Word: hollywoodism
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...absorbs the collected wisdom of millions of investors and expresses it as stock prices. Prediction markets now let people bet on everything from sports scores to election results to the expected capture of al-Qaeda bigwig Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi. Some of the best of those online markets: the Hollywood Stock Exchange, the Iowa Electronic Markets, Yahoo's Tech Buzz Game and PublicGyan. InTrade, run by the Trade Exchange Network, an Irish firm, cleared 50,000 contracts last month (including 10% odds that al-Zarqawi will be caught in 2005). "There's a tremendous demand for prediction," says Justin Wolfers...
Steven Quartz, director of the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Caltech, is one of many experts moving into neuromarketing. He is helping Hollywood studios select trailers for new movies by scanning viewers as they watch a series of scenes to see which ones elicit the strongest reactions in the parts of the brain that are associated with reward expectations. Quartz, who works in partnership with market-research company Lieberman Research Worldwide, is similarly scanning consumers to identify emotional reactions to TV commercials and to products' packaging design...
...When a Hollywood studio invests heavily in a movie that turns out to be a box-office flop, the polite euphemism is: "The film didn't find an audience". California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had a similar problem finding his audience in the state's special election yesterday. The former Hollywood star had backed four government reform propositions; by Wednesday morning it was clear that all four were voted down in a crushing rejection of the governor's program for change...
...give his election night speech to supporters in a Beverly Hills hotel long before the final results were tallied. "In a couple of days victories or losses will be behind us," he said, and then got off the stage fast before the real bad news became official. Unlike in Hollywood, there was no chance to make up for the flop with DVD sales...
Like any half-decent Hollywood thriller, every serious political brawl in Washington needs at least one good villain. It's not nearly as much fun or as easy to score points and hurl invective back and forth without a compelling one-dimensional character at the center of it all. Robert Bork played that role magnificently in his 1987 epic Supreme Court battle, as did Clarence Thomas in his more understated performance four years later. More recently, during the bloody conservative revolt over the Supreme Court nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers, the real villain turned...