Predicting Disasters Of The Future: Economic Disaster, Water Shortages, And Cyber Attacks | Co.Exist Experts around the world agree: Global catastrophes are coming in the next decade. When the experts were polled, they were incredibly pessimistic. We’re at increased risk of economic, political, and environmental disaster. It’s a scary world out there, and it’s just getting scarier.
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Predicting Disasters Of The Future: Economic Disaster, Water Shortages, And Cyber Attacks | Co.Exist

Experts around the world agree: Global catastrophes are coming in the next decade. When the experts were polled, they were incredibly pessimistic. We’re at increased risk of economic, political, and environmental disaster. It’s a scary world out there, and it’s just getting scarier.

Source: fastcoexist.com

Study links skyscrapers to financial crashes

emergentfutures:

An “unhealthy correlation” exists between the construction of skyscrapers and financial crashes, according to a new report from investment bank Barclays Capital.

Full Story: ABC

Interesting correlation! I immediately think of the magnificient head office buildings successful companies tend to build preceeding their downturns. I doubt skyscrapers can be used as tools for predicting financial crashes but they might signs of a situation and a way of looking at prioritizations that might be worth looking into if we want to understand financial crashes.

Source: emergentfutures

BPS Research Digest: Why we're better at predicting other people's behaviour than our own

Psychologists have identified an important reason why our insight into our own psyches is so poor. Emily Balcetis and David Dunning found that when predicting our own behaviour, we fail to take the influence of the situation into account. By contrast, when predicting the behaviour of others, we correctly factor in the influence of the circumstances. This means that we’re instinctually good social psychologists but at the same time we’re poor self-psychologists.

The Graph That Proves Economic Forecasters Are Almost Always Wrong - Derek Thompson - Business - The Atlantic There are a few lessons to glean from the Surprise Index, which I was only made aware of this week. First, predictions are often reported as news. They’re not. They’re predictions, and they’re almost always wrong. Full disclosure: I’ve been as guilty as anyone for breathlessly passing along predictions without the qualifying them as conjecture. Second, to be fair to the analysts, sometimes the first draft of the economic figures aren’t any better than the predictions. A great example: We initially estimated GDP falling 3.8% in the last three months of 2008. Instead, it fell nearly 9%. That’s a horrible miscalculation that had a real impact on decisions made by Congress and the Federal Reserve to fix the economy. I wonder what the Economic Surprise Index would say about first readings of GDP and unemployment numbers.
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The Graph That Proves Economic Forecasters Are Almost Always Wrong - Derek Thompson - Business - The Atlantic

There are a few lessons to glean from the Surprise Index, which I was only made aware of this week. First, predictions are often reported as news. They’re not. They’re predictions, and they’re almost always wrong. Full disclosure: I’ve been as guilty as anyone for breathlessly passing along predictions without the qualifying them as conjecture. Second, to be fair to the analysts, sometimes the first draft of the economic figures aren’t any better than the predictions. A great example: We initially estimated GDP falling 3.8% in the last three months of 2008. Instead, it fell nearly 9%. That’s a horrible miscalculation that had a real impact on decisions made by Congress and the Federal Reserve to fix the economy. I wonder what the Economic Surprise Index would say about first readings of GDP and unemployment numbers.

Source: The Atlantic

2020 Foresight: Predictions for the Next Decade | ParisTech Review

Click on the link to read about some predictions from Ester Dyson, Michael S. Tomczyk and Jeremy Rifkin.

infoneernet: Econophysicist Predicts Date of Chinese Stock Market Collapse—Part III Back in July, econophysicist Didier Sornette at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and a few pals predicted the impending collapse of the Shanghai Composite stock market index. Their evidence was that the index had been growing at a faster than exponential rate, which was clearly measurable and obviously unsustainable. But Sornette and co were less forthcoming about how they were able to say a collapse was imminent. I was sceptical of this prediction and said so. And yet at the beginning of August, the Shanghai Composite dropped by about 20 per cent and I was forced to eat my words, puzzled though I still was to their method. Today, Sornette and co publish the method they use to make their prediction. Their method is a synthesis of ideas from the economic theory of rational expectation bubbles, from the imitation and herding behaviour of investors and traders and from the mathematical and statistical physics of bifurcations and phase transitions. Seen at Technology Review
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infoneernet:

Econophysicist Predicts Date of Chinese Stock Market Collapse—Part III

Back in July, econophysicist Didier Sornette at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and a few pals predicted the impending collapse of the Shanghai Composite stock market index.

Their evidence was that the index had been growing at a faster than exponential rate, which was clearly measurable and obviously unsustainable. But Sornette and co were less forthcoming about how they were able to say a collapse was imminent. I was sceptical of this prediction and said so.

And yet at the beginning of August, the Shanghai Composite dropped by about 20 per cent and I was forced to eat my words, puzzled though I still was to their method.

Today, Sornette and co publish the method they use to make their prediction. Their method is a synthesis of ideas from the economic theory of rational expectation bubbles, from the imitation and herding behaviour of investors and traders and from the mathematical and statistical physics of bifurcations and phase transitions.

Seen at Technology Review

Source: technologyreview.com

Predicting tipping points before they occur - USATODAY.com

Tipping point

It is really interesting to notice that scientists and systems theorists are catching up and is generalizing the observations concerning that systems are signaling a coming bifurcation point by showing certain fractal patterns.

As a futurist I regularly use a similar explanation for why businesses and societies are currently showing so many extreme and contradictory phenomena at the same time: all these extreme opposites and dramatic shift are signaling that we, as a social system, are almost certainly approaching a major tipping point.

The researchers who wrote this paper have observed the same fractal patterns in critical transitions in as diverse areas as:

  • algae blooms in lakes
  • asthma attacks
  • climate change
  • desertification
  • epileptic seizures
  • fisheries collapse
  • migraines
  • financial systems

Source: usatoday.com%2Ftech%2Fscience%2F2009-09-03-tipping-point_N.htm%3Fcsp%3D34

The Futurist: Timing the singularity

An interesting post which gives an overview of the singularity discussion as well as gives some nice illustrations of how to think about it. Really worth reading!