Betting

Jan UAH in: 0.291C Anomaly warmer than December!

25 Comments

Roy Spencer has announced January 2014 UAH temperature anomaly: 0.291C. This might be unexpected by those shivering under the influence of the “polar vortex”, but it’s is up from December’s value of +0.266C. So unexpected that all but two people bet for lower temperatures. Or the explanation isthe low bias in betting persists. (I tend to think the later. After all: prior to January’s announcement, the lagging 4 month average temperature was 0.2785C and last months was +0.266C. Only 4 people bet higher than either of those!)

This month, win place and show went to: LesJohnson, eddieo and denny. Eddieo bet for a higher temperature than ultimately observed. Alas, LesJohnson and eddieo both wagered 5 quatloos, nearly emptying the pot. So while denny ‘wins’ some quatloos, it’s less than he bet. Sigh… (Maybe ensuring show nets a positive amount is something that should be tweaked. )

I’ll be posting the betting form for February shortly (to give people more time to bet). Tips to bettors: No matter how cold it might seem outdoors, an anomlay like -0.1C is highly unlikely. It’s not physically impossible for temperature to drop more than -0.3C in one month, but.. not likely. That said: they’re your quatloos! (I’m tempted to start betting the lagging 4 month average just to see how it does!)

Winnings in Quatloos for UAH TTL January, 2014 Predictions.
Rank Name Prediction (C) Bet Won
Gross Net
— Observed +0.291 (C)
1 LesJohnson 0.28 5 87.734 82.734
2 eddieo 0.31 5 70.187 65.187
3 denny 0.27 5 3.429 -1.571
4 AndrewKennett 0.313 5 0 -5
5 MDR 0.253 3 0 -3
6 YFNWG 0.25 5 0 -5
7 UnfrozenCavemanMD 0.238 5 0 -5
8 PavelPanenka 0.234 3 0 -3
9 angech 0.22 2 0 -2
10 SteveT 0.22 4.75 0 -4.75
11 BobW 0.22 3 0 -3
12 Clyde 0.219 5 0 -5
13 ivp0 0.216 5 0 -5
14 ScottBasinger 0.21 5 0 -5
15 EdForbes 0.201 5 0 -5
16 MpG 0.2 5 0 -5
17 Bill 0.198 5 0 -5
18 Tamara 0.195 5 0 -5
19 mct 0.194 5 0 -5
20 EdS 0.18 5 0 -5
21 KreKristiansen 0.172 4 0 -4
22 BobKoss 0.127 5 0 -5
23 Jefff 0.12 4 0 -4
24 PhilR 0.12 5 0 -5
25 RiHo08i 0.119 4.6 0 -4.6
26 RobertLeyland 0.114 4 0 -4
27 JohnNorris 0.113 5 0 -5
28 lance 0.111 5 0 -5
29 Perfekt 0.099 5 0 -5
30 RickA 0.095 5 0 -5
31 RichardDupuis 0.05 5 0 -5
32 Hal 0.015 5 0 -5
33 Freezedried 0.013 4 0 -4
34 AMac -0.026 3 0 -3
35 Cassanders -0.05 5 0 -5
36 Jens -0.1 2 0 -2

The net winnings for each member of the ensemble will be added to their accounts.

25 thoughts on “Jan UAH in: 0.291C Anomaly warmer than December!”

  1. Well, last month I won almost 61 quatloos, so maybe I can afford this negative win:)
    I am curious though: how often has that happened that someone one twice back to back?
    My betting strategy involves betting on the improbable based on betting history and I employ the sophisticated method of eyeballing.

  2. denny,
    I don’t know. I would have to write a script to interrogate the database.

    My betting strategy involves betting on the improbable

    This is why I try to avoid over-interpreting what the ‘bias’ means. With betting you get money only if you edge other people out. While actually being able to forecast the months temperature (for whatever reason including ‘psychic powers’) will let someone net lots of quatloos, it’s not clear that ‘sane’ bets will win more money than “on the bleeding edge” bets.

    That said: the bets have had a negative bias. And “insane bets can win” by itself doesn’t explain why there should be any bias. After all: high insane bets are likely to win just as much as low insane bets. And given that we observe a negative bias, always betting “last month +0.1C” (or whatever increment you like!) might be a winning strategy!

  3. And it is written, before the 4 horsemen make their terrible presence known, LesJohnson shall twice win the UAH bet. And, lo, it came to pass….

  4. > Tips to bettors: No matter how cold it might seem outdoors, an anomlay like -0.1C is highly unlikely.

    At #34, I wasn’t strategically betting on the improbable — I just mis-read Roy’s graph! Fortunately, the oceans wouldn’t have been required to boil away or freeze, in order for me to have won.

  7. I can only observe the temperatures only in my local area but the average temperature from my january electric bill showed a -5f change from the previous january

  8. MDR–
    Yes. It’s hot some places. People forget that when shivering in -4F That was the temperature when we retrieved our frozen newspaper from the driveway this morning!

