April 29, 2014
For Immediate Release
FAIRFAX, VA
Announcing the 1st Annual College Bowl Competition in Science and Technology Forecasts
SciCast is pleased to announce the SciCast College Bowl, an open competition to see who the best forecasters are in science and technology. People wishing to enter the competition can join a team representing the college of their choice and win individual and team prizes for accuracy in their forecasts and other activities.
When participants register on the site they will choose from a variety of questions and make forecasts on the outcomes. Detailed background information will be provided for each question. Forecasts can be updated any time until the question closes. Updates can be based on what you learn or just a change in opinion.
The College Bowl is scheduled to run until May 31 and is designed to engage college students, alumni, faculty, researchers, professionals, and hobbyists interested in current innovations in science and technology. Questions in the College Bowl will include topics such as 3-D printing, medicine, robotics, and space sciences.
First prize in the SciCast College Bowl is a $500 gift card to Chipotle or Amazon (winners’ choice) for the most accurate forecaster. Top 10 forecasters from winning teams will also be awarded prizes both for accuracy and level of participation.
For more information and to enter, visit https://scicast.org/collegebowl
About SciCast: SciCast is a crowdsourced forecasting platform for science and technology run by George Mason University. It is based on the idea that the collective wisdom of an informed and diverse group is often a better predictor than the judgment of a single expert. Part of the Forecasting Science and Technology (ForeST) Program funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), SciCast questions are generated by its participants, as well as ForeST teams at Inkling Markets, George Mason University, BAE Systems and SRI International.
Question: What does it mean when I select my university as a group instead of ALL? It seems like I see a restricted set of questions. Could you explain? I’m a bit lost.
Hi Ted -
Thanks for your question.
You’re exactly right that when you select your school from the dropdown, you’re seeing a limited set of questions. These are the questions that are part of the College Bowl competition. Your leaderboard also just shows other people from your school who have signed up. We’ll be updating an overall leaderboard on this blog starting in the next couple days.
You’re obviously more than welcome to participate in other questions not part of the college bowl, for those, you’d just select the “All” from the dropdown.
Hope that makes sense. If not, you can contact us directly at [email protected]. Good luck!
Ok, I didn’t realize that before. Thanks for explaining!
Are you concerned that the nonlinear payoff will distort market prices? (Competitors will have an incentive to choose high variance strategies.)
Also, volumes are low enough that point dumping seems quite easy to do. Are we supposed to follow some sort of honor code?
The goal is to increase trading volume. That’s our main concern right now.
Also, it looks like I’m the only person who’s signed up from my university. Is there any university even approaching 50 participants?
Hi Ted,
Our expectation is that people who hear about the college bowl first will do a little recruiting to make sure there are enough people from their school participating. If you’d like help with that, please shoot me an email at [email protected] and I can try to assist.
As for the other schools, we’ll be updating stats like that starting next week!
I’ve told some nerdy friends about it, and they seem uniformly uninterested, unfortunately.
@Ted: Alas, Stanford must be keeping them too busy? But don’t give up, we may have another angle on promoting SciCast there.
Final question: What’s an assumptive trade? (The final prize mentions this.)
Sorry, one of our copy editors is from the 19th Century, and apparently sneaked that through while I was traveling. It means and should say, “Conditional Trade”.
Thanks for the reply.
Followup question: How does one execute a conditional trade? I’ve searched around, but I see nothing.
@Ted: Sorry. Right now you can access conditional edits via the Related Scenarios that appear after you make an initial forecast. See this post on related scenarios.