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Chris Hibbert

I work on Prediction Markets (AKA Idea Futures). I've been interested in these markets since the late 1980s, and have been participating (at the Foresight Exchange) since '92 or '93. I helped run a private real-money market in 1999, and have been building sofware to implement them since 2003. Currently, I am working full-time to build Zocalo, an Open Source toolkit for Prediction Markets, hosted at sourceforge. From March, 2005 through July, 2006, I worked on this project in CommerceNet's research lab as Principal Investigator. I continue to pursue the project now, without outside funding. Prediction Markets and Zocalo are major themes in my blog.

My purpose in the project is to build prediction market software that people can use as a foundation for deploying many markets of this type. As I said in my proposal to CommerceNet, the plan is to start by building software to support economists doing experiments with prediction markets, and expand from there to internal markets within businesses, and eventually expand to the point where the software would be sufficient for public real-money markets in important questions on technology development, economic impacts, and other important issues.

In 2003, I worked on an implementation of Idea Futures in E. I used it to explore some of Robin Hanson's ideas on how to support conditional claims . It is probably mostly of interest to people who are interested in learning E, or are very interested in the details of Idea Futures. Early in 2004, while working as a contractor on an Extreme Programming project, and discovered the power of the Idea Java IDE. I started over building the present version of Zocalo in Java. This version focuses on integrating book orders with an automated market maker.

Personal

In my spare time, I'm a rock climber, I play ice hockey (I took a class in the spring of 2003; it had been twenty years since I played pick-up hockey in college.)   I no longer play volleyball, (my knees gave out.)   I do play backgammon, and read Science fiction. (I'm currently the president of the board of the Libertarian Futurist Society.) I'm also in a reading group, which I attend regularly since the group usually meets at my house. I'm an inveterate game player. I'm in a couple of games in a PBEM zine, Variable Pig. I keep track of the Maps for a Railway Rivals game I'm playing in using Adobe Photoshop and post them here so the other players can proofread them for me.

Janet and I are geocachers. We're Chris and Janet. We passed 500 caches found in August '04 about 16 months after we started. We've slowed down a lot, recently, but we still do go out caching when we can.

I also like to watch Hockey, and Bike racing. (Since we don't watch TV, we only see sports we're willing to watch in person.)

I read Edge whenever a new edition comes out. This is smart people talking about recent exporations and developments in science and technology and their implications to an educated lay audience. I've recently been reading blogs a fair bit. (Catallarchy, Marginal Revolution, Agoraphilia) I got started on these because of a friend's recommendation of USS Clueless, which I read consistently until its shift of focus from politics to Japanese animation videos. I now have my own blog. I post there a little more than once a week.

Here are some comments on my favorite local place to see great art.

I've been signed up for cryonics for a few years now. I wrote up some of the reasoning behind my decision. Please let me know what you think of my arguments.

Photos

My newest pictures are of the trip Janet and I took to the four corners area and the slot canyons and other rock features we saw. This immediately followed a backpacking trip in the Grand Canyon (my second), which is why there are a few pictures from the Grand Canyon as well. My pictures from the previous week-long off-trail backpacking trip to the Grand Canyon are still up. Late in 2000, we went to Australia with Janet's sister and brother-in-law Eileen and Alan.

For Christmas in 1999, I received a digital camera. I've really enjoyed using the camera. Janet and I were at the Gala at the RSA conference, and one of her co-workers took this picture using my camera. (It was much easier to clean up the red-eye and flash reflection on Janet's glasses with the Adobe software that came with the camera than anything I've used before.)

We went to Año Nuevo in January 2000, and I used the camera with good results there as well.

Here are some photos of our dog. Here she's laying on a blanket looking cute. In these three she's jumping for a treat Janet is holding. And here she is resting during a hike. These are some of the photos I'd like to clean up now that I have a scanner and software that seems to work. I have lots of other stuff to do, so it'll probably be a while.

In January 2000, we went to watch the Cat's Hill Criterium, an annual bike race on the streets of Los Gatos. I captured some good sequences. (My camera will snap up to 9 pictures in under a second.)

Charity

Here's a list of organizations which I support with my tax-deductible contributions. I urge you to consider supporting them as well.

Geneology

My mother worked on geneology for several years, but she doesn't spend any time on it any more. (For a while, her license plate was an amalgam of her first name--Jennie--and the word Geneology.) She sent me the sources for a book she wrote based on the information she collected. I've converted it all to html and GIFs. I've (finally!) integrated all the material. Here is the root of the geneology material.

I had prevously posted the material in GEDCom format, converted with ged2html. If you preferred that format, please let me know.

Privacy

I do privacy-related volunteer work as a member of CPSR.

I maintain the Usenet FAQs on Social Security Numbers, Junk Mail, and also a list of Privacy-related addresses.

If you want to see what kind of information your browser is sending about you along with your request, look here.

Patents

I am a co-inventor on 10 patents. 6 resulted from work Agorics did with Sun Labs between 1994 and 1997. Four result from work Agorics did with Sun and with IBM on ECheck. You can see the abstracts at the Patent office's web site. They are:

Some pages with more in-Depth pointers.

• Authoritative Books
• interesting People with interesting web pages
• Politics