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Forecast

Forecast is defined as: the process of estimation in unknown situations. Many aspects of our daily lives need to be forecast, from how much milk is left in the fridge to how will this decision impact my financial future? Most of the forecasts are shallow and are not for very distant into the future. These posts are an attempt to look a bit further at the possibilities and see how they may be played out, what would need to happen and how socially and technologically it could be done.

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Introduction to Prediction Markets

When you gather a suitably diverse group of people together, ask them a question and average their answers, the result tends to be more accurate than the result of any one person including experts. The implication of this, is that the crowd as a whole can make better informed judgements than traditional experts. There just needs to be an ideal way to extract those tiny bits of relative information from individuals in a consistent manner. Enter the prediction market.

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The Long Now

The Y2K problem was pop-culture’s initiation into short-term thinking on a global scale. The issue revolved around the 2-digit year, 19__ on checkbooks and in computer databases. When the year 2000 arrived, it broke a lot of code that filled in the __ with 00 making it 1900 instead of 2000. The long now foundation challenges us to think in the longer term, not in years, not in millennium, but in 10s of millennia.

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Future predicting: What might happen in the next hundred years?

This is an article that ran in the December 1900 issue of Ladies Home Journal. It was predicting life 100 years into the future in the year 2001. The following is that article annotated with notes about how close or far off they really were with their predictions.

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Near future of sports from a spectator’s point of view

How we attend and watch sporting events will change due to the use and prevalence of technology and the ubiquitousness of connectivity. As we carry around more and more sophisticated mobile phones that are always on and always connected to the Internet, the way we as spectators will view sporting events, gather information and make decisions is going to change drastically.

This is an exploration of some technological changes and challenges in the near future framed within the contexts of being a spectator at sporting events. At the end of the day, the biggest advances needed won’t be in the hardware realm, but instead with interface design. The shear amount of data available to be mined needs to be done in a fast and simple way and on small devices the task gets even harder.

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