Todd Suomela's Library tagged prediction →  View Popular, Search in Google

"And on and on. If futurists have become almost too good at technological foresight, we remain woefully primitive in our abilities to examine and forecast changes to cultural, political, and social dynamics.

Why is this? There isn't a single cause. "

futurism futures prediction technology social change

It is well known that people movement exhibits a high degree of repetition since people visit regular places and make regular contacts for their daily activities. This paper1 presents a novel framework named Jyotish,2 which constructs a predictive model by exploiting the regularity of people movement found in the real joint Wifi/Bluetooth trace. The constructed model is able to answer three fundamental questions: (1) where the person will stay, (2) how long she will stay at the location, and (3) who she will meet.

In order to construct the predictive model, Jyotish includes an efficient clustering algorithm to cluster Wifi access point information in the Wifi trace into locations. Then, we construct a Naive Bayesian classifier to assign these locations to records in the Bluetooth trace and obtain a fine granularity of people movement. Next, the fine grain movement trace is used to construct the predictive model including location predictor, stay duration predictor, and contact predictor to provide answers for three questions above. Finally, we evaluate the constructed predictive model over the real Wifi/Bluetooth trace collected by 50 participants in University of Illinois campus from March to August 2010. Evaluation results show that Jyotish successfully constructs a predictive model, which provides a considerably high prediction accuracy of people movement.

social-networking location mobile computing people prediction

"In every foresight or forecasting exercise, there are two overarching tensions:

The more certain and detailed the forecast, the more people will accept it and believe it to be useful.
The more certain and detailed the forecast, the less likely it is to happen."

futurism prediction scenario scenario-planning foresight dilemma paradox

The tumultuous summer of 2012 will also hold some welcome surprises. It will be a time when frustrated citizens find common ground in the streets, and demonstrators will be astonished by who is standing next to them. Commonality could well reverse the political fragmentation that has defined the last decade. Above all, the summer of 2012 will share one thing with what transpired in the 1960s: What unfolds in 2012 will unquestionably reshape our society in the decade to come.

politics protest prediction 2012 wall-street activism

"Welcome to the future! Here you will find a speculative timeline of future history. Part fact and part fiction, the timeline is based on detailed research that includes analysis of current trends, projected long-term environmental changes, advances in technology such as Moore's Law, future medical breakthroughs, and the evolving geopolitical landscape. Where possible, references have been provided to support the predictions"

timeline futures futurism future prediction vision singularity

Sunday is the 10-year anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As a commemoration of the day, I'm going to investigate answers to a very simple question: what is the probability of a 9/11-size or larger terrorist attack?

terrorism probability complexity prediction model social

"As I see it, there are three main complaints one can make about economists and their role in the current crisis. First is the complaint that economists fell down on the job by not seeing the crisis coming. Second is the complaint that economists failed even to see the possibility of this kind of crisis — and that by pointing out the possibility, they could have helped head the crisis off. Third is the complaint that they have either failed to offer useful advice on what to do after the crisis struck, or that they have offered such a cacophony of voices as to provide no useful guidance for policy.

As I see it, the first complaint is mostly — though not entirely — unfair. The second is much more substantial: anyone with some knowledge of history should have realized that the age of financial crises was far from over. But the most damning failure of economists, I’d argue, was their acquired ignorance of what I’ve called depression economics — the principles that should govern policy after a financial crisis has left conventional open-market operations impotent."

economics crisis recession failure prediction via:cshalizi

future futures futurism prediction world international economics military foreign-policy

social-networks trends prediction opinion network-analysis simulation complexity

"In other words I have a new ambition for my own SF: not as prediction, and not cautionary, either--but aspirational.

The fact is that if I've learned one thing in two years of studying how we think about the future, it's that the one thing that's sorely lacking in the public imagination is positive ideas about where we should be going. We seem to do everything about our future except try to design it. It's a funny thing: nobody ever questions your credentials if you predict doom and destruction. But provide a rosy picture of the future, and people demand that you justify yourself. Increasingly, though, I believe that while warning people of dire possibilities is responsible, providing them with something to aspire to is even more important. The foresight programme has given me a lot of tools to do that in a justifiable way, so I might as well use them."

foresight futurism futures aspiration sf literature writing prediction near-far

by Dan Gardner and Philip Tetlock

expertise prediction accuracy future

risk prediction weather meteorology science state(California)

economics crisis research prediction recession

prediction forecasts future futurism

"Though Lazarsfeld was writing 60 years ago, 20/20 hindsight is still very much with us. Contemporary psychologists call this tendency to view the past as more predictable than it actually was "the hindsight bias." Watts, a Yahoo! Labs scientist best known for his research on social networks and his earlier book, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (W. W. Norton, 2003), argues that this tendency is a greatly underappreciated problem, one that not only causes us to make up just-so stories to explain any conceivable outcome—but to delude ourselves that we can predict the future by learning from the past."

interview sociology internet yahoo book prediction randomness

"ONCE PERFECTED, communication technologies rarely die out entirely; rather, they shrink to fit particular niches in the global info-structure. Crystal radios have been proposed as a means of conveying optimal seedplanting times to isolated agrarian tribes. The mimeograph, one of many recent dinosaurs of the urban office place, still shines with undiminished samizdat potential in the century's backwaters, the late-Victorian answer to desk-top publishing. Banks in uncounted thrid-world villages still crank the day's totals on black Burroughs adding machines, spooling out yards of faint indigo figures on long, oddly festive curls of paper, while the Soviet Union, not yet sold on throwaway new-tech fun, has become the last reliable source of vacuum tubes. The eight-track-tape format survives in the truck stops of the Deep South, as a medium for country music and spoken-word pornography. The Street finds its own uses for things - uses the manufacturers never imagined. The microcassette recorder, originally intended for on-the-jump executive dictation, becomes the revolutionary medium of magnizdat, allowing the covert spread of suppressed political speeches in Poland and China. The beeper and the cellular telephone become tools in an increasingly competitive market in illicit drugs. Other technological artifacts unexpectedly become means of communication, either through opportunity or necessity. The aerosol can gives birth to the urban graffiti matrix. Soviet rockers press homemade flexi-discs out of used chest X-rays. "

technology technology-adoption user street adaptation anarchy future prediction

statistics quantitative measurement research methods probability robust linear-regression prediction error

statistics quantitative measurement research methods probability robust linear-regression prediction error

"Predicted to be a storm of historic proportions, Tuesday’s snow and ice storm fell short of expectations, and meteorologists couldn’t be happier."

meteorology prediction weather science success failure accuracy

interview sf prediction literature