Slashdot Mirror
Using a Supercomputer To Predict Revolutions
bLanark writes "A fascinating article from Singularity Hub describes software which, when fed news, makes predictions about forthcoming events. When given information on recent events, it spiked before the Egyptian and Libyan uprisings. It uses various sources including the News Bank which is a database of global news."
Anyone else watch the pilot of Person of Interest?
Foundation anyone?
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Is this time to create the foundations?
"Spiking" before the Egyptian and Libyan uprisings is nothing impressive, without more information about when it has and hasn't "spiked".
It's much easier to look for spikes or what your data looks like *after* an important event has taken place, than to actually predict them. I'm sure that even if I look at my computer logs on a significant date, there's most likely something there that I would class as interesting or out of the ordinary, in hindsight, too...
Already exists:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Bot
Yeah, that's great but I'm afraid the hard part about predictions is the "pre" bit i.e. you have to make them before things happen. Tell me today that there's going to be a revolution starting in Algeria in the next month and if it happens then I'll pay attention to the next couple of predictions too. But if you say nothing now and then well me in a month's time that your predictor spiked before whatever's happened in the meantime then, well, I'm not going to care am I? Now, does this thing have some actual predictions about, you know, the future, or not?
n/t
For some reason this resembles "Foundation" by Isaac Asimov.
Reality is what you make of it. More specifically, what the social and news media make of it.
I can already tell you what the software will return, though.
How did it go prior to congress bailing out the banks?
from Singularity Hub describes software which, when fed news, makes predictions about forthcoming events
George Ure gets really feisty and hot under the collar every time someone mentions this and claims its new... He's been doing this for years now, probably a decade now.
http://urbansurvival.com/week.htm
If you want to know what Ure is doing, you can pretty much copy-paste his name on the report and roll all the dates in the report back about a decade.
It would be much like the reaction if I wrote my own crappy homemade webserver this week, and then sent press releases to the entire universe explaining how I just wrote the worlds first webserver and not only that but its also the worlds first open source webserver and carefully avoid mentioning any prior art.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The whole premise of the book Megatrends was based on this sort of analysis. Keep a count of the headlines in newspapers on various subjects. See how that changes over time.
It sorta works. Sometimes. Intel agencies do this sort of thing so they aren't as easily blindsided. It's not a new idea.
This just in: Using historical analysis and hindsight we can build a system that predicts events! Amazing!
That's nothing - my supercomputer predicts the lottery results the day after the draw!
The graph of the "spike" was very unimpressive. The signal-to-noise ratio looks pretty small.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
if( opersionRate * timeSinceLastRevolution > criticalPoint ) return true;
...we will see martial law declared preemptively, military and police forces will start flooding areas before anything can happen, and people who the computer says will be key figures in the revolution will be preemptively jailed and/or executed.
Don't get your hopes up, kids. This isn't the Foundation, and it won't be used to save civilization, it will be used to keep people already in power from even having a chance of losing that power. If you haven't noticed, the folks running the show think the only value of civilization is that it gives them a system within which to gain power and wealth.
"We live as though the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be." - Joss Whedon via Angel
There's one revolution every 365.25 days or so. Why do you need a supercomputer for that?
revolutions per minute! although it is more calculating then predicting.
And not really that "new" if you ask me, but this sort of "marketing" makes sense from a business point of view. Oppressive governments like Mubarak's (and, I guess, Obama's) are in the market for this sort of thing right now; there's no better time than now to con them into buying, or funding more research for, a magic crystal ball.
What if the markets start using it as input for automatic trading?
Couldn't it affect prices negatively and therefore, triger social events?
This could be more dangerous than most would think...
But predicting future ones is even more challenging.
Zzzz.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
You can't revolt against people who don't have power. The rest of your post makes even less sense. I realize you are trolling, but back in my day trolls made sense even if they were offering pure fiction. I shudder for the future when people are too incompetent to even troll correctly.
"Paycheck" (2003). Ends with them blowing the computer up and destroying the software.
But CNN told me we just need to check facebook for the latest revolution. They and all the other main news sources did endless interviews of people from Egypt who were naming their children facebook in honor of their revolutions.
If 2010 taught us anything, it is that no revolution, ever, anywhere, happened without facebook. All hail facebook and its indisputable power to bring about justice and peace!
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
if ( article.containsIgnoreCase("Libya")) {
return true;'
}
It is unfortunate that non-violent protests of this sort will simply be ignored. Here is a prediction: this won't change any minds on Wall Street or Capitol Hill, and most regular citizens won't stand behind it because they instinctively know it is (almost) pointless.
even if this software worked 100%, it would predict its authors' priorities, not actual events. who defined "revolution" for this purpose? is a peaceful change in political parties a revolution? is a series of failed demonstrations a revolution? what about a series of brutally repressed and hushed over demonstrations?
what about obscure places no one in america cares about, can it predict events there?
if you look at that chart, which supposedly spots the "revolutionary" event when U.S. bombed Iraq in the first Iraq conflict, it shows events that were news in the States, not worldwide.
where is the fall of the berlin wall ?
where is the breakup of the Soviet Union?
anyways, its impressive only in so far as its successful in plotting its authors' priorities
What's a "revolution"? The revolts in Algeria, Libya, Egypt and Syria this year? How about the people who have been "occupying" Wall Street the past week? Does getting maced by the cops for no reason at all make a revolt a revolution?
--
make install -not war
I wonder if it has yet predicted the coming American uprising?
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
The Tea Party members of congress mostly signed a fealty pledge to Grover Norquist not to raise taxes no matter what.
That became pretty well a litmus test for all republicans. I am not aware of a single republican in congress who did not sign the pledge, and for that matter several "blue-dog" democrats have signed it as well. I thank you for using the work fealty to describe the pledge, as it is very much a religious oath to many of the members.
