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Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Style of predictions: We long for conversation

“If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from,” Carl Sagan wrote in his meditation on science and spirituality, “we will have failed.”
~ “One cannot accumulate love.”

Prediction markets predict public events such as election outcomes better than do polls or other forecasting mechanisms. Internal corporate prediction markets in events such as sales forecasts, product launch times, and product feature demand have been less well studied. Internal corporate markets tend to have fewer participants than public markets and the participants often have strategic interests and biases. Thus, it has been an open question how well these markets operate.
Cowgill and Zitzewitz report on a number of different types of prediction markets run by Google, Ford and Firm X and although they find evidence for some biases they also find that corporate prediction markets also work better than alternative forecasting methods.


“Of all her contemporaries, Austen is the only one to have made it through with her best-seller status intact, and that’s not just because her girls meet her boys without any help from Tinder.” The Telegraph (UK) 


“Two and a half years ago, the critic and editor John Freeman abruptly resigned his post as editor in chief of Granta, the tweedy British literary magazine that he’d spent several years remaking for a 21st-century readership. … Finally, last summer, Freeman announced the more long-term venture everyone was waiting for:Freeman’s, a Granta-like literary magazine-meets-anthology that he would publish regularly in partnership with Grove Atlantic.” The first issue arrives next week Vogue 

In what is being referred to as “an unprecedented example of library-author-publisher collaboration,” a new philosophy book and accompanying digital archive of its material were recently launched. The book is The Ethics of Suicide: Historical Sources, by Margaret Battin (Utah).
Ethics of suicide

Kate Manne (Cornell) has an opinion piece in today’s New York Times about professors’ use of “trigger warnings,” by which she means “notice in their syllabuses, or before certain reading assignments” that the course material may discuss or depict “common causes of trauma.” Such warnings have been criticized (here, for example) as a sign of the end times of higher education, but Manne makes some rather reasonable points about them
Warning: This Post Is About Trigger Warnings

This research investigates psychological differences between individuals of different political orientations on a social networking platform, Twitter. Based 

Gupta, Sonam and Dhillon, Ishneet, Organizational Restructuring and Collaborative Creativity: The Case of Microsoft and Sony (2015). The IUP Journal of Business Strategy, Vol. XII, No. 1, March 2015, pp. 53-65. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2671723
“The need for innovation and cross-dependencies among the departments is forcing organizations to restructure from divisional to functional organizational structure. This paper presents one such case wherein Microsoft and Sony carried out restructuring efforts to move towards a functional organizational structure when they faced cutthroat competition from other technology majors such as Google and Apple.