Good for Zeynep publishing this. But I don't really see what the point is. The problem for democracy is that campaigning is about manipulating people to win votes, not about actually engaging in issues. The mass media approaches to this are not particularly less scary to me, even if they are not as effective as new more data-driven approaches.
I'm also a devotee of the Amtrak quiet car.
Using the Wikipedia logo seems to be pretty lame for an article about Intrade and prediction markets. But the rest of it seems reasonable. The summary is something like: Prediction markets aren't good when there isn't good publicly available information. Which I suppose shouldn't come as a huge suprise.
Cool article on Joi. He also published an "unabridged" version on his blog.
This article, and the other articles in this "Room For Debate" about ADHD are awesome.
"Why not offer legal protections to the ugly, as we do with racial, ethnic and religious minorities, women and handicapped individuals?"
"In popular mythology, the impressive performances of America’s blacks, especially Owens, so infuriated Hitler that he refused to shake Owens’s hand after his victory in the 100-meter dash. It’s a good story, and one widely disseminated at the time to show that the Olympic spirit had triumphed over Nazi racism. The problem is, it never happened."
Nice oped by Viviana Zelizer about why it's considered so bad to give money as a gift.
