Katie McAlpine, aka alpinekat
Your guess is as good as ours. But according to InTrade, which bills itself as the world's leading prediction market, the chance that the overnight YouTube sensation will ink a deal (as they say in Variety) is 13 percent.
alpinekat is the nom de blog of science communicator Katie McAlpine, who graduated last year from Michigan State University and has been working at CERN, the European particle physics lab near Geneva where the Large Hadron Collider officially opened for business on Wednesday. Her Large Hadron Rap video, with its catchy hook ("The LHC accelerates the protons and the lead, and the things it will discover will rock you in the head!"), has got more than 2 million views on YouTube, and is #1 on a list of Top 10 Amazing Physics Videos that Wired magazine put up over the weekend.
So what is a prediction market, you may ask, and how did InTrade come up with 13 percent? Prediction markets are essentially a way of harnessing the wisdom of crowds to predict what will happen in some specific area--say, the next Presidential election. They're thought to be more accurate in forecasting the future than surveys or polls, because traders place bets on what they think will actually happen, rather than on the outcome they prefer. (For the academically minded, here's an review of the concept from the Journal of Economic Perspectives by Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzewitz of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.) On InTrade, participants buy and sell shares in various contracts, each focused on a single outcome; yesterday, for instance, there was active trading on the question of whether John McCain will win the presidential election (51 percent chance), Osama bin Laden will be captured or neutralized by the end of this year (12 percent), and Hurricane Ike will first hit the United States in Louisiana as a Category Two storm or higher (7.9 percent).
I'm going to go way out on a limb here and predict that another particle physics blogger will NO WAY get a record contract. That would be US LHC blogger Steve Nahn, who in honor of Wednesday's first beam event gamely sings "The Protons in the Ring Go Round and Round." He writes, "If Katie can do it, so can I," adding:
- Who says scientists cannot be completely ridiculous?
- I believe I should put off that career in music and stick with my day job
- I attempted to get a more friendly performer, but was refused--although it might cost him some allowance
- There was some breakfast table discussion about what detrimental effects this may have on my career, but if you don’t take risks, you’ll never really live, right?
It's great to see physics bring out peoples' wild, creative sides!
