Let's take supercomputer with 1024 Intel Nehalem cores and let's call it Nautilus.
Let's take Nautilus and give it 100 million news articles to read.
Let's ask Nautilus to apply mood detection for those articles searching for words such as "terrible", "horrific" or "nice". Those words will describe global sentiments.
Let's ask Nautilus to detect words for locations, like 'London', and record those locations on the map, showing where the specific waves of news were produced.
What do we get?
We get a trend, showing that BEFORE large events happening around the world, the mood of the words used in the news becomes very negative. And we know the location of the places, where the mood goes down. Such analysis is possible because Nautilus was programmed using similar algorithms for analyzing news as those used in DNA simulations and weather forecasting. It was done a posteriori - after the events happened - but now it will be applied to the ongoing events with better location engine.
What Nautilus did is, indeed, a weather forecasting for the large events in the worlds. Not perfect, but definitely above the level of chance. Still, as @mjrobbins points in his article for Guardian, you need human to make sense out of the analysis outputted by Nautilus, so it's not that computer does all the job. But it's a good start.
Details are in this paper and slightly biased BBC news article.
What do we get?
We get a trend, showing that BEFORE large events happening around the world, the mood of the words used in the news becomes very negative. And we know the location of the places, where the mood goes down. Such analysis is possible because Nautilus was programmed using similar algorithms for analyzing news as those used in DNA simulations and weather forecasting. It was done a posteriori - after the events happened - but now it will be applied to the ongoing events with better location engine.
What Nautilus did is, indeed, a weather forecasting for the large events in the worlds. Not perfect, but definitely above the level of chance. Still, as @mjrobbins points in his article for Guardian, you need human to make sense out of the analysis outputted by Nautilus, so it's not that computer does all the job. But it's a good start.
Details are in this paper and slightly biased BBC news article.
