Well, I guess I picked the wrong day to tout the Intrade futures market.

On Monday, citing the formidable record of Intrade’s bettors in calling elections, I noted their near-certainty that Barack Obama and John McCain would win the New Hampshire primary. The bettors were only half right. As one Lab reader, Tony, observed after the results came in last night, the traders apparently fell victim to the same Obama-is-unstoppable cascade that had journalists and politicos writing off Hillary Clinton’s chances.

But the traders did at least realize their mistake even before the polls closed (presumably because some of them were insiders who got hold of the closely guarded exit polls), and Mrs. Clinton’s upset victory was obvious on Intrade long before it was proclaimed on television. While the networks’ election wizards were still cautioning that the race was too close to call, the graphs at Intrade showed Mr. Obama’s shares plummeting while Mrs. Clinton’s shares soared.

I still think Intrade is a great time-saving device — it was the quickest way to know who won New Hampshire — but I’m sufficiently chastened by the traders’ fallibility to consider alternate tools for analyzing politics. I’ve sought help from Ian Ayres, an econometrician at Yale Law School and the author of “Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart.” Here’s his guide to political math: Read more …

They haven’t voted yet in New Hampshire, but my unnamed sources tell me there’s not much question who will win: Barack Obama and John McCain.

I can’t name these sources because they’re the anonymous bettors at the Intrade futures market, which I consider the greatest time-saving invention of this century. Keeping up with a presidential campaign used to require at least an hour a day of wading through punditry, and much more time during the peak primary season. But now, with a few clicks on Intrade, you can see the accumulated expertise of thousands of people betting on the campaign. Because they put up their own money and act anonymously, they’re less likely to fall prey to the errors of herd thinking — the informational and reputational cascades that I discussed last year in this column.

Before the Iowa caucuses, as journalists debated the outcome and warned it was too close to call, Intrade correctly favored Mr. Obama and Mike Huckabee, giving them each about a 60-percent probability to finish first. For the New Hampshire primary the traders are far more certain who’s going to win. As I write this, on the eve of the primary, they rate Mr. Obama’s chances at 90 percent and Mr. McCain’s at 85 percent. Each man is also the front-runner at Intrade to eventually get his party’s nomination, with Mr. Obama having a 63-percent probability of being nominated, and Mr. McCain a 32-percent probability (although that puts him just barely ahead of Rudolph W. Giuliani).

The Intrade speculators could be wrong, of course, but they have a remarkable track record. During 2004, as those of us covering the campaign wrote excitedly about about shifts of momentum, the traders favored George W. Bush throughout the campaign and correctly called all 50 states the weekend before the election. Futures markets like Intrade (and the Iowa Electronic Markets) illustrate some of the principles discussed by James Surowiecki in “The Wisdom of Crowds.” Experimenters have found that when you ask enough people to estimate, say, the number of jelly beans in a jar, they tend to cancel one another’s errors and come up with a surprisingly accurate number. Read more …

Field work can be hell. But thanks to the dogged researchers who attended 66 college parties in Southern California, now at last it can revealed:

Playing drinking games at a party leads to increased levels of alcohol in the bloodstream.

Fortunately, that wasn’t the only result of the investigation reported in the January issue of January issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research. The researchers say their fieldwork, which involved studying more than 1,300 people at parties, is an improvement over past studies that relied on people’s recollections of getting hammered. These researchers made observations at the parties and brought along equipment to test students’ blood-alcohol concentrations (BrACs). One of the authors, J.D. Clapp of San Diego State University, summarizes the findings:

Both individual behavior and the environment matter when it comes to student-drinking behavior. At the individual level, playing drinking games and having a history of binge drinking predicted higher BrACs. At the environmental level, having a lot of intoxicated people at a party and themed events predicted higher BrACs. One of the more interesting findings was that young women drank more heavily than males at themed events. It is rare to find any situation where women drink more than men, and these events tended to have sexualized themes and costumes.

The researchers say they’re planning to do further investigations of themed parties, and I hope they’ll consider letting a journalist accompany them (if necessary, I would go in costume). I don’t know why women would drink more at themed parties, but I do have a hypothesis: Could it be a coping mechanism for dealing with the sight of guys like John Belushi dressed in togas?

Amidst the denunciations of my column and post on weather alarmism, there was a calm question from one critic, Annie Jia:

What is your purpose in writing these articles, aside from making climate-change-is-a-problem advocates look bad, and making climate skeptics happy, and making yourself appear smart by debunking “popular wisdom”? Shouldn’t journalism be more responsible and purposeful than that, and be geared towards some positive end?

I’ll spare you the usual lecture on journalism being a search for the pure truth no matter where it leads. Journalists, especially columnists, want to tell the truth while also performing some useful public service, and we’re inevitably selective in what we choose to write about. So why did I write about the weaknesses in some of the alarms being raised about global warming? Even if some availability entrepreneurs like Al Gore are mistakenly attributing isolated weather events to global warming, aren’t they serving a noble purpose by getting an otherwise apathetic public to take action against a real problem?

I don’t doubt that people like Al Gore mean well. As I noted in the column, the best excuse for what they’re doing is that they’re offsetting another bias: people’s tendency to ignore global warming because it’s an abstract long-term problem. Politicians who want to get things done routinely rely on emotional and irrational appeals. As a short-term political strategy, it makes a certain sense to exploit hurricanes and droughts for the global-warming cause. But as a long-term strategy, I think it could hurt the cause. Read more …

On New Year’s Day, let us contemplate signs of future weather.

In my Findings column, I argue that “availability entrepreneurs” have been exploiting short-term weather in order to awaken the public to what could be a real long-term danger, global warming. Hurricanes, blizzards, floods, droughts, exceptionally hot years — all these have been linked to global warming. Sometimes they’re described as “evidence” or as “wake-up calls” or as “examples” of what’s in store. The more careful entrepreneurs like to say these events are “consistent” with the theory that the climate is dangerously warming.

