Quick update

For any regular reader, it’s probably been hard to miss that I haven’t had much time for blogging.. or even browsing the Web given how few links have appeared here via del.icio.us.

I was on the road, first at a MacArthur grantees’ meeting, then in Fort Lee, NJ for a couple of days, next in Chicago for some meetings and data collection, and finally at Northwestern for our graduate recruitment weekend. I’m delighted to be back in what was sunny California when I arrived yesterday, but what is now a cloudy rainy day (less delighted about the latter).

I’m still in catch-up mode so don’t expect too much in the near future. Maybe I’ll post some photos to keep things colorful.

In the meantime, check out how the “wisdom of crowds” principle completely failed me in this guessing game Scott put up. I decided to guess the contents of the coin jar by averaging the guesses of everyone else. It didn’t work at all.

I guess it’s just as well, choosing from among those intriguing prizes would’ve been difficult.

2 Responses to “Quick update”

  1. scott Says:

    Wrong though it was, your answer was my favorite. Methodologically speaking. 🙂

  2. Jay Livingston Says:

    I’ve been blogging about theWisdom of Crowds, and I tried the jar-guessing game in class (http://montclairsoci.blogspot.com/2007/01/groups-and-wisdom-ii.html)

    The average would have been the best answer except that outlier inflated itdrastically (she must have used the last four digits of her SSN or phone number).