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."
Foundation anyone?
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
"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...
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.
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!
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
...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.
But predicting future ones is even more challenging.
Zzzz.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
"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.
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.
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.
Interesting project, but their predictions exit their scope of possible indicators. For instance, natural disasters don't have societal indicators.
As for the stock market, it has defied analysis for as long as it has existed... although that may very well be due to interested parties acting upon potentially accurate predictions and skewing the anticipated actions, thus invalidating the predictions.
Call me back when they can accurately and reliably tell me whether it will rain next Tuesday.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
What a hilarious argument. You people really are clowns.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
How would you go about compensating for the impact of using the generated data as the basis for massive amounts of trading?
How do you compensate for competing predictive engines, doing the same thing with the same data but using different algorithms?
The problem with attempting to utilize a predictive system to influence a decision is that acting on the predicted outcome changes the outcome, invalidating the prediction.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Forget Foundation, it's called FUCKUP...
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.
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/
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
Oppressive governments like Mubarak's (and, I guess, Obama's)
I'd love for some of youright wing retards to spend a bit of time in a genuinely oppressive regime, then maybe you'd stop thinking that having to pay tax was the moral equivalent of being tortured to death for reading the wrong newspaper.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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.
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.