Hurricane!

Here's an odd take. In the same way that emergency officials try to predict natural human behavior in the event of an evacuation, Wal-Mart is trying to predict natural human behavior in the event of a hurricane.

A week ahead of the storm's landfall, Linda M. Dillman, Wal-Mart's chief information officer, pressed her staff to come up with forecasts based on what had happened when Hurricane Charley struck several weeks earlier. Backed by the trillions of bytes' worth of shopper history that is stored in Wal-Mart's computer network, she felt that the company could "start predicting what's going to happen, instead of waiting for it to happen," as she put it.

Bottled water, anyone?