"And on and on. If futurists have become almost too good at technological foresight, we remain woefully primitive in our abilities to examine and forecast changes to cultural, political, and social dynamics.

Why is this? There isn't a single cause. "

Sunday is the 10-year anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As a commemoration of the day, I'm going to investigate answers to a very simple question: what is the probability of a 9/11-size or larger terrorist attack?

"In other words I have a new ambition for my own SF: not as prediction, and not cautionary, either--but aspirational.

The fact is that if I've learned one thing in two years of studying how we think about the future, it's that the one thing that's sorely lacking in the public imagination is positive ideas about where we should be going. We seem to do everything about our future except try to design it. It's a funny thing: nobody ever questions your credentials if you predict doom and destruction. But provide a rosy picture of the future, and people demand that you justify yourself. Increasingly, though, I believe that while warning people of dire possibilities is responsible, providing them with something to aspire to is even more important. The foresight programme has given me a lot of tools to do that in a justifiable way, so I might as well use them."

by Dan Gardner and Philip Tetlock

"Though Lazarsfeld was writing 60 years ago, 20/20 hindsight is still very much with us. Contemporary psychologists call this tendency to view the past as more predictable than it actually was "the hindsight bias." Watts, a Yahoo! Labs scientist best known for his research on social networks and his earlier book, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (W. W. Norton, 2003), argues that this tendency is a greatly underappreciated problem, one that not only causes us to make up just-so stories to explain any conceivable outcome—but to delude ourselves that we can predict the future by learning from the past."

"ONCE PERFECTED, communication technologies rarely die out entirely

"Predicted to be a storm of historic proportions, Tuesday’s snow and ice storm fell short of expectations, and meteorologists couldn’t be happier."

Modeling where to aim in darts to maximize your score.

Academics are trustees of one of our greatest resources – the accumulated abstract knowledge of our ancestors. Academics appear to spend most of their time trying to add to that knowledge, and such effort is mostly empirical – seeking new interesting data. Alas, for the purpose of intellectual progress, most of that effort is wasted. And one of the main wastes is academics being too gullible about their and allies’ findings, and too skeptical about rivals’ findings.

People aren't very accurate at predicting how good or bad they'll feel after an event -- such as watching their team lose the big game or getting a flat-screen TV. But afterwards, they "misremember" what they predicted, revising their prognostications after the fact to match how they actually feel, according to new research.

20-year-olds cannot predict the specific skills they’ll need in the labour market in 10-20 years time. This is not just because they don‘t know what jobs they‘ll have then, but because they don‘t know how occupations will change. For this reason, there’s a huge danger that purely vocational skills will quickly date. Instead, the key is to teach them more general skills: how to interpret evidence; how to write, and so on. One good way to do this is to give them a rigorous education in anything; how else do you explain the economic success of Oxford classics graduates?

Rafael Popper (1976- ) has more than 10 years experience as a foresight researcher and practitioner. Since 2002 he is based at PREST Manchester Institute of Innovation Research of the University of Manchester (one of the world’s leading foresight think tanks)

The field of futures and forecasting is undergoing a revolution. Since the field was founded in the 1950s, the problems futurists must make sense of have become much more complex. The tools we can use-- and could develop-- to follow trends and forecast possible futures have become more sophisticated. The audiences we try to reach have expanded. The media we use to communicate have changed. And our knowledge of how people and groups actually think about and respond to the future has evolved greatly. The purpose of this blog is to make sense of how the field is responding to these changes, and try see where the field is going-- in effect, to forecast the future of futures

In the Uncertain Future, we let you input the full range of your uncertainties — and we show you the distribution over futures that your current, uncertain beliefs imply. We help you create your own picture of the uncertain future.

