An arbitrage opportunity

Nate Silver noted a discrepancy between the market prices for bets on who will win the presidential election at Intrade vs. other markets like the Iowa Electronic Market, with strange bidding patterns at Intrade. More discussion over at Computational Complexity. To help visualize it, here is a graph of the closing prices of PRESIDENT.DEM2008 at Intrade and PRES08_WTA at IEM. Update: CQpolitics: Trader Drove Up Price of McCain ‘Stock’ in Online Market It certainly looks as though there's been an unusually large difference in prices lately.

Recent results in nonlinear peer-to-peer reviewing algorithms

On Monday I received spam, as many periodically do, from the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, WMSCI '09. Their peer review process having been previously demonstrated by Stribling et al. to be susceptible to random paper generation, they have a new strategy:

Submitted papers or extended abstracts will have three kinds of reviews: double-blind (by at least three reviewers), non-blind, and participative peer-to-peer reviews.

(Emphasis mine.) The conference web site further describes the peer-to-peer review process as

Informal, nonlinear, systemically interactive methods, for the achievement of what is called bottom-up quality[.]

This is great news; as a sometime peer-to-peer researcher myself, I'm eager to see nonlinear peer-to-peer reviewing technology adopted.

I understand that as future work WMSCI is developing an oblivious algorithm for ad-hoc low-power reviewing.