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Researchers Mine Old News To Predict Future Events
hypnosec writes "Microsoft Research has teamed up with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology to develop software that can predict events like outbreaks of disease or violence by mining data from old news and the web. The project, if successful, will result into a tool that would provide information that is more than just educated guesses or intuition. The team consisting of Eric Horvitz from Microsoft Research and Kira Radinsky from Technion-Israel Institute tested the program with articles from New York Times spanning over 20 years from 1986-2007."
... is Not Necessarily Indicative of Future Results.
Do these guys not even read their own prospectus?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
There will be a Presidential election in 2016 and 2020
An NFL team will win the Super Bowl.
Many new TV shows will be cancelled each fall.
Old people will die.
A "machine".
Cliff has been doing this for years. The most interesting aspect is that there is weighting given to emotional "charge".
http://www.halfpasthuman.com/
War never changes.
that we yet cant predict the weather.
The shade of Asimov raises his head..... Does this seem a little like Psychohistory to anyone else? Where's the Mule?
Please don't dominate the rap, Jack, if you got nothin' new to say.
"All this has happened before. All this will happen again."
Minority Report references in 3..2..1
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
...and will happen again.
Hey that makes a pretty good tag line...someone should make a scifi tv series based on that concept. Maybe two even!
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Discovers experience.
Is this the softwar that comes up with republicrat propaganda?
$
Unrest in Middle East
African Regime Unstable, May Collapse
Congressman Indicted
Experts Say Hurricane "Extremely Dangerous"
Audit Finds Serious Misuse of Funds
Green Energy Firm Declares Bankruptcy
Apple's Latest Product Selling Like Hotcakes
Patch Released for Serious Windows Vulnerability
Unemployment Rises, Unexpectedly
There's your headlines for the year.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
...to the land of tomorrow!
Are so exciting!!!
Its taken them this long to realize that the past and the future are very strongly correlated and that those in power haven't learned from their own mistakes? I mean, every war that the US has gone to since WWII has been played out multiple times in history, economies run on the same basic patterns, etc.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
What better place for mining old news?
Eureka! We've struck gold!
Have gnu, will travel.
You mean by looking at twenty years of newspaper articles they were able to predict that there will be a large increase in the number of cases of influenza during November 2013 to March 2014 compared to the preceding 5 months?
Or, when disaster causes infrastructure to break down and crowds refugees into unsanitary temporary housing there's a high likelyhood of more cholera breaking out than at other times?
Gee. Color me impressed.
How is this greatly different than many different types of analysts have been doing for decades via headline counts in world newspapers and the like? (See John Naisbitt of Megatrends fame, for example. And he certainly wasn't the first.)
The math used to find the probabilities may be a bit better, and it may be more automated, but it's not particularly new.
Yes, i'm sure this audience will always quote that old hack Asimov but perhaps Mark Twain is better - "history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme". Humans respond to much the same situations in much the same way - emphasis on 'much', because there are always differences of culture, place and circumstance.
That is why we study history - to guide us in our own decisions. Do some research on Heine and Neitzche and the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrance which ponts to recurring patterns of human behaviour, not for metaphysical reasons but because of human psychology, economics, geography all joined in chains of causality.
A cheaper way of doing this would be to have a talk with any professor of history. Some can actually impart information clearly when they are not writing academic papers. Of course governments don't always like what they hear because it often shows that their short-term agenda will lead to long-term failure.
But tell me please - this baby boomer asks why do so few gen X and Ys show any interest in history? Yes, i know it's boring in school, but so are most things. Why is there so little interest in the past/ Have you not learnt that other people's past is your future?
care to elucidate further on that thought?
I have two family members in the journalism business. The media business has a cycle of covering particular topics and moving on when the public gets bored of it. Plenty of news does not get coverage at all, at least by English language media, if the country is too remote or the topic is too cliche.
The NYT? For only the last 20 years? That's worse that basing global warming predictions on just the last 20 years.
Reminds me of the movie "Paycheck" but other than that it has been pointed out to me by a financial adviser that FDR converted this country from a republic to a democracy as the people gave him credit for bringing the US out of the great depression. Only it wasn't the government but the oil industry. This is the history part. The future part is strongly suggesting Obama is going to convert this country from a democracy to Socialism and he too will take credit for turning the economy around, and again it won't be the government but the Natural Gas Industry when the exporting of Liquid Natural Gas begins in 2015.
There is a lot of small pieces of this that seem to be supporting the high probability of this happening. Large ammo purchases for DHS and IRS and the distribution of such across the US. Detention camps, triple decker prisoner train cars, military helicopter training in major cities, effort to change bill of rights, including the second and 4th amendments, and more such as Obama violating constitution and blaming the founders of this country for the changes he wants to make....
Of course we'll have to wait to see if this all plays out but apparently many are not waiting as there is a public run on guns and ammo....
But then again, the article research probably doesn't going into this given who is behind it.
So basically they're using the same technique used to forecast the weather. I'm sure it will be every bit as inaccurate and only useful in extreme cases.
Can't wait for this: "the forecast for next week, we'll have a 20% chance of riots, with a 10% chance of terrorist activity in Turkey, and we're expecting scattered protests throughout the region and down into North Africa, so if you're stepping out Wednesday through Friday, bring your pepper spray and protective mask, because it's going to be a gassy one out there folks..."
I believe, the result was "Five months before Palestinian State will be established with stable borders and elected government".
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
There is nothing Microsoft Research ever will discover that will ever be of use to the rest of us in general. They research for Microsoft, not for us, and almost all of their output is ignored even by Microsoft. When it's a product then look at it in terms of whether it's useful to you despite the completely unnecessary but mandatory IE/DirectX interface. It probably won't even be worth loading up Windows in a VM to have IE to try it out with.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Newspapers focus on big events not gradual changes. So a study like this is going to miss non-events until there are enough natural disasters to report a definite trend. But it will always be easy to be wise after the fact by selecting keywords related to the event you want to trace historically and thus prove your method could have predicted the present.
But, isn't Zapaday.com already doing that?
Made mostly of cellulose, and some of the most expensive fluids known to mankind, this newly discovered vessel is capable of transmitting information from past to present and can acurately predict many future events.
Scientists dub "Calendar" as discovery the year.
I hope that the collaboration can focus in one aspect of old news ... ... even if it is not accurate ... even if Past Events Are Not Necessarily Indicative Of Future Results
What I hope they will focus in is the possibility of violence caused by religion - no matter which religion, no matter how religion is defined
I'm sure it will do mankind a lot of good ...
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Isn't this a job for the Time Bandets?
THINK! It's patriotic
I just want to know when Hari Seldon joined Microsoft?
THINK! It's patriotic
Was that nothing had essentially changed from the beginning of man, so you could scientifically use Greek or Roman battles to navigate the contemporary wars with Pisa and Cesare Borgia.
Usually, though, such an enterprise would only be fruitful after the event (e.g. no scientific predictions) on account of Fortuna. Notably, Machiavelli died bitter and beaten.
Point of this is that you cannot predict the future; perhaps at best a possible outcome with some better chance than other counterfactual scenarios, which everyone will say was completely obvious after the fact.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
"Garbage in, Garbage out".
But, it's probably worth a try...