The Past is Poor

The internet’s data mine isn’t bottomless; you actually hit an inpenetrable barrier fairly quick, and it’s something far older than the web. That kachink of your information shovel recoiling is due to the simple fact of language. You can translate keywords, of course, but you’re still always translating into some other non-universal language, and translating imperfectly. Looking at collective behavior across different world languages is then limited, locking up quality research into different “ljinguistic silos,” as put in a new study out in Nature’s Scientific Reports journal, courtesy of researchers at University College London. And there are thousands of them.

What you can look at, however, is numbers — years, perhaps, as the new UCL paper does. The report looks at something called the future orientation index, which is basically whether or not a group of internet users is more or less interested in the future than the past. So, take a given year — they took 2008, 2009, and 2010 — and look at whether it’s more or less likely that users were searching for the following year or the prior year. In their experiment, the UCL researchers looked at this information across different countries and different GDPs. There’s little ambiguity about the results: poorer countries are far more interested in the past; richer countries, the future.

Read the rest at Motherboard.