WKU
alum drawing global attention
By
JOANIE BAKER HENDRICKS, The Daily News, jhendricks@bgdailynews.com/783-3234
Wednesday,
August 5, 2009 11:37 AM CDT
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Miranda
Pederson/Daily News |
In the same way a meteorologist uses
trends and empirical data to forecast the weather, a Western Kentucky
University alum is using the media to forecast the global mood.
For about the past four years, Cari Bourette has been working with WKU
geography and geology instructor Daniel Reader to materialize a concept of
social mood and perception projecting and giving it real-world applications.
Those applications have predicted rises and falls in the stock market and crude
oil prices and even social unrest or environmental sustainability factors.
The success of the MoodCompass global forecast has drawn the attention of a
university in Italy, where officials at the University of Milan are trying to
determine how successful someone would be in the stock market using the
MoodCompass forecast. To date, Bourette
said preliminary data has shown a person “would have had a 56 percent return on
their money.”
Bourette said to prepare the monthly forecast publication, a team of people at
A New Story Foundation in Bowling Green, a not-for-profit organization designed
to conduct research on issues of sustainability, reviews media reports and
measures them against eight broad categories.
The scores are used to determine things such as humans’ perception of nature
and societal mood cycles based on how current global events are portrayed in
the news. Regular cycles are identifiable,
Bourette said, which allows the researchers to extend predictions to the
future.
Bourette said the forecast has been remarkably successful; the team predicted
September’s stock market crash in its MoodCompass publication that month,
titled “The Stock Market Crash of 2008” - written in August and based on global
mood scores, she said.
“I do this and find it’s absolutely amazing,” Bourette said. “I don’t know
anyone else who does this ... each time it actually works, it’s like ‘wow, it
happened again.’ ” The group also
publishes a blog with similar forecasts on its Crow’s Nest blog at www.dr-cari.blogspot.com.
The group has expanded its forecast to present mapping of its findings to
project attitudes across the globe as potentially hostile, aggressive or
defensive, while other maps show things such as economic and disease
instability factors for the month across the world. The global mood has an effect on the economy,
society and the environment, according to the researchers, and can be used to
forecast non-specific upcoming events.
Reader, the foundation’s executive director, participated in a stock market
game at Western and won based on the predictions of the MoodCompass. Bourette, using the same technique, has twice
won prizes in the same contest using the publication’s information.
In this month’s publication of the MoodCompass, the researchers say “there is a
heightened risk of a moderate earthquake in the area surrounding the Indian
Ocean. For whatever reason, strong concerns with disease are indicated in Asia
at the end of the month, going into September.”
The issue also predicts a large stock market decline becoming
“increasingly near” as September approaches as the “ingredients for new crises
have been stewing.”
Bourette said the mood climate forecasting is a holistic approach at seeing the
world. And while the predictions are not specific as to what exactly will
happen, the time period prediction is “amazingly accurate for something a month
ahead of time. “We think it’s a way to
see how things are a lot more interconnected than we think,” she said. “We
think a world view where we see things more connected would help in the
ultimate goal of sustainability.”
Reader said the forecast gives people the opportunity to steer their direction
and help them effect change in environmental concerns. For instance, one of the
most immediate concerns is a fresh water shortage, the professor said. In places like India and China, there is
already a shortage, while California is starting to feel the impact.
Reader said the MoodCompass is accurate and makes people aware of the need for
certain changes to be addressed now. “It
is certainly a tool to help understand what we need to do and when we need to do
it,” he said. “... it works.”
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