There are two types of prophets –  those that do what they think and those that think that they do.

Google Trends based Israel RE Demand modeling (Abstract)

Google Trends is giving a unique insight into consumer demand changes and direct impact on financial conditions of firms or economy processes. I have tried to apply the model that I am widely using since 2009 on Real Estate market in Israel to get an exposure, understand better processes within, examine causality of local price growth and try to estimate the scenarios that are to come. In the article we see an interesting phenomenon of price hysteresis in local market, trying to understand it and explain by the RE demand model. The first part of the article is only the presentation of data, while the second part is model proposition and explanation of processes by the model. 

This is only an Abstract for the article I have done in Hebrew due to localized nature of the matter. I can translate it in case of demand in which I have a doubt or maybe one day I will do the same for couple more of interesting countries.

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ביקוש לנדל”ן מגורים על פי מודל גוגל וניתוח המשבר 2009-2013

הקדמה

מודל מגמות גוגל (Google Trends) חושף תובנות ייחודיות לגבי שינויי ביקוש למוצרי צריכה והשלכות ישירות על מצבם הכלכלי של חברות או משק .החלטתי להפעיל מודל שבו התחלתי להשתמש בצורה נרחבת מ2009 על שוק נדל”ן כדי להבין טוב יותר את מצב השוק, סיבתיות לעליות המחירים ולנסות לחזות את התרחישים הבאים. אנו נראה תופעה מעניינת בשוק הנדל”ן הישראלי של חשל (היסטרזיס) המחירים וננסה להסביר אותו בעזרת המודל. החלק הראשון של העבודה הינו הצגת נתונים בלבד, כאשר החלק השני הינו ניסיון לבנות מודל שמסביר את דינמיקת השוק.

Traffic Angel

Thinking about various ways of car accidents reduction, I took a commonality of car accident root causes and found out that most of monitoring/tracking solutions today are not meant to solve those root causes. Let’s take a look at the list (top to bottom) based on Car accident statistics of accidents including lethal ones.

Colorizing Clouds

I had my morning run through the Yarkon Park and observed those wonderful skies with fluffy clouds slowly rolling towards the sea. And I thought, why not to colorize them? It would be a spectacular performance on any holiday! It would not be photoshop pictures, nor a small scale color explosions and even not a Holi Festival… No. It is going to be a wide show of heavens. How can we do it?

Controlled Manufacturing Variability

 

As you become exposed to manufacturing processes, you can see that the variability is taken as something that is not welcome.

Variability in manufacturing increases risks, causes lack of prediction, enforce application of parametric and financial guardbands, increases complexity and variable costs. Copy-exactly is a strong credo in factories. Unstable processes are nightmare. Bottom line – looks like you would like to have it all stable.

In other hand, in dynamic world the lack of variability is as fatal as chaos. Precise manufacturing is causing stagnation, fragility, low reliability. Such products cause inability to sense market and adapt to the change. Such consumer products are boring and broadcast a strong smell of commodity.

 

 What if we will not fight with variability? What if we will not just learn to live with it, like by making segmentation of products and adjusted pricing based on nature-God-physics-man-driven Gaussian quality ?  No. What if we will embrace it? What if we will integrate it into our product as basic essential property? What if our incomes would grow with increased manufacturing variability? What if we leverage it and establish a beneficial feedback based on instability?

Example of it can be abandoned stable aerodynamic architecture in modern combat aircrafts, that have relaxed stability and moving towards unstable design. This way they gain new extreme characteristics, such as better maneuvering, air defense resistance or fuel saving.

Another example is smartphone AppStore, which was grown by embracing the variability of applications.

 

But the growing variability has its price. It could bring inefficiency, losses, chaos, crash and lots of unpleasant things in our life. All this in case we will not care for a proper control. The variability can be a great power, as long as it is managed by system which is complex enough to navigate processes within the scope of our business.

In our example, the relaxed stability of aircraft is managed by fly-by-wire system and without it would cause the immediate fall.

Hundreds of thousands of apps in AppStore would become a chaos or just would not be there without proper management process and tools.

 

Have you already pushed the limits of your product and see growing instability of various mechanic, electro-mechanic, logistic, managerial, SW, business or other properties? Ask yourself what should you do to love this instability. Imagine this variability of products or processes that you’ve got increased thousand times and ask how do you make this world better (and make money) from it? Build a product and manufacturing which are leveraging variability. Seek antifragility (not a robustness), immunity (not a health), dynamics (not a stability).

  

Do you have a power variability? Ask yourself how can you make better products by increasing the dynamic range of power. Cross products and within a product. You can see that you have a new product with great properties and bringing a great value for customers.

 Do you have to create same garment and struggling to choose between meeting standards and ever changing designs? Why not to abandon trying to predict the consumer demand, or sensing by long full-value-chain? Try to increase purposely variability of  product. Try to imagine that every person on the earth wants his own design. Can you supply it? Can you integrate a controlled variability in manufacturing to make it? For example create a random (unique!) color scheme. I call it “Exclusification of Manufacturing” and it is meant to mitigate the gap between Art and Commodity. 

 Do you produce yogurts? Make amount of fruits vary considerably more and promote it as a benefit. You might find a growth in demand of surprised consumers.

 

The concept can be used not only in manufacturing, but in economics, programming, services, education and more – everywhere you meet a variability of process. Embrace variability, control it with your hug and you will find a great friend right next to you.  

Progress Singularity Point

At the beginning the scenario density is big, variance of results is biggest, probability to get to any result is biggest.
With entropy, scenario density is dropping, result significance is lower and probability to get another result is smaller.
Why then world’s progress seems exponentially growing? Is this explosion makes us close to event horizon? What is the asymptotic world we are falling into? When will we pass the point of no-return and fail into the black hole? Interesting…