Sir Winston Churchill once said:

"The most important lesson life ever taught me is that the idiots many times are right"

Örjan Hallberg
Hallberg Independent Research
www.hir.nu

As I am interested in lots of things that don't really belong to my own area of profession (which is quality- and reliability engineering) I have sometimes been regarded as 'unprofessional', 'unscientific' or even 'bizar' by professionals in these areas.

But by the time the critique seems to fade away and the results are instead beginning to be recognized and referred to in professional circles. Here follows two examples and one awaiting the outcome..:

1. The mad Englishmen disease

In 1996 I came across interesting data about the Mad Cow Disease (BSE). The first signs of the human variant of that disease (nvCJD) were reported and scared (hopefull?) scientists screamed about possible death toll numbers up to millions, hoping for large research funding.

My analysis of the data gave a more modest outcome of a few hundred killed. In April 1997 I wrote a report to The Lancet and presented my calculations from 1996. The report was rejected of-cource, I did not know how to write a medical report and probably nobody were capable of digesting the mathematics either. However, to-day it is interesting to see how my prediction done in 1996 fits fairly well with the actual outcome.

Figure 1. The number of nvCJD deaths in GB was predicted in 1996 and is here shown together with the real outcome.

2. The number of people killed in the Swedish traffic

The real big thing that was done to improve the traffic safety in Sweden was to introduce the safety seat belts in all new cars. This was done mid 1970's. During the 10 years that followed the traffic safety improved and I understood that now we had a new base to start from when future accidents and death toll numbers should be estimated.

So, I used the data available between 1975 to 1985 to extract two single important numbers. These two numbers described the probability of getting killed over time from the moment you first got your driver's licence till you quit driving.

In contrary to the professionals I did not change these parameters annually at all to get better fit to new data but kept them unchanged and calculated the number of deaths depending on the number of new, unexperienced drivers that were added to the traffic for every year.

In the next Figure you can see how well actual data and predicted numbers match even to-day, 20 years later. Unfortunately, this indicates that we have not had any major break-throughs regarding traffic safety since the safety-belt law was imposed. And that may be a reason why a report on this work never was accepted for publication. I have, though, over the years had very good private communication with professionals in the branch and quite recently I have understood that some research is ongoing where my web-based information is being used.

Figure 2. The number of deaths due to traffic accidents has closely followed the prediction based on my analysis of the data between 1975-1985

3. The number of Alzheimer deaths can also be predicted

It will take 5-10 years before we will know if I was right. Let's hope not...

It has been scientifically reported that the blood-brain barrier (BBB) does get damaged from mobile phone radiation. Logically, we thus should expect that Alzheimer patients will get kicked down into their graves much faster in this new era of unwired communication.

So, I just analysed the relationship between the number of mobile phone subscribers and the number of Alzheimer deaths between 1981 to 1993 in the same manner as for the traffic killed above. The two extracted parameters were then used to calculate the amount of deaths due to the Alzheimer disease for the coming years. As you can see from Figure 3, already in 1993 we should have expected an accelerating death toll number from around 1998 which really happened. A fine tuning of those two constants based on all data from 1981 to 2001 gives somewhat lower numbers of killed but the direction is unchanged!

Figure 3. The number of deaths due to Alzheimer's disease is increasing and follows wery well the prediction done based on data between 1981 to 1993. An even better fit is ofcource found when all data up to 2001 is being used. And the direction is scaring....

4. The heat is on...

In 1992 IPCC predicted that the global temperature in 100 years could increase by about 3 degrees C. In 2000 the prediction had increased to around 6 degrees C. In this paper you can read how I came to an even higher temperature of +11 degrees C.

Figure 4. The estimated temperature increase for the next 100 years.

Örjan Hallberg

PS. Do you wonder about some data you have? Try to predict the future by sending me the data, simply by klicking this link: RelView DS.