For those of you who don’t take decision-making quite as seriously as we do, you can now turn to Apple’s Siri.

Ask Siri to

Roll the dice

and she’ll roll two dice for you, reporting

Rolling… it’s two and six.

Or, if you prefer a coin toss, ask her to

Flip a coin

to which she might respond

It’s tails.

Good luck.

A recent paper from Korea University Business School suggests that thinking too specifically when trying to predict an outcome makes you less likely to get it right.

Researchers compared predictions made about the overall outcome (win/draw/lose) of sporting events with predictions made about the actual scoreline. Scoreline predictions are also overall outcome predictions—e.g. if the score is Manchester United 3, Arsenal 1, then that is a win for Manchester United. Hence, scoreline predictions are a “more detailed” approach to predicting the overall outcome.

Analysis of 19 billion commercial bets suggested that people do worse when they attempt to predict the scoreline. These findings were confirmed in laboratory experiments.

The paper offers the insight that, in studying the minutiae, we may miss factors that have a much greater impact—i.e. we miss the forest for the trees.

So, less thinking = better results. Great.

The Global Data on Events Location and Tone (GDELT) project is attempting to document all the important political events in recorded history.

It currently contains data on over 250 million events, stretching back to 1979—and the intention is to extend that all the way to 1800.

Events are geotagged to city level and contain information on the type of confrontation, the parties involved and the action that occurred. The types of confrontation recorded are:

• material conflict
• material cooperation
• verbal conflict
• verbal cooperation

Events like bombings and riots are currently captured, drawing on traditional news sources, and the intention is to expand coverage to include, for example, financial events.

Founder Kalev Leetaru says

The goal of the project is to create a free and open global resource for the quantitative study and mapping of global conflict and cooperation and thus the data is being made available completely free and open for any use.

Mike Young, of Decision Workshops, has just released a screencast explaining how to use confrontation analysis to analyze political confrontations. He uses the approach to model the current tensions in Bahrain.

The screencast makes extensive use of Decision Workshops’ proprietary Microsoft Excel-based modeling tool. More information on this tool can be obtained by contacting Decision Workshops directly.

Those interested in modeling their own confrontations may wish to consider our Confronteer iPhone app.

Publishing your data isn’t enough—consumers have to be able to find and use it.

The Open Knowledge Foundation has officially recognized this through its Frictionless Data initiative. They propose:

• simple formats (e.g. CSV, JSON)
• simple tooling—i.e. the ability to get data in and out of standard software packages, such as Excel, R and Hadoop.
• bootstrapping the system with essential data (e.g. countries, postal codes)

It’s early days, but the direction is encouraging.