It’s the whole pie with jam in
He has devised an algorithm which can look at someone’s mobile-phone records and predict with an average of 93% accuracy where that person is at any moment of any day. Given most people’s regular habits (sleep, commute, work, commute, sleep), this might not seem too hard. What is impressive is that his accuracy was never lower than 80% for any of the 50,000 people he looked at. […]
Politics, too, is falling to the new psychohistorians. Boleslaw Szymanski of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York state studies how societies change their collective minds. By studying simulated networks of people he can predict the point at which a committed minority can convert almost everyone else to its way of thinking.
