Slashdot Mirror
Computer Models Find Patterns In Asymmetric Threats
The Narrative Fallacy brings us a story about a project by University of Alabama researchers to develop a database capable of anticipating targets for future guerrilla attacks. Quoting Space War:
"Adversaries the US currently faces in Iraq rely on surprise and apparent randomness to compensate for their lack of organization, technology, and firepower. 'One way to combat these attacks is to identify trends in the attackers' methods, then use those trends to predict their future actions,' said UA-Huntsville researcher Wes Colley. 'Some trends from these attacks show important day-to-day correlations. If we can draw inferences from those correlations, then we may be able to save lives by heightening awareness of possible events or changing the allocation of our security assets to provide more protection.' Researchers reviewed the behavior signatures of terrorists on 12,000 attacks between 2003 and mid-2007 to calculate relative probabilities of future attacks on various target types."
"The climatologists keep tweaking the models until they get what they expect and are then smug because the models "prove" their predictions."
That is a load of crap. If you don't know the difference between a priori and post hoc analysis, then please refrain from speaking as if you do. There's enough mis-information regarding climate change already without people like you contributing.
To digress, this attitude that climate scientists' results are due to such well understood logical fallacies is like saying that the theory of evolution is rubbish because the past has already happened. You don't believe that, do you? The alternative is accepting that the majority of climate scientists are intelligent people who know what they're doing - but that would be rather more inconvenient, wouldn't it?