You can't sign a pledge of that nature which has the effect of subverting democracy and expect to get away with it.
Well, the Tea Party - and many of their GOP colleagues - view the government as acting in violation of the constitution on which it is based. Hence they see themselves as committing no seditious act; rather they believe they are aiding our democracy by bringing government down through their pledge.
And naturally, they see no government employee as being worthy of their own job. For some reason a certain GOP presidential hopeful who has never in her life held a non-government job doesn't seem to see that as a problem.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I stick on crystal balls, tea leaves reading and medium?
Here's one to analyze for you. December 12, 2012.
Have fun and don't overheat.
They didn't mention any of those countries. Doesn't seem very good to me....
I have noticed that similar nations tend to move the same way (sounds obvious), All the Baathist systems are dying in the ME.
Even in the west, all the democratic nations are facing strange "historic" electoral results. The US, Britain, Sweden, Australia and many other democratic countries have all had the equivalent of a 'hung parliament' and in the case of Sweden (were a 'hung parliament' is the norm) an outright swing to the right.
What a hilarious argument. You people really are clowns.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Forget Foundation, it's called FUCKUP...
Last week's news, made new again!
Signs of revolution: screaming or cries for change.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Right now some very indirect methods are being used to predict the stock market. There seem to be happy words and sad or moody words. By studying conversations on the net for happy word and sad word content the market can be predicted more accurately than with any other method.
As for people mouthing off about revolutions and dramatic actions during hard times they really need to moderate their words a bit before they get what they claim they want. Germany had a revolution and ended up with Hitler. Russia had a revolution and ended up with Stalin. Improvements in life tend to happen with orderly progress and orderly change. Revolutions usually simply do not work.
For instance, natural disasters don't have societal indicators..
o rly? the teabaggers told me hurricanes hit places where lots of buttseckz is had.
Mod parent up!
Why was he modded down? What he says is true. A small minority forced the majority to sign a pledge to submit the voters they represent. That should be illegal as the constitution is who they should pledge too and look at for their citizens
http://saveie6.com/
*cough* curve-fitting *cough*
See PRI story below... But first:
Mining news stories will only tell you what people already knew... Osama Bin Laden? If you asked any experts in the past decade where he was, the answer was always "Pakistan". Everyone assumed he was in the tribal areas, and were wrong. In hindsight, it's easy to say they were within X km, but that information also ceases to be useful in hindsight...
Anyhow, this story isn't a complete waste. It segues nicely into a different story from PRI a couple months ago, which DOES make predictions. It is based on weather, and specifically predicts how many politically unstable countries are likely to experience "violence" (an uprising) in a given year:
http://www.pri.org/stories/science/environment/global-violence-linked-to-severe-weather5064.html
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being
run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy
Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and
Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving
For just the proper occasion.
Seriously though, these things are impossible to predict, so far, because they depend on remarkable individuals upon whom great events pivot -- and those remarkable aspects are within us all next to the fear and the hate, and they could come out of any of us given the right combination of events.
Or not.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sedition 1. incitement of discontent or rebellion against a government. 2. any action, especially in speech or writing, promoting such discontent or rebellion. 3. Archaic . rebellious disorder. 1: Tea party folks or democrats that have signed the pledge are involved in the process doing nothing illegal. They were voted in by the folks they govern. 2: Maybe this is where your coming from, it's the closest I can come. Poverty (as defined in the US) is way up. Our current jails hold 2.5 million people. The murder rate would be approx 5X of what is currently reported if it wasn't for major advances in medical technology and 911. We are going broke rapidly. Contemplate the "rebellion" if just one day, 45 million folks didn't get thier food stamps. The government is spread too thin and we're up to borrowing $.43 to quell our masses. They are actually PART of the government.. not sure how you rebel against yourself. 3: Mostly, that's what the teaparty is trying to avert. Curious, how does a balanced budget subvert democracy? The tea party got WAY off track, it was suppose to be a social movement around personal responsibility. I used to be a tea party member until there were tea party leaders. At that point, I bailed.
By the way, it wasn't a pledge to Gover Norquist. Niether himself or any group is mentioned in the pledge.
knows who to kill and when?
Probably because she runs a business with her husband. She also administered a farm that was owned by her father-in-law. I'm surprised you didn't hear about all the claims from the left that somehow that farm should have run without subsidy-- nearly impossible, thanks to the farm economy the government created in the New Deal-- because Bachmann is a conservative. Anyway, saying she's never had a non-government job is lying through omission.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Really? How was that? Were blackmail or firearms employed?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
"Predicting" past events isn't predicting. He aren't saying anything about future events.
Anyway, saying she's never had a non-government job is lying through omission.
Can you point to a single job she's ever held, or a single paycheck she's ever received, that was not made possible by the government? She is in the camp that repeatedly shouts from the highest mountain that the government cannot create jobs, yet I am not aware of a single job she has ever had that was not created or heavily supplemented by the government.
There is no lie there based on any amount of information I have ever seen. If you have information that I have not seen, please share it and I will take back what I have said. However my statement reflects the reality of all the information I have ever seen, including what you just said - every single job Bachmann has ever held has been either directly working for the government, or supported by the same. Regardless of what your feelings are about the money she has received from the farm and her husband's business, the reality is nobody forced her to accept the money from either. She could have chosen a different path instead, which could have freed her from this rank hypocrisy.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
This story was here just a few days ago...
The system will never predict anything bad happening here. Between the fact that our media spoon-feeds us whatever their version of events are and that we are all more than happy to sit back and eat whatever bowl of (expletive deleted) our corporate overlords feed us, there will never be anything to predict.
Are we not even waiting a whole year now before reprinting the same story and hoping people didn't read the original?