  9. Nick Stokes (Comment #123960)
    February 5th, 2014 at 8:09 pm

    MDR (Comment #123954)
    “Polar vortex or not, here back in Brazil it is as hot as hell”
    Same here

    It would be funny if the northern pacific hot spot turned into a permanent feature.

  10. Coming in 7th out of 36 on my first entry is encouraging, but still no quatloos for this newcomer. I’m game to try again, but my balance is -5. How big is my quatloo credit line?

  12. Don’t listen to her Caveman. Once you owe enough quatloos to the house, it’s hard to recover. You’ll have to work it off with the Providers of planet Triskelion. Indentured servitude. Takes years.

  13. Let me tell you my Quatloo story. Once upon a time I was a teenage whiz kid programmer, back in the mid 1970s. The high school hired me to write software for the school system. I wrote programs for school administration and class scheduling, but also computer games for kids to play in the elementary and middle schools, where the computer labs had ASR-33 teletypes connected by telephone lines to a PDP-8 timesharing operating system called EDUsystem-50 in the high school.

    I wrote a variation of the “High-Low” game where the player had 7 guesses to guess a random number from 1 to 100, while being told if their guess was too high, too low, or correct. If they got it, the teletype would print out a lovely certificate for the number they guessed, enumerated in Quatloos, that they could tear off the paper roll.

    Several weeks later, I discovered that the game was a huge hit with the kids, who were playing it madly, and collecting these Quatloo certificates in their notebooks, and even trading them like currency. It also got back to me that an administrator wanted the game removed from the system, because he thought that “Quatloos” were a thinly veiled drug reference to Quaaludes (which I had barely heard of, probably from the lyrics to “Rebel Rebel” by David Bowie) and that I was encouraging drug use.

    I tried to explain that Quatloos were the unit of currency on the planet Triskelion from Star Trek. I didn’t matter. The kids were playing this Quatloo game to the exclusion of all other activities, and even if it wasn’t a drug reference, it was too much like gambling. The game had to be removed. And so my brief career as a Quatloo pusher to school children ended, sometime in 1976.

  14. Alas!! The misunderstood Quatloo.

    Sometimes in 1981 I was in a Wisconsin state park and a guy came around and oferred to sell use some of us ‘ludes. He left and our conversation went somethign like
    ” ‘ludes? What are ‘ludes?”
    “Dunnos, do you know?”
    “Dunno. ”

    Finally one guy in the group knew. No one contacted the ‘ludes guy to purchase.

  15. I just recall some show where there was a game show in space, called “Who Wants To Amass Quatloos?” It wasn’t until much later that I learned it was a reference to anything.

    Hm. Seems it was Johnny Bravo. Ah, childhood memories.

  16. Ah, the PDP-8 timeshare system with teletypes. That takes me back…I learned BASIC on that, way back when. I remember making game programs: tic-tac-toe, blackjack, draw poker, slot machine, lunar lander…but nothing with quatloos, unfortunately.

  17. People older than me have much more interesting stories about their younger years.

    I’m beginning to think the real problem with progress is that it’s boring.

  18. Andrew_FL,

    Woody Allen said that 85% of success is showing up. I’d suggest that paying attention gives you another 10% bump.

    You seem to be cooking along above 95%. What are you going to do with it?

  20. Woohooo! I’m in the quatloos. Years of educated guesses brought me no winnings at planet Lucia until today. My new improved GCM is obviously working. It’s a simple equation T = Pi/10 to two significant figures. What could possible go wrong next month?

  21. Eddieo –
    Here’s an interesting facet of your algorithm:
    Rounding to 1 significant figure (0.3) would have placed you first this month, with 25% more quatloos (gross).
    Rounding to 2 places (0.31) gave you second.
    Rounding to 3 places (0.314) would have given you fourth place and no quatloos at all.

    I’m not sure of the moral to draw from this, though.

  22. HaroldW,
    “I’m not sure of the moral to draw from this, though.”
    .
    That lots of weather noise, along with close clustering of the educated guesses, produces almost random winners. Or as King Charlemagne said: It’s smarter to be lucky than it’s lucky to be smart. 😉 OK it wasn’t Charlemagne, it was Stephen Schwartz who said that.

  23. I had a couple of thoughts. My first is that the betting tells us more about the bias of the betters than anything else. And the bias here seems to be in favor of the null or at least a return to the mean.

    My second is that the temperature seems to be random, or at least the trailing digits are random. Is there a way to test for randomness? I wonder if it is possible to compare the randomness of the temperature with the randomness of the betters? Is temperature a random walk?

  24. Genghis–
    Depends what you mean by “random”. But it’s true that predicting next months temperature includes a high degree of unpredictability.

    Is temperature a random walk?

    “Random walk” is a term of art and means a specific thing. And the answer is: No.

  25. HaraldW
    I’ll have to build a random number of significant figures into this months “projection”.
    Ed

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