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Statistical Analysis of Terrorism
Harperdog sends in a Miller-McCune story about Aaron Clauset, a researcher whose studies on the statistics and patterns that arise from large numbers of terrorist attacks could help governments better prepare for such conflicts and reduce uncertainty about their frequency and magnitude. Quoting:
"After mapping tens of thousands of global terrorism incidents, he and his collaborators have discovered that terrorism can be described by what mathematicians call a power law. ... Using this power law relationship — called 'scale invariance' — