are a lot of people who spend a lot of time thinking
about what's going on in the world these days. A lot of that thought could
be transferred into the system, giving you trading data that will tell you
what's really going on."
Geiger added, "Who knows whether it will reveal stuff? Anyway, it will be
engaging."
The public, he noted, will be able to follow trades on the market's website.
David Pennock, a senior research scientist at Overture Services, said
futures markets have proven to be very good predictors of many different
kinds of events, from the weather to election outcomes.
"It's one of the best, if not the best, way to predict the future," he said.
"It's a good, well-known method for getting information that's distributed
around the world."
Bob Forsythe, a University of Iowa professor who helped organize the Iowa
Electronic Markets, which speculate on election results, agreed that futures
are reliable indicators of what's going to happen next -- if the traders are
knowledgeable.
"You have to have informed traders or they don't work very well," he said.
"Who are the informed traders in an assassination market, for example? The
same's true for predicting the White House."
-- ******************************************************************** Amara Graps, PhD email: amara@amara.com Computational Physics vita: ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/ ******************************************************************** "That would be a good idea." -- Gandhi [when asked what he thought of western civilisation]
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