Winners 5/27/14
Congratulations, winners! The following SciCast forecasters won the first round of prizes, which included both a $25 Amazon Gift Card and badge merit points. Learn more.
Winners, please let us know your Twitter handle if you have one, and we’ll tweet to you directly when you win. Be sure to share your news with friends!
peaigr
DanielH
mev
WadeWillson
ninedaywatch
BubbaB
angela
Disinterest
benthinkin
jackyamashita
jkominek
sflicht
william.quixote
Salemicus
quijasi
mmachin
arjunr
ted
dilettante
Can you please verify that the user accounts “joeteicher” and “steicher” belong to human beings and not bots? These new accounts appeared this morning and seem to be making series of edits at 6-10 second intervals. Possibly they are humans (related to one another?) with whom I happen to disagree about many questions, and who happen to edit very rapidly on a huge number of questions. But it is also possible that this is a (predictable?) attack against the website aiming to acquire as many $25 Amazon gift cards as possible.
Thank you for the notice, it does look suspicious, and we are looking into it. We do expect the occasional person to game the incentives without adding any value, and can disqualify invalid forecasts or accounts making them.
Upon reflection, I actually don’t have a problem with people using bots. They’re just responding rationally to the incentives.
I only worry whether it will pollute the brier scores and mess up the SciCast results for research purposes.
(Also, it’s entirely possible that these accounts are humans making rapid edits, with the 5-6 second delays caused by website lag or network latency.)