On tomorrow night’s show (4/7/2011 – 11PM EST), we will be covering the web bot predictions for 2011 and 2012.  But before we get into the nitty gritty of what is to come, I wanted to recap our last show on web bots.  It was a split episode, discussing remote viewing and web bots.  Chip finds remote viewing a ton more interesting while I enjoy picking apart the web bot.  For the record, I did call BS on it.

I listened to most of Clif High’s interviews and releases, just to get a grasp on this guy.  It is very important to me that if you CHOOSE to believe in the web bot predictions, you need to know that they are no more accurate or credible than speaking with a psychic or remote viewing.  There are hits and misses.  He is NOT using magic software, there is NO secret computer system that predicts the future.  I listened to how Clif explained his breakdown and third party analysis of his web bot.  Yes, sometimes he uses what may seem to be complicated computer terms… but really, it’s like when the doctor uses big words that you don’t understand.  So here is the breakdown of his process, for the lay-man/non-technical:

• Clif’s whole concept behind the web bot of “how the psychic-ness is leaking out of humans,” (Clif High Interview with Suzanne Toro) is based on a flawed theory.  He says that when we communicate on the internet, we use words that are outside of our normal speaking lexicon.  While I totally agree with him on this latter point, this is nothing more than a common, well-researched, basic principal.  Effective communicators use more formal words when writing to account for the distance.  There have been many studies on the difference in written and spoken language, even as specifically applied to the internet.  (http://www.slais.ubc.ca/courses/libr500/04-05-wt1/www/C_Campbell/page2.htm gives the basics and http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~crocker/courses/documents/lecture7-PK-part1.pdf gives the technical backing).  Clif says that these extra words are (sorry, this quote is too priceless not to repeat) “how the psychic-ness is leaking out of humans.”  So here, in the very crux of his dear web bot, he has manufactured a theory out of something which there was proven scientific fact to explain otherwise (READ: no government conspiracy, no alien intervention, just good old “we want to look better because people can’t see us so we use big words).
• So he is a really big fan of the language model (claims to have invented it… his exact words were, “[I gave them a solution] which I liked to call the language model”).  The language model is old and basic.  Early forms of it began surfacing in the 1800s in astronomy.  Language models are a method of developing the probability in a sequence of words with a good old probability distribution… very statistic-y.   It is used often in speech recognition stuff.  Not complicated… just math.  He claims his evolution of the language model started his thoughts on language and the evolution of the aforementioned linguistics theory.
• It took him four years to code the software (1993 to 1997) and states specifically, “I know what I’ll do, I’ll use this to make money” in this interview at around 6 minutes and 40 seconds in.  By the way, I don’t know if y’all have noticed, but the internet has changed just a wee bit since 1997.  I’ve been on the internet since 1991.  The methods of communication have shifted so frequently it will spin your head.  Not to mention, that he has to have a method of “searching” these websites.  Let’s say he uses a search engine… around 1993, W3Catalog, Aliweb, and JumpStation were the only names in the game.  Yahoo wasn’t around until 1995.  Google?  1998.  So he could’ve built the software on old technology… that which is not available or not as accurate as the alternatives today.  Conversely, I suppose he could be crawling all available domains and the content within… but he’d have to get a list of domains from the respective registries or IANA.  Neither of whom are going to release that kind of information to Jesus, let alone some guy.
• He is a technology dinosaur.  I have no idea how old he is and I couldn’t find anything more than a silhouetted picture of him, but the technology concepts he is talking about are old and dated.  There are new and better ways, Clif, embrace the future.  C?  Really?  C++, Perl, bah!
• He uses Prolog to interact with the data.  This language evolved in the 1970′s,
• So Clif used his newly developed software to make one stock market prediction and fool around with in 1999.  He claims he sold 44 shares of Microsoft 2 weeks before their high and got their money out before the loss.
• He says a bunch of servers call up a web page, read them, and convert them to hexadecimal. His bots read 100 million pages per run. Google, as of 2008, had 1 trillion (yeah that’s 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLS indexed.  In 2008, the internet was 10,000 times bigger than what Cliffy was looking at.  That number has grown exponentially since…
• Clif procured a list of words from the Oxford English Dictionary without the definitions and assigned values to them… emotional values and contextual values.  No science, no magic… just what he thinks the value of each word is.  He says, “some words are weighted heavier because they are way up in what you may think of as a psychic bandwidth.”
• Basically, he makes a heat map of the occurrences of these words in his data.  Clif describes the data as clumping in a 60x60x60 aquarium in his software.  In layman’s term, he is measuring the occurrences of words, comparing it against the arbitrary value (or not arbitrary, if you totally buy into his psychic bandwidth explanation), and generates a visual distribution.
• That’s it.  That’s the technology.  Clif says the human element enters once he gets his “virtual aquarium” a.k.a. heat map.  The human goes into the “hot” areas in the sophisticated heat map to rule out and throw out personalities and political occurrences.  Then, they convey the heat maps to predictions… manually… just by “interpreting” the image.   What he gathers from the image is certain slang terms that he evolves into predictions. To me, this is like a technical crystal ball.
• The predictions are VAGUE and NUMEROUS.  If you’ve seen the Nostradamus predictions, they work the same way.  They are so vague, they can be interpreted to FIT events.
• He has many theories surrounding the use of emotion, the powers that be, and the “reptilian mind.”  Frankly, I find it too extreme, illogical, and dull to summarize.  It doesn’t change his methodology, just tries to limit how he evolves the slang terms into predictions and how we all have the power when we type on the internet.

The bottom line is, everyone has the power and authority to make vague predictions and be half-right!   Clif uses the abbreviation “TPTB” to refer to “The Powers That Be.”  He claims to have pointed out the BP Oil Spill, Dick Cheney’s hunting incident, Hurricane Katrina, and the Northeast Blackout of 2009.  He missed, however:

• A massive earthquake in Vancouver, Canada and the Pacific Northwest was predicted to occur on 12 December 2008.^[source]
• The US dollar completely collapses, or Israel bombs Iran. In reaction to this crisis, administration of U.S. President Barack Obama would have been thrown into major chaos ten days later.^[source]
• A buildup of tension was to begin July 11, but nothing noticeable happened to cause such buildup.
• From July 11, 2010 onward, civil unrest will take place, possibly driven by food prices skyrocketing, and the devaluation of the dollar.(6 Months off) ^[source]
• November 5–14, 2010 – The web bot warns of a big tipping point, possibly a stock market crash or financial issue of some sort.^[source]
• An October 2010 release of a data set analysis (The Shape of Things to Come Volume 0, Issue 8) forecast a major event termed the Tipping Point to occur between 8 November and 11 November. The analysis was later modified to extend the time frame for the Tipping Point to occur between 5 November and 14 November.^[source]
• A missile launch that would herald the start of World War III was predicted to happen on the 14th of December in an interview.

If you choose to buy into the web bot project predictions, it is important to me on a personal level that you are aware of the whole picture.  If you still want to believe in it, more power to you.  He’s been right just as much as he’s been wrong.  There’s no magical technology… he’s just as good as any other person that claims to predict the future.