Supercomputing Impending Disaster – or Terrorists

This is very interesting.

Scientists say they’ve proven that it’s possible to predict uprisings and revolutions, and even terrorist locations. It works by analyzing news articles – a lot of news articles, and looking at the tone in them. A steady trend towards one end of the spectrum or the other can indicate something is about to happen. Egypt’s president, for example, had a steady and massive negative trend in Egyptian papers before the revolution, and we know what happened there.

The researchers and scientists have posted their findings here.

It’s important to realize that while this can possibly be a very efficient tool, all the analysis that are written about in the report have been done in hindsight – the events that are being analyzed have already happened, in other words. The metod and theory is very similar to economic analysis, and as any stock broker or day trader will tell you, the analysis isn’t always right.

So no, it’s still not possible to see the future, but this might help ease the pressure on the intelligence community, for example.