But if all these things are consistent with the theory, are there any sorts of weather trends or events that would be inconsistent? Or, as Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado put the question on the Prometheus blog:

What behavior of the climate system could hypothetically be observed over the next 1, 5, 10 years that would be inconsistent with the current consensus on climate change? My focus is on extreme events like floods and hurricanes, so please consider those, but consider any other climate metric or phenomena you think important as well for answering this question. Ideally, a response would focus on more than just sea level rise and global average temperature, but if these are the only metrics that are relevant here that too would be very interesting to know.

Any answers?

If you have any brilliant predictions for either 2008 or 2108, I’d like to offer you a prize. But I can guarantee delivery only for the 2008 winner.

The prize is a copy of “America 1908,” by Jim Rasenberger, a very good book about a very good year for technology. In 1908, the Wright brothers became celebrities, Henry Ford introduced the Model T, and American newspapers published wonderfully optimistic forecasts for coming technological breakthroughs. My favorite is from Hampton’s Magazine, which, like everyone else, was infatuated the possibilities of the “wireless” wonder of that day, the radio:

“When the expectations of wireless experts are realized everyone will have his own pocket telephone and may be called wherever he happens to be. . . . The citizen of the wireless age will walk abroad with a receiving apparatus compactly arranged in his hat and tuned to that one of myriad vibrations by which he has chosen be called. . . . .When that invention is perfected, we shall have a new series of daily miracles.

If that prophet were alive today, I’d award him or her a cell phone with a headset and personalized ring tones. To you, dear Lab reader, I promise to award a copy of Mr. Rasenberger’s book at the end of this year for the best prediction of a scientific or technological development in 2008. And should TierneyLab be around in 2108, it will award another copy — a collector’s edition, by then — for the best prediction for the next century.

To get in the prophetic state of mind, you can check out predictions for New York City that Mr. Rasenberger rounded up for the Times’ City section. But you don’t have to confine your imagination to New York. You’ve got the whole universe open for your crystal ball.

If the 2008 presidential candidates are forced, kicking and screaming, to debate science, what questions should they be asked?

An impressive array of scientists, academics, politicians and journalists have joined Science Debate 2008, the grass-roots group urging the candidates to have a debate on science and technology. I can’t imagine the candidates’ handlers are happy with this prospect, given how much extra work it would mean for them in bringing the candidates up to speed. Politics attracts lawyers and liberal-arts majors, not science whizzes. And I imagine Republicans might be especially leery — to conservatives, the “scientific community” doesn’t sound like a welcoming crowd. But it might actually be a smart political move. Given how often the GOP is criticized for scientific ignorance, expectations would be so low that a Republican wouldn’t have to do much to exceed them.

The debate sounds like a great idea to me — but then, as a science journalist, I’m not exactly a disinterested observer. Give me copy! Feed this blog! What I’d really like to see, even more than a debate, would be a televised science quiz for the presidential candidates. Aside from offering us all the pleasure of watching politicians try to explain the laws of thermodynamics, it would be a novel experiment: Would the candidate who scored highest on the quiz improve his or her standing in the polls? Or would voters traumatized by science classes react like kids turning on the science geek?

I welcome your answers, plus any suggestions for questions you’d like to see the candidates answer in a science debate — or a science quiz.

Now that Donald Norman and Lab readers have analyzed the water faucets in the office building of the future, let us contemplate an even more important topic: the elevators.

Dr. Norman, the Northwestern cognitive scientist and illustrious techno-critic, had no trouble dealing with the elevators in the New York Times new headquarters, but that’s because he makes a living checking out this stuff. Most other visitors are flummoxed — one neuroscientist who came here for an interview described them as a “cognitive test.” Even those of who have been using them for six months still aren’t used to them.

In theory, the elevators are a technological marvel. They save energy and people’s time by grouping passengers going to the same floor in the same elevator. After you punch a button in the lobby telling the computer what floor you’re going to, it directs you to one of the elevators. You step into the elevator and let it to do the rest — there are no numbered buttons to push inside the car. The smart elevator already knows which floors all the passengers are going to, and it simply displays a list of the stops it’s going to make.

This all makes so much sense that these smart elevators are bound to end up in lots more buildings. I’d bet they’ll eventually become the norm. But in the meantime, the people who work in the building still sometimes reach for nonexistent buttons to push, and visitors have to get an elevator-reeducation course. It’s a typical problem of a new technology, as Dr. Norman explained. Read more …

Results of a field investigation with Donald Norman: Yes, Virginia, you can get water out of an automatic faucet. (Photos: Donald Norman)

For my Findings column, I put in a day of field work in New York with Donald Norman, the author of the classic “The Design of Everyday Things” and a new book, “The Design of Future Things.” I had a fine time being enlightened by the great expert on gadgets gone bad as he analyzed gear at places like Hammacher Schlemmer and Best Buy (my ulterior motive was to get advice on what to buy my dad for Christmas).

But for Dr. Norman, a cognitive scientist at Northwestern, the most productive part of the day was spent in the new headquarters of the Times. He went into his anthropologist mode as as he checked out the new elevators, bathrooms, vending machines, printers, faxes and phones. He looked for telltale signs of bad design and took care to interview the natives.

You can see one result of his field work in the photographs that he took, which are at the top of this post. They’re from the men’s room near my desk. I took him there seeking to solve a mystery has been puzzling the crank in me for years: Why can’t you get water from the miserly faucets in new buildings? Have the secrets of plumbing technology been lost? Is the Sahara in danger of spreading across America? Is the country beset by roving gangs of ruthless water thieves? Read more …