Cash backer

Alarming news for those who thought the greatest peril lying in wait for the election forecaster was a certain amount of derision when you got it wrong. Helmut Norpoth of the State University of New York, Sunny Brook, opened up alarming vistas of forecasters needing indemnity insurance when he told an American Political Studies Association session about a disconcerting form of student feedback: "One student told me that, using something she'd learnt from me, she'd lost $50 on the 1992 elections." What really worried him, he added, was that said student was on her way to law school.