An exploration of more rigorous ways to forecast events

The ability to forecast natural and global events is required by CIA and NSA analysts as well as several dozen government institutions to help in creating awareness of various threats to the country. However, most of the old-style approaches used for this purpose tends to produce flawed results.  As such, in order for quality to be improved, the United States government has appealed to people outside the intelligence community by running tournaments. Though this is a rather unusual step, a number of different ways have been developed to forecast world events and several notable results have been taken into account.

One method of forecasting is deliberation though it is useful, it is not necessarily ideal for forecast guarantees due to its susceptibility to groupthink. Social biases also tend to intrude on the process as deferments are conducted based on seniority. Thus, dissenting views are normally not captured which has led analysts to predict or miss events that did not take place.

Equally important, other methods that have been run by Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity include ACE or Aggregative Contingent Estimation, ForeST (Forecasting Science and Technology) and Open Source Indicators (OSI).  These methods each seek to improve intelligence forecasts through precision and timeliness through the use of techniques such as crowdsourcing, probability and machine learning. As a result, weaknesses are offset of any single source while human tendencies are overcome to overestimate as well as underestimate an event’s probability.

Forum One - Jacquard Loom

Title: Revisiting the Jacquard Loom: Threads of History and Current Patterns in HCI

Authors: Ylva Fernaeus, Martin Jonsson and Jakob Tholander

To conclude, the Jacquard Loom and its relation to HCI patterns can be broken down into four themes with the first being materiality and digital representations.  In this particular case, materiality issues are broadly construed and explored from a number of angles such as its potential as a resource in design, its aesthetic qualities as well as the representational opportunities it presents (Fernaeus, Jonsson, & Tholander, 2012).  One of the key characteristics of the invention was the use of punched cards in which holes are represented by fabric patterns and the absence of holes in a long punched card chain where stitched together.  

Thus, the mechanics behind the punched cards could be viewed as the birth of binary representation allowing material objects to be digitized thereby creating a form of code that could be interpreted by running it through a mechanical device (Fernaeus, Jonsson, & Tholander, 2012).  The entire process could also be viewed as programming with a consideration placed on the final fabric as a form of a program directly focusing on the transformation from different forms of representation such as from point paper to cards.  In relation to Interaction Design, this is an example of the distinction between separate end user roles and programmers.

The second theme, graspability of complex mechanics, narrows the meaning of graspability as something that can be picked up and acted upon as well as something that is understandable and has meaning (Fernaeus, Jonsson, & Tholander, 2012).  The simplistic nature of physicality can also be avoided in this case by arriving at a notion through which an activity uses artefacts (e.g. weaving) that are not understood primarily as meaningful isolated objects but by the manner in which they play a role in a larger process.  The important point to note here is that the Jacquard Loom was invented for the entire work process to be more efficient and not to make its various physical parts more understandable by its users.  Additionally, the Loom’s development was based on Jean Marie Jacquard’s practice who had worked as a draw boy at a weaving mill.  Hence, in order for something to be graspable it implied that some kind of information had to be understood or grasped which could be the functioning of how it all ties together in this case, bridging newly produced fabric patterns with chains of cards and strings hanging in the loom.

References

Fernaeus, Y., Jonsson, M., & Tholander, J. (2012). Revisiting the Jacquard Loom: Threads of history and current patterns in HCI. Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1593-1602). New York: ACM.

Use of Mobile Devices

There has been some sharp contrast in the use of mobile devices from the years 2012 to the first quarter in 2014.  Apparently, 57% of adults used their mobile phones for Internet accessibility alone in the first quarter of 2014. This alone is indicative of the competitiveness as well as the social inclusion of mobile telephony in the United Kingdom.

Households also had a sharp rise in tablets with the number doubling to 44% over the past year.  This is up from 24% in 2013 and 11% in 2012. About fourteen percent of homes claim to have at least two or more tablets. The numbers are also staggering especially in tablet use for internet connectivity with 35% of the users saying they use it for this particular purpose and only 29% use their laptops.

Lastly, texts and pictures sent per person in the year 2013 fell with an average of 170 sent per person per month. This decline can be attributed to the fact that smartphone have become more or less the alternative mechanism for sending text based media which includes messages, pictures, as well as email, instant messaging and social networking.