Tiger gotta hunt, bird gotta fly;
Man gotta sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger gotta sleep, bird gotta land;
Man gotta tell himself he understand. -- Kurt Vonnegut

Things are complicated

The butterfly effect is more than a great movie starring, man of science, Ashton Kutcher.

A simple idea: a butterfly fluttering her wings in Casablanca can effect the weather in Cleveland.

Unlikely, but possible.

Things are related

Perhaps everything is related. Determinism maintains that things are set in motion at the dawn of existence and unchangeable.

a strange idea..

Everything under the sun is in tune

Predicting the future

The stock market is a great forum for prediction. The rules are pretty simple, predict the future better than your opponents, win fame and fortune.

a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations -- John Maynard Keynes

This is interesting: Twitter mood predicts the stock market.

No small feat

How / why would twitter be good at predicting the market?

Think of Twitter as a network of human sensors. -- Rick Lawrence, head of IBM's Machine Learning Group

Online social networks

Imagine all of us as a single interconnected system. Taken in its entirety, our human network is an amazing analytical machine. We experience, categorize, learn, and teach. We gain collective knowledge over time.

The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things. -- Robert Pirsig

The web lets us experience, record, and learn at a scale unprecedented. We're still discovering what this means.