Can This Black Box See Into the Future? - Science News - redOrbi. In the Blink of a Byte, Future Becomes Past. When the world catches flu, Google sneezes - health - 11 Novembe. Innovation: How your search queries can predict the future - tec. By Jim Giles Innovation is our new column that highlights the latest emerging technological ideas and where they may lead. Real-time web search – which scours only the latest updates to services like Twitter – is currently generating quite a buzz because it can provide a glimpse of what people around the world are thinking or doing at any given moment. Interest in this kind of search is so great that, according to recent leaks, Google is considering buying Twitter. The latest research from the internet search giant, though, suggests that real-time results could be even more powerful – they may reveal the future as well as the present.
Google researchers Hyunyoung Choi and Hal Varian combined data from Google Trends on the popularity of different search terms with models used by economists to predict trends in areas such as travel and home sales. The result? Better forecasts in almost every case. Early warning It works because searches reveal something about people’s intentions. Wondering What Will Terrorists Do Next? There's an App for That. The Israel-Lebanon border is normally one of the world's nastiest conflict hotspots which is a headache for security forces and the regional governments. Which is where an odd app can help. It predicts how bad (or good) things may get. SOMA, the Stochastic Opponent Modeling Agents, is the app (or rather suite of apps) we're talking about.
It was developed by the University of Maryland's Laboratory for Computational Cultural Dynamics, and it's accurate enough to have predicted that the Israel-Lebanon border (a segment of which is shown above) would be relatively calm for terrorist activity right now. How the heck can some software do that? The datasets that feed SOMA include the Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior database, also at the University of Maryland. Why is this interesting? Apps, it seems, are wending their way deeper and deeper into global life every day.
[Via ForeignPolicy] Place Your Bets on When the Polar Bear Population Disappears | S. If the world is going to hell in a handbasket, why not make some money in the process? That seems to be the thinking behind Irish bookmaker Paddy Power's plan to take bets on the global polar bear population on December 31, 2011. The bookmaker--Ireland's largest--is also taking bets on the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center's next report on global CO2 emissions. The odds, according to Paddy Power: Polar Bear estimate on 31 December 2011 20/1 Under 10,000 8/1 10,000 - 15,000 13/8 15,000 - 20,000 7/4 20,000 - 25,000 9/4 25,000 - 30,000 4/1 Over 30,000 Amount of World CO2 Emissions (2006 – 28.4 mil (in thousands of metric tons)) 10/1 Under 20 Million 8/1 20,000,001 – 23,000,000 6/1 23,000,001 – 26,000,000 4/1 26,000,001 – 29,000,000 7/2 29,000,001 – 31,000,000 9/4 31,000,001 – 34,000,000 7/4 Over 34 Million Is this a crude way to make money? [Via UK Guardian]
To The Future! A List of Intention Enabled Websites « Web Strate. The web is quickly moving to real-time, people share the information about what they’re doing while their doing it. Yet the next step beyond real time, is future-looking data, which is called the Intention Web (get up to speed by reading this post). In an effort to map out this trend in 2010, let’s list out the vendors, companies, and beyond that will facilitate this type of forward looking data. There are countless opportunities for people to connect with others with the same goals, or for companies that want to serve them as new technologies like Social CRM evolve and develop. Scope: These Intention websites facilitate a person to publish their future goals in the context of their community, or sometimes even in public. For example, an unshared CAL isn’t a qualifier. To The Future! 43 Things: This “wish list”, they suggest that you make a list on 43 Things and see what changes happen in your life.
Leave a comment if you know of other technologies that meet this critia. Suivi de la grippe | Comment ça marche ? We've found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate current flu activity around the world in near real-time. Each week, millions of users around the world search for health information online. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Insights for Search. We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms.
United States: Influenza-like illness (ILI) data provided publicly by the U.S. These graphs show historical query-based flu estimates for different countries and regions compared against official influenza surveillance data. So why bother with estimates from aggregated search queries? Model Updates Experimental Flu Trends.