David Icke and Alex Jones were discussing this on today's broadcast.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/tag/crystal-ball/Twitter Can Predict the Stock Market
* By Lisa Grossman Email Author
* October 19, 2010 |
* 1:30 pm |
* Categories: Miscellaneous
The emotional roller coaster captured on Twitter can predict the ups and downs of the stock market, a new study finds. Measuring how calm the Twitterverse is on a given day can foretell the direction of changes to the Dow Jones Industrial Average three days later with an accuracy of 86.7 percent.
“We were pretty astonished that this actually worked,” said computational social scientist Johan Bollen of Indiana University-Bloomington. The new results appear in a paper on the arXiv.org preprint server.
Bollen and grad student Huina Mao stumbled on this computational crystal ball almost by accident. Earlier studies had found that blogs can be used to gauge public mood, and that tweets about movies can predict box office sales. An open source mood-tracking tool called OpenFinder sorts tweets into positive and negative bins based on emotionally charged words.
But Bollen wanted to build a more nuanced emotional barometer. He used a standard psychology tool called the Profile of Mood States, a quick questionnaire that is used frequently in pharmaceutical research or sports medicine.
The original questionnaire asks people to rate how closely their feelings match 72 different adjectives, including “friendly,” “peeved,” “active,” “on edge” and “panicky,” and uses the responses to measure mood along six dimensions: calmness, alertness, sureness, vitality, kindness and happiness.
Bollen and colleagues checked a huge Google database to see what other words are commonly used in conjunction with the original 72 adjectives, and added those words to their lexicon. Then the researchers took 9.8 million tweets from 2.7 million tweeters between February and December 2008, selected the tweets that indicated a confession of emotion (tweets that included the words “I feel” or “I’m feeling,” for instance), and ran the test on the entire data set.
“We’re using Twitter like a psychiatric patient,” Bollen said. “This allows us to measure the mood of the public over these six different mood states.”
Read more:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/twitter-crystal-ball/#more-39407
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/07/darpa-deep-gree.htmlPentagon Plots Digital "Crystal Ball" to "See the Future" in BattleBy Noah Shachtman Email July 19, 2007 | 12:00:00 PM
Darpa, the Pentagon's way-out research arm, is looking to design a software suite that predicts the future for battlefield commanders. At the heart of the package: A digital "Crystal Ball" that forecasts how a mission is going to turn out, before it's done. No, I am not kidding.
The overall, three-year program is called "Deep Green." Its goal is to "allow the commander to think ahead, identify when a plan is going awry, and help develop alternatives 'ahead of real time.'" If it works out the way agency officials hope (a very big if), Deep Green will enable officers to out-hustle and out-think any potential foes -- and do all that planning and analysis with a quarter of the staff that it takes today.
Deep Green has a half-dozen different interlocking components, including a "Sketch to Plan" program that reads a commander's doodles, listens to his words, and then "accurately induces" a plan, "fill[ing] in missing details." That allows an officer "to specify an option at a coarse level, then move on to the next cognitive task." A related program, "Sketch to Decide" allows a commander to "see the future" by producing a "comic strip" to represent his possible options in a given situation. That may "sound exotic," the Agency notes. But "since the 1970s (and perhaps earlier), there have been novels and game books in which the reader is asked to make a decision and then is directed to a different page or paragraph, depending on the choice made."
To make these warzone versions of choose-your-own-adventure novels, Darpa proposes two pieces of software. "Blitzkrieg" will quickly model sets of alternatives, while "Crystal Ball" will take information currently coming into a headquarters to figure out which scenarios are the most likely to happen, and which plans are likely to work best. Crystal Ball will use this estimate to nominate to the commander futures at which he/she should focus some planning effort to build additional options/branches. Crystal Ball will identify the trajectory of the operation in time to allow the commander to generate options before they are needed.
Darpa believes these kind of clairvoyant tools are needed, because some well-worn martial concepts have been proven obsolete by the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Specifically, the "venerable Observe Orient Decide Act (OODA) loop is no longer viable for an information-age military." To fight a fast-moving foe, these four tasks have to now happen all at once. That's the goal of Deep Green.
The Observe (execution monitoring) and Orient (options generation and analysis) phases run continuously and are constantly building options based on the current operation and making predictions as to the direction the operation is taking. When something occurs that requires the commander’s attention or a decision, options are immediately available. Ideally, the OO part of OODA is done many times prior to the time when the commander must decide. When the planning and execution monitoring components of Deep Green mature, the planning staff will be working with semi-automated tools to generate and analyze courses of action ahead of the operation while the command concentrates on the Decide phase. By focusing on creating options ahead of the real operation rather than repairing the plan, Deep Green will allow commanders to be proactive instead of reactive in dealing with the enemy.
An "Industry Day," to discuss how such a fortune-teller might work, is set for next week. Final proposals, DANGER ROOM predicts, won't be due for a year.
See the full list of comments, here's one that I think is accurate.
"The OODA loop is not viable? As a way of thinking how people think, its 100% viable in this information age.
What UTTER BS!"
About the OODA Loop
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=192063.msg1172471#msg1172471
