Methodology
How we track speculative dates
Most countdowns on WorldClockTools point at a date a vendor or authority has officially announced. A growing share, however, point at events whose date is still speculation — the next Apple keynote, an unannounced Anthropic model, a US government report with a statutory deadline that may or may not slip. This page documents how we treat those uncertain dates, end-to-end.
Why some pages show an estimated window
When a date is officially confirmed, the countdown shows a precise target. When it isn't, showing a single sharp date would be misleading — so the UI degrades gracefully: instead of a ticking clock you see an estimated window, an explicit confidence label, and a list of the signals that produced the estimate. We treat the absence of certainty as information the reader should see, not as something to hide.
This affects roughly the rumour-tracker family of pages: tech keynotes ahead of vendor invites, AI model launches, generative hardware rumours, and political events with a soft deadline. Confirmed events (FIFA World Cup kick-off, an SEC rule's effective date, Diwali) never use the speculative UI.
The credibility-tier system
Every signal we ingest is assigned to one of three tiers, each with a fixed numeric weight. We render this as a small visual legend at the top of every rumour-tracker page so readers can see the source quality at a glance.
- Primary (×3): the vendor itself, a government primary source, or a court filing. Examples: an Apple newsroom invite, a NARA disclosure schedule, a Federal Reserve FOMC calendar entry.
- Trade (×2): established trade press with named bylines and visible editorial standards. Examples: Bloomberg, Reuters, The Information, Financial Times. We require corroboration from at least two independent trade outlets before we treat a trade signal as load-bearing.
- Community (×1): tracked accounts with a verifiable history of accurate pre-announcement leaks, plus liquid prediction-market prices. Anonymous claims with no track record are not ingested at all — they don't even get a ×1.
Weighted-median fusion + 90-day linear decay
Once signals are tier-weighted we fuse them with a weighted median, not a weighted mean. Median is robust to outliers — one wildly wrong account doesn't drag the estimate. Each signal's effective weight also decays linearly over the 90 days following its publication, so a six-month-old leak counts for less than yesterday's.
The formula:
effectiveWeight(s) = tierWeight(s) × max(0, 1 - ageDays(s) / 90) estimate = weightedMedian(date(s), effectiveWeight(s))
In practice this means a fresh primary signal (×3, age 0) has an effective weight of 3.0; the same signal at 45 days old has an effective weight of 1.5; at 90+ days it has weight 0 and drops out entirely. The half-life is symmetric across tiers, which keeps the math interpretable and the UI honest.
How signals enter the log
We maintain a tracked-accounts whitelist (currently <200 names) reviewed quarterly. Accounts are added on a track-record basis: at least three previous public predictions that resolved within ±7 days of the truth, with public timestamps. Accounts are removed if they have two consecutive misses outside ±14 days.
Prediction-market prices are pulled from listed venues with published rule-books (Polymarket, Kalshi, PredictIt where applicable). Markets with thin liquidity (under USD 5,000 one-sided depth at the ±5% level) are excluded, because thin markets are easy to manipulate and produce noisy signals.
Every ingested signal is stored with its source URL, ingest timestamp, tier, and ageing curve. The trail is reviewable on request — see Sources.
Editorial responsibility
The line between "rumoured" and "confirmed" is enforced in code, not vibes. A countdown gets confidence: "confirmed" only when the source is a primary-tier announcement on the record (vendor newsroom, official press release, court filing). Everything else is tagged speculative and rendered with the estimated-window UI, the tier legend, and an explicit "not yet confirmed" banner.
When a vendor confirms a previously-speculative date, we promote it in the next build cycle and link the original speculation thread to the confirmed page so the audit trail survives. When a date is publicly retracted, the page is flagged retracted rather than silently deleted — so the correction is itself part of the record.
We do not accept paid placement or sponsored signals. The tracker is editorial.