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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.
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.
Actually, the weather report for the next day is pretty accurate most of the time.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Discovers experience.
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/
would you consider a Douglas Adams?
“Anything that happens, happens.
Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.
Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again.
It doesn’t necessarily do it in chronological order, though.”
Almost makes you think that was the joke. But only almost, apparently.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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.
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.
But tell me please - this baby boomer asks why do so few gen X and Ys show any interest in history?
Because the Founding Fathers were Christian through and through; the Civil War was about slavery and nothing else; and we're the chosen people, spreaders of truth and justice and democracy, having never committed wholesale genocide or locked up our own citizens in concentration camps.
Also, they hate us for our freedumbs.
Seriously, though, most history teachers bore kids to death by doing little more than demanding they memorize places, names and dates. While some of them are shitheads who get off on this sort of trivial idiocy, a great many probably suffer from having their hands tied by our lackluster schools.
God forbid a history teacher informs his class about how many bitches Ben Franklin got.
Dude got mad bitches, by the way.
tl;dr: When you hear factoids instead of interesting stories about historical figures, said historic figures seem fake; unreal; and people end up with a sense that we're completely different than the humans who lived even a hundred years ago, despite the fact that we're no different than the humans alive at the time of the Roman Empire and earlier.
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.
(For AC's)
And for future readers finding your post long after you've changed your signature to something completely different.
Nobody should ever refer to sigs (not their own, and certainly not other people's) without quoting them.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.