Monthly Archives: June 2014

SciCast partner TechCast has relaunched as TechCast Global

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With a New Name, New Website, and Expanded Services, TechCast Now Offers a Full Range of Forecasts and Strategy for a Changing World

TechCast, a virtual think tank tracking the technology revolution for 20 years, is excited to announce the launch of its new website at http://www.techcastglobal.com. The redesigned site with mobile interface provides expanded access to TechCast’s award-winning forecasts of emerging technologies, social trends, and wild cards. It also features new tools for strategic planning. The company changed its name to TechCast Global, Inc. raising foresight to a broader scope covering the entire technology revolution, globalization, and other strategic forces that are transforming business, government, and the world itself.

“The launching of TechCast Global comes at a propitious time when all organizations need to plan for disruptive change,” said Prof. William E. Halal, Founder and President of TechCast Global. Accelerating technological change, evolving global markets, global warming, transparency, and other new powerful forces are altering products, services, lifestyles, industries, and the way organizations work.

Read the full release here.

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Super Tuesday Amazon Gift Card and Badge Merit Points Winners

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Winners 6/17/14

Sorry for the belated posting of Super Tuesday winners from LAST week. Several of our winners do not have emails registered with us. If you see your name here but you haven’t given us an email address, we can’t send you your Amazon gift card. We’ve invited you to a “Got email?” group. You can also contact us.

Congratulations, winners! The following SciCast forecasters won both a $25 Amazon Gift Card and badge merit points. Learn more.

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The World Cup question has resolved

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The question, A young paraplegic Brazilian, assisted by a neurorobotic exoskeleton, will take the ceremonial first kick at the 2014 World Cup in São Paulo, Brazil. How far will the ball travel? has resolved as “Between 1-3 meters”.  Our Brier score was 0.326, better than uniform.

There were 275 forecasts made by 53 unique users.  Did you make a forecast? If so, login and check your dashboard.

Also, check out the epic comment stream on this popular SciCast question. Continue reading →

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Scaled Continuous Question

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The following shows an example of a Scaled or Continuous question:

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Instead of estimating the chance of a particular outcome, you are asked to forecast the outcome in natural units like $.  Forecasts moving the estimate towards the actual outcome will be rewarded. Those moving it away will be penalized.  As with probability questions, moving toward the extremes is progressively more expensive: we have merely rescaled the usual 0%-100% range and customized the interface.

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Why did my forecast do that?

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Forecasters frequently want to know why their forecast had so much (or so little) effect. For example, Topic Leader jessiet recently asked:

I made a prediction just now of 10% and the new probability came down to 10%. That seems weird- that my one vote would count more than all past predictions? I assume it’s not related to the fact that I was the question author?

The quick answer is that she used Power mode, which is our market interface, and that’s how markets work: your estimate becomes the new consensus.  Sound crazy? Note that markets beat out most other methods for the past three years of live geopolitical forecasting on the IARPA ACE competition. For two years, we ran one of those markets, before we switched to Science & Technology.  So how can this possibly work?  Read on for (a) How it works, (b) Why you should start with Safe mode, (c) The scoring rule underneath, and (d) An actual example.

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Comment notifications temporarily disabled

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A new SciCast ad campaign has created ~1,000 registrations per day for the past couple of days.  That has doubled our forecaster community and created a lot of activity, which is great.  But it also generated a lot of email notifications for users who had opted to receive updates for new comments, and more email is not always great.

After a dozen or so complaints and a review of some comments, we have disabled email notifications until we add some more controls.

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SciCast Calls for Science, Technology Experts to Make Predictions

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Contact:
Lynda Baldwin – 708-703-8804;
[email protected] 

Candice Warltier – 312-587-3105;
[email protected]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

SciCast Calls for Science, Technology Experts to Make Predictions 

Largest sci-tech crowdsourcing forecast site in search of professionals and enthusiasts to predict future events 

FAIRFAX, Va (June 19, 2014) – SciCast, a research project run by George Mason University, is the largest known science and technology-focused crowdsourced forecasting site. So what makes a crowdsourced prediction market more powerful? An even bigger crowd. SciCast is launching its first worldwide call for participants to join the existing 2,300 professionals and enthusiasts ranging from engineers to chemists, from agriculturists to IT specialists.

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