
Can Google predict the future by measuring emoticons in data traffic? - hackteck
http://bitgain.com/blog/permlink/26-can-google-predict-the-future-by-measuring-emoticons-in-data-traffic-
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kwamenum86
In order for Google to predict the future millions of users would have to be
accurately able to predict the future, and then use emoticons to reflect their
feelings about the prediction.

Emoticons are often used to express feelings about past and present events. If
they express feelings about future events, it is speculation. How would you
filter out the noise of the past, present, and erroneous predictions of the
future?

Cool concept but in practice you would need more information about who uses
the emoticon (location, occupation, age, etc). And even then it still might
not be feasible (a bunch of people in the financial sector, aged 25-40, NYC
sent frowny faces...now what?)

Reminds me of information (prediction) markets where people purchase positions
on future events. Turns out it is a more efficient way to tease information
out of a group than polling. The ideas is that when there is money at stake
people's predictions _magically_ become more accurate.

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potatolicious
You bring up some valid points, but I would postulate that people talk about
the recent past (i.e. events that affect the future), the present, and the
predicted future, far more than they talk about far-past events... especially
so if they're tying emotions into this discussion.

The geo-centricity of the data is definitely a problem. Forest fires in
California would certainly incur a lot of grief emoticons from that area, and
if the algorithm were not geosensitive it would presume there was a spike in
global sadness, which would not be the case.

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kwamenum86
How would you use the data to predict the future though, assuming what you
just said is accurate?

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niels_olson
You guys!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Come on! Surely startups in the present economy
would be aware that predicting the future has been _exactly_ the problem that
got us into this mess. If you didn't study it yet, get familiar with the
history of the Black-Scholes model. The original quants behind Long Term
Capital Management, and the quants today use the _same math_. Yes, it won the
Nobel Prize in economics, but nobody said economists were brilliant
mathemeticians (quite the contrary actually. In fact, the poor/dishonest
reasoning of economists was the whole motivation behind the Post-Autistic
Economics Review).

The Black-Scholes is based on a calculus used to by rockets to predict their
navigational path through space while seeking their targets. Any rocket
scientist can tell you, it doesn't work out all the time. Continuous
calculuses don't respond well to unplanned discontinuities. So you might get
away with it for a little while, but eventually you'll be wrong. And the
consequences will almost certainly be catastrophic.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-Scholes>

Stop it!

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SingAlong
Using emoticons can give results with an error percentage of around... 99.99%
:) and the result maybe just 0.01% right.

Coz, as kwamenum86 said, these icons are used to express personal feelings
about an incident or news. My aunt might be in the ICU and when such a news is
heard I give a sad emoticon. And that can't be counted when you want to decide
if the world will be happy(not the whole world cares about my aunt). And at
the same time I might be happy when a guy in my class scored less than me. He
would be sad and I would be happy when we express this in emotes. (I'm not
this bad).

So if these emotes are to be really considered to count for the world's future
happiness measure, then the text along with the emote also has to be parsed
using Natural Language Processing to determine if its just a feeling about an
incident or news that matters personally or the other way.

I might be wrong too.

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gojomo
Emoticons are just words; why confine the analysis to just emoticons?

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kwamenum86
Emoticons are less intrusive method of aggregating the public sentiment. Would
you want the contents of you emails analyzed to help predict the future?

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gojomo
No, it's not less intrusive. Emoticons are essentially words like any others.
Grabbing the emoticon words from writing (public or private) is no different
than sampling other classes of words, such as all adjectives or verbs.

And no, I would not volunteer any part of my private communications for a
third party to analyze for their own benefit.

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kwamenum86
It is a little different. The amount of information you garner from ":)"
versus "Gee, I think I am going to liquidate now" are completely different. It
is a matter of sentiment analysis versus content analysis. But I see why you
say "it's not less intrusive". I think sentiment analysis is less intrusive,
especially if you are just looking at emoticons, because they reveal less
about you. The information encoded in the emoticon has less clarity. It's
reasonable that you might find any amount of intrusion unacceptable though.

Doesn't Google look at the contents of your (subject being gmail users) email
anyway to serve ads on Gmail right now though? The scary thing is I think
people would just get used to it if it were useful.

Of course I think (hope) we are all engaging in this conversation assuming
this will never happen.

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aneesh
Well, from my anecdotal evidence, most emoticon usage is to describe
_personal_ events, not global ones. There's way too much noise in this
dataset.

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kwamenum86
One crude way for them to measure this right now is looking at the number of
requests that are made for the emoticon image. There are some problems there
(caching, does emoticon sent or emoticon received, how often do you count a
request per ip)...far-fetched...but as long as we are dealing with a
hypothetical situation...

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ntoshev
An internet confidence index :)

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ganouta
987654

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ganouta
p l

