The final SciCast annual report has been released! See the “About” or “Project Data” menus above, or go directly to the SciCast Final Report download page.
SciCast has seen over 11,000 registrations, and over 129,000 forecasts. Google Analytics reports over 76K unique IP addresses (suggesting 8 per registered user), and 1.3M pageviews. The average session duration was 5 minutes.
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The full pseudonymized SciCast data is now available for download! See the “Project Data” menu item above, or go directly to the Download Data page. The form asks for your email so we have a way of contacting you and tracking downloads.
Many thanks to our sponsor for encouraging publication and distribution throughout our project — and beyond. Please cite SciCast in any publications using our data, and let us know what you’re doing. We would also be happy for guest blog posts.
-Charles
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by Kellen Leister
Note: The following post has been revised slightly to use a power law (x^k) instead of a logarithmic function (k ln x). This is because the logarithmic function could go negative, which we know the percentage of trades cannot do. Revisions are in red.
Given the ease of switching back and forth between Safe Mode and Power Mode, we were interested to observe the relative use of each mode. (For a description of the different modes, see the Appendix.) Continue reading
Since it began, SciCast has let you make conditional edits when we have previously linked the questions. But if you wanted to link questions, you had to email us. No more! Now users can add links.
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We have started adding “Accuracy” numbers to emails. For example:
What does that mean? The short answer is that it’s a transform of the familiar Brier score, which we have mentioned in several blog posts. Where the Brier measures your error (low is good), Accuracy measures your success (high is good). This is more intuitive … except when it’s not.
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Today we disabled 7 accounts for blatant gaming behavior, particularly this time for dumping points from a shill account to a main account. When accounts are disabled, the account owners receive an email, if they have provided a valid email address. Otherwise they will see a note when they try to log in. We will not name the accounts until the owners have had a chance to respond to us. Continue reading
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The admins are monitoring several accounts which appear to be engaged in blatant gaming behavior such as “dumping” points from a shill account or “throwing” points across a leaderboard deadline, in opposition to any sensible accuracy-guided forecasting strategy. Most of these accounts will probably be disabled and eventually removed from all leaderboards. Disablings will be announced. Forecasters with permanently disabled accounts will have to start over. The SciCast team is examining some non-trading variables for possible exonerating evidence.
The market is better calibrated than we thought, but not perfect. In our previous calibration post, each question counted once. In the chart below, each forecast counts once, which is the usual method.
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