Hi, all.
I wanted to alert you to a new project run by Dr. Greg Laughlin (UC Santa Cruz/Lick). Greg is an old friend of the AAVSO's who some may remember as a co-runner of a number of the AAVSO's exoplanet transit search campaigns in the early 2000's - some of which ended up as papers with AAVSO observers as coauthors. He and some colleagues are starting a new citizen science project to get crowd-sourced predictions on questions of scientific and technical interest. It is at:
Here are some astronomy-related questions:
New Planets in the solar system: http://www.metaculus.com/questions/37/
K2 habitable planet detection: http://www.metaculus.com/questions/14/
IAU Exoplanet Naming Policy: http://www.metaculus.com/questions/38/
KIC 8462852: http://www.metaculus.com/questions/4/
There is a mechanism to pose our own questions, so we could think of some big variable star ones and see if they get any traction (LSST questions?). Of course, success of these markets depends on participation rate and the more narrow the focus of the question the more people we'll need to make predictions.
As a side note, here is a recent PNAS article about how prediction markets are an effective mechanism for deciding whether a particular scientific result is likely to hold up.
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15343.full.pdf
PAH