Marta Salij on Harry Potter, in the Detroit Free Press:

The Half-Blood Prince is ... not who I thought it was all through the book.

And, the sixth book in J.K. Rowling's series about the boy wizard who's chosen to save the world from the evil Lord Voldermort proves an interesting point: Many heads are better than one.

Because, you see, the online betting pools that had sprung up to wager on what would happen in the book were largely right, especially right before the book was released Saturday at 12:01 a.m.
...
That last part intrigues me, having read and reviewed The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki (Anchor, $14), last year. Surowiecki described how asking a vast number of lay people to predict something was almost always more accurate than asking a small group of experts.

And that's what a betting pool is: a way to average many hunches.

For "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," some online sports betting sites had added pools on which major character would die in the sixth book -- a plot development Rowling had announced. Several names had strong betting, but in the days and weeks before the book's release, some pools, especially in the United Kingdom, shifted around one name.

I won't tell you which name, because that would be spoiling the book for those who haven't yet finished it. But those pools were right.

Inside information? Maybe, but then more bettors clearly saw the wisdom of that guess and put more money in that direction. That proves Surowiecki's point: That many people, putting together their various sources of information, good and not-so-good, would come up with a more accurate answer than asking, say, a random book critic to predict the death.