Dutch economist Dirk Bezemer, writing in the Financial Times on September 7, "Why some economists could see the crisis coming". What's more, he has a much more detailed explanation in a 51-page paper, "'No One Saw This Coming': Understanding Financial Crisis Through Accounting Models" (pdf). Long story short, Bezemer set out to find those who had been right in predicting the financial meltdown, not just randomly, but because of a well-reasoned argument. He found eight examples-including Baker-and analyzed what they had in common. He discovered that they all relied on accounting models that looked at the economy in terms of stocks and flows, in sharp contrast to the standard macro-economic models that actually have no way of predicting a financial crisis, since their programming does not allow for the possibility.

Comic about the efficient market hypothesis and its defenders, especially John Cochrane who said that EMH predicts that no one can predict anything so it must be true.

First, I fear Anthony has too much confidence in economists’ ability to build useful scenarios. The problem is that extreme events are often not captured by scenarios. For example, back in 2007 loads of economists had a disaster scenario. But these revolved around an unwinding of consumer debt, or a meltdown of hedge funds, or a dollar collapse triggered by global imbalances. Very few indeed had a remotely accurate credit crunch scenario.

Complex dynamical systems, ranging from ecosystems to financial markets and the climate, can have tipping points at which a sudden shift to a contrasting dynamical regime may occur. Although predicting such critical points before they are reached is extremely difficult, work in different scientific fields is now suggesting the existence of generic early-warning signals that may indicate for a wide class of systems if a critical threshold is approaching.

People in their 20s wished they had saved for travel, people in their 30s wished they had saved for a house, and people in their 40s wished they had saved for retirement. His implicit suggestion is that younger people should use this data and get "ahead" of the curve by aligning their current savings patterns with what they probably will want to have done in 20 years.

A research effort launched in 2005 sought to introduce new methodologies that might help crack the bias in demand signals. We worked with our academic partners to develop a new application, a form of prediction market, integrated with Intel's regular short-term forecasting processes. The process enables product and market experts to dynamically negotiate product forecasts in an environment offering anonymity and performance-based incentives.

quick taxonomy of unpredictability: information, computational, endogenous, chaotic, under-determined

The future of education: The class of 1989

BY MARSHALL McLUHAN AND GEORGE B. LEONARD
from: LOOK magazine, February 21, pp. 23-25.

Predictions tracked and then evaluated.

prediction market for political events.

During this season of gloom, when experts say the economy will not look up till at least 2010, Eliyahu M Goldratt begs to differ.

It’s hard to tell what’s more striking about Raghuram Rajan’s 2005 presentation at the Kansas City Fed’s Jackson Hole symposium — the way many of the dangers he laid out came to pass, or the way he was attacked, and then discounted.

Mr. Rajan came to the conference, dedicated to soon-to-retire Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, with strong bona fides as a pro market advocate.

by Robin Hanson

The eLab eXchange is brought to you by the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing at the University of California, Riverside.

Robin Hanson

Qmarkets provides your company with accurate forecasting capabilities for future events, relying on your employees collective intelligence. We allow your employees to participate in prediction markets that you create, to get the forecasts you are looking

Los Alamos research lab that investigates collective practices.

HPsales levelCharles PlottTime,Plott & ChenEli LillyDrug efficacyEli LillyTimeMicrosoftdeveloper acceptance of new releasesTodd ProebstingTimeIntel*assignment of chip production to plantsTom MaloneTimeBritish Petroleum*Pollution Credit tradinginternalTo

If you are from an academic or media organisation and you would like to download our data,please contact ushere.Aticker tapeof our contract data is available.

NewsFutures designs, implements and operates prediction markets for the most demanding organizations.Prediction markets deliver clear, accurate forecasts on almost any issue for corporations and media organizations. Some use them to predict sales, alloc

Welcome to the Foresight Exchange!This is the place to test your ability to predict the outcome of future events. It is also the place to check the current odds of upcoming events and make your own bets.Remember, this is not real money!Are you finding t

HedgeStreet®is the first Internet-based, government regulated market where traders can hedge against or speculate on economic events and price movements. HedgeStreet significantly expands the investment, risk-hedging, and profit-making opportunities av

joint center for policy markets, using markets to aggregate political/policy ideas

A site to create and manage prediction markets.

Site on weather prediction.

NWS center for storm predictions and information.