My fabulous horoscope for June got me thinking about this project again. I'm really enjoying this balance between superstition/spirituality and science. Disregarding concentric circles of influence for a moment (just because it's right doesn't mean it's fun), how would the El Niño be accounted for by modern Astrology? After all, I don't think I can ask the right questions until I understand the mechanisms that I'm asking about. At a high probability of going off in the wrong direction, here's a little astrological word association to get started.
What's interesting about this chain of words are the number of similarities that these aspects have. Each is a bit mysterious. Neptune in particular is slow moving and illusionary. The planet swells and diminishes over time, like that original graph of El Niño. There is a great deal of mystery associated with all these aspects. Amusingly El Niño, refers to the boy or the Christ Child, who appeared at the beginning of the Age of Pisces.
As a Liberal Arts major, I find these coincidences fascinating, as if there is some underlying (perhaps spiritual) force that is creating this El Niño phenomenon. But, is it one phenomenon or is it many phenomena? Is this weather event simply a culmination of many things? Is this simply Jungian Literary Theory gone a muck? I wholeheartedly believe that there is a lot of knowledge trapped in the collective unconscious that we (as humanity) have not successfully mined or identified. We know without knowing.
How do we deal with events in Science that have multiple causes? For instance, let's say we have a well. Let's make it a standard, residential well that provides water to a house. I'm probably the last person you want touching your plumbing, but I'm going to try this as an illustration. Let's assume that the well turns on whenever there is a need for water in the house. This need is indicated by a drop in water level in the reservoir or tank of water that feeds the house.
Now, anything could be causing this drop in water in the tank. Someone could be taking a shower. The dishwasher could be running. A load of laundry could be in the washer. Or, any of these things or more could be running in combination. There could also just be no water consumption except for a slow leak, which causes the well to run for 5 minutes once every 3 days.
For El Niño, we do not have anything as convenient as an enclosed reservoir that tells us when the system will turn on or off. Does that mean we can throw Occam's razor out? Probably not. It's really tempting to just get a bunch of potential causes and run a big, giant regression. However, I've heard an anecdote that folks (much more mathematically inclined than me) have already tried that. Instead, we must harness the mysterious power of simplification and figure out what is the water tank equivalent for El Niño.
In my last entry, my thought processes brought me to thinking about El Niño cycles. This is primarily because El Niño is a slightly irregular event, which means that it could be caused by the culmination of factors or a number of forces coming into alignment. After a brief discussion with a professor, I realize the best way to think about this issue is in concentric circles of cause to the event. That is to say that the initial focus on this research should be about what El Niño is, which is a meteorological event that appears to be affected by the temperature of ocean currents. After identifying the "what," the research can then move to the next ring of causes closest to the event, for instance "what causes those ocean currents?" From there research can move away from the initial event to more disparate causes. A list of these circles of influence (in rough order) might look as follows:
El Niño
Ocean currents
Heat transfer to the oceans
Global warming and melting
Solar events
Gravity wells affecting the Earth, Sun and Moon
Major causes of gravity
Center of the Milky Way Galaxy, The Great Rift
Local planets
Local stars
Orbital paths
Of planets
Of moons
Of the Sun
The resulting combinations of the above and other events
So when I started writing on forecasting a few weeks ago, in the back of my mind, I had an idea that the movement of the planets, weather patterns, and basically some good old fashion Babylonian and Chinese Astrology could be brought to modern business forecasting. I mean, why not? For all I know, it could be as relevant as anything else to business forecasting. I can't find any research on it. Shocker, no one is out there debunking something that is obviously based on superstition. Or, I'm looking in the wrong places, which is probably more likely the case.
My biggest problem with creating a forecasting model is that I cannot fully conceptualize how forecasting actually works to start my own project. I took a couple courses that gave brief introductions to Minitab and one that gave a quick review of SPSS. I've done some basic forecasting in supply chain classes with Excel, and frankly I've had some in depth experience with Excel and Statistics. I, also, just finished a project working on an inventory control with Access and SharePoint. However, I think the simplest way to dive into this particular project is to admit that I simply know nothing about how to approach forecasting.
It, after all, is just another way of replenishing inventory. Forecasting is only a way to set expectations about what may or may not happen in the future. In no way is it a substitute for reducing inventory lead times and setting min/max levels. I think for most cases the way to go is just trimming the process down and ordering more stuff when your inventory is low. Forecasting just has a bit more of an allure because it's more steeped in allegory, giving us a glimpse of our own godlike nature: predicting the future.
So what if I start there? Over simplify? There are things that happen that seem to indicate future events. Mainly, these things that happen are past events. So past events can tell me what is going to happen in the future? But which past events, over what time frame, and why? And do I really understand how those past events really occurred. The challenge, and why I'm looking at something akin to astrology, is finding the context.
This "context problem" can be illustrated by the summer melt of the polar ice cap. In the video below you will see how forecast for summer melt is being outpaced by actual, real melting of the polar ice cap during summer.
The part of this video that gives the best illustration of this is the following graph:
The dark, black line shows sea ice dropping below (or at least to the low side) of the predictive range in 2007. I show this because global summer ice melt, even global warming as a whole, is a great example of historical ranges being insufficient predictors of the future. The politicized nature of this issue also illustrates the natural human urge to use more conservative models than we should in our forecasting. For instance, some folks still argue that global warming is a myth.
So how do we find the context for our predictive models? My thought is that we, as humans, go through cycles. The ancients represented this with astrology, the study of how the heavens effect the earth. We do know that crime goes up during a full moon. We do know there is a natural seasonal cycle that affects our lives. The oceans have tides created by the gravitational pull of the moon. But what about longer cycles than a day, a month, a year? Do forces external to the earth control El Niño cycles, which appear somewhat randomly every three to seven years?
My favorite Einstein quote is "God doesn't play dice with the world." Simply taken, we (as humans) can expect a reasonable explanation for many of the phenomena that we experience and find in the natural world. On a gut level, I get the sense there is a deeply profound truth hidden in the El Niño graph, above. I do not, at this juncture, know how to access it; however, I fully expect to find someone that knows or discover this nugget of knowledge. Does it have anything do with the movement of astronomical bodies, such as planets or sun spots? I do not know, but I will find out.
