GOOD WEEK . . .
COMPUTER malfunctioning? Maybe you should skip the expensive helpline call in favour of whacking in a couple of worms — long thin skinny ones, big fat juicy ones, head-biting optional — instead. New Scientist (Feb 4) reports that a computer security firm has developed a way of using good computer worms to deliver software patches that repair the weak spots that bad worms can use to sneak malicious software on to your machine’s system. The nice worms can be programmed with a “map” that tells them which computers they can invade, reducing the chance that they’ll cause a crash.
. . . BAD WEEK
ECONOMIC forecasters, political pundits and financial market swing-spotters share more than a taste for big words and bigger numbers: they’re also no better with their crystal balls than anyone else, reports Fortune (Feb 6). Research by a professor from the University of California at Berkeley, who ground through the results of more than 82,000 expert and non-expert political and economic predictions, found that experts were no better at predicting the future than amateur guessers, and significantly worse than computers. In fact, the only thing less accurate than an expert was a famous expert.