The 10 craziest items you can't sell on eBay - Yahoo! News

The 10 craziest items you can't sell on eBay - Yahoo! News ;..  Magic potionsSelling things on eBay that aren't actually real is an interesting phenomenon that may be more common than you think. So common, in fact, that as of August 30, eBay is taking action to ban services that may not even be real. One casualty of this new rule is the selling of magic potions — which currently have a rather large presence on the site. Small vials of liquid being sold for the purposes of defeating "demons" or improving your luck are abundant, but not for long.

6. Prayers
Regardless of what religion — or non-religion — you favor, you've probably never considered the act of praying as something you could actually sell. Well, apparently some intrepid eBayers have monetized the act of speaking to a deity, and ask for real, actual money in order to pray for you or someone you care about. As of August 30, that will no longer be allowed. Thank God.

Netvibes – Social Media Monitoring, Analytics and Alerts Dashboard

Netvibes – Social Media Monitoring, Analytics and Alerts Dashboard: Netvibes is the all-in-one dashboard intelligence platform for real-time social media monitoring, social analytics, brand sentiment, reputation management, team management, company intranets and community portals. The #1 dashboard solution for Fortune 500 brands, agencies and enterprises."

RELOADED as in...

RELOADED as in...

What we think about the 50 states — in 1 map

What we think about the 50 states — in 1 map ;.. In politics, perception often trumps reality.  Put another way: What people think they know about a politician, an issue or anything else goes a long way to determining how they feel about it — whether or not their initial perception is based in reality or not.

That perception obsession has lead us to seek out any and every tool that helps us get at how people think about their politics — and each other.

Inferring Default Probabilities from Credit Spreads: The Journal of Fixed Income

Inferring Default Probabilities from Credit Spreads: The Journal of Fixed Income ;... PROBABILITIES on DERIVATIVES, ... That an implied volatility can be extracted from the market price for an option is well known. Less familiar is the fact that with a set of options with the same maturity and a range of strike prices, an estimate of the entire risk-neutral probability density (RND) can be extracted without the need to specify the market’s option pricing model. There are several alternative ways to do this in the literature, and the authors examine two of them. The behavior of the RND provides a detailed look at how the market’s (risk-neutral) expectations respond to important information events, such as a change in the interest rate target followed by the central bank. In this article, the authors look at how these monetary policy decisions by the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Banco de México are reflected in the market for FX options on the peso/U.S. dollar exchange rate. The results show that the exchange rate RNDs do respond significantly to interest rate surprises, and the extraction procedure that completes the RND by adding tails from a generalized extreme value distribution appears to have more success in capturing extreme values than does the alternative procedure that imposes a tail shape.

Preseason Ranks: Top 200 - Yahoo! Sports

Preseason Ranks: Top 200 - Yahoo! Sports ;..  FANTASY REALMS... ;... Scoring system: Pass TD = 4; 25 Pass Yards = 1; Rush/Receive TD = 6; 10 Rush/Receive Yards = 1

FantasyPros is the leading aggregator and analyzer of fantasy football rankings. They provide free consensus rankings, accuracy ratings, and innovative decision-making tools.

‘Jim Henson’s Fantastic World’ at Museum of the Moving Image - NYTimes.com

‘Jim Henson’s Fantastic World’ at Museum of the Moving Image - NYTimes.com