American Idol

Freakonomics: look at the ways that voting on American Idol can be predicted. There is a lot here about information and the way that it can be used in trading.

"But there are many other ways to predict who would win. TiVo has experimented with using data from 20,000 random anonymous subscribers to find out when viewers fast-forward or re-watch particular contestants. Neat idea, but so far they have had a much lower success rate than DialIdol.Instead of looking at phone and television behavior, you can also try to make predictions from Internet behavior. Apple might look at iTunes downloads of the contestant songs. Or you could use Google Trends to see which contestant name has been searched more often. David Cook rules by this method as well:"