If you haven’t heard of this before, you need to check it out. The basic idea is that with everyone working together, everyone can beat the market. Here’s how they describe the service:

Motley Fool CAPS operates from a simple premise: Working together, we can improve our investing results. This revolutionary new service pools the resources of the Motley Fool Community to help you identify the best stocks at the best times to buy them — and which stocks to avoid, too!

Here’s an example of a stock with a good rating, Pioneer Co (PONR). At the time of this writing, 35 out of 36 people though this stock was going to outperform the S&P500. From the number of ratings, and the percentage that think it will out perform the market, it calculates a star rating. In this particular case, it has a rating of 5 stars. This is the highest rating a stock can have. This particular stock looks good, and I’ve added it to my watchlist.

I’m definitely going to be using this service instead of Yahoo or Google finance. Right now, I only have 8 stocks picked. But this looks not only fun, but educational. Stay tuned for more posts.

It’s cold and rainy here today, so I thought I’d share some observations on the topic of relative temperature.

The actual air temperature is an easy thing to qualitatively measure. For instance, right now it’s 54 degrees Fahrenheit. So what’s relative temperature? That’s just my phrasing for how warm it feels based on what the temperature was like in the near past. About a week ago, there was a cold spell in Tucson, and we got snow. It was very cold. With highs in the 40s. The system pasted and temperatures returned to normal - around 55. It was nice. It felt like springtime. Contrast that with today, where the temperature is about the same. Yesterday, the high was in the 70s. Sunny skies all day long, and no wind made it seem like it was almost 80.

So why did it feel so warm a week ago, but so cold today? Relative temperature. My body was “used to” the colder temperatures, so when the temperature rose, it felt warmer - which is was. Today, when my body is “used to” the warmer temperatures and the temperatures fell, it felt colder - which it was. It’s a simple phenomenon, but it’s kind of interesting.

I’m hoping the cold will be gone tomorrow, but I’m not selling the farm.

This personality test has 85 phrases, of which you rate the accurateness. Each of the question has a choice of 5 possible answers, ranging from very inaccurate to very accurate. My results follow in the grey table. In general, I think they’re pretty accurate. Lowest in the warmth and social assertiveness categories, and highest in the intellect, paranoia, introversion, and independence categories.

There is no in depth explaination of what each of the terms means. However, they do offer a table that gives a few words for each of the categories. In general, I think the category names are self-explanatory. There are no off site links that give more insight into the test’s results.

I’m an editor for the Open Directory Project, and have been thinking of ways to increase the number of websites that are listed without having to wade through the trash that is what normally gets submitted. The current situation is that editors are free to choose where they edit, and what they do. In fact, this is a very good method because it allows editors to work on areas that are of interest to them. There is no need to even visit the list of suggested sites, much less add them.

Adding a FIFO (first in, first out) system, in addition to the current system, would increase the number of sites in unpopular categories. This system would need at least one editor that could edit anywhere (dmoz term: editall). And it would work better with a team of editalls. The system is relatively simple. The person entering a site into the FIFO would supply the URL, title, description, and category where they think it should be listed. This would be a watered down version of the current dmoz add url form.

The editors job would be to simply decide if the URL should be listed in the category suggested with the title and description. There would be only two options - Add and Delete. Under the delete option, there would be several sub-options to choose from. The URL is not listable, the category suggested is not correct, the title is not correct, and/or the description is not correct. Upon processing of the URL, an email would be automatically generated to the submitter. If the URL is not listable, it would tell the submitter to stop submitting and add the URL to the FIFO blacklist. Then this URL would not longer appear in the FIFO, even if it was suggested. If the URL was deleted and was listable, the email would suggest changes to the appropriate fields, and suggest the URL be resubmitted to the FIFO. If the URL was added, it would say that.

This system has the advantage of putting the weight of correct titles, descriptions and categories on the submitter instead of the editor. While it does not take a long time to write titles and descriptions and to find the correct category, it does take time. And if that time were spent adding other websites, the Open Directory Project would be adding more sites than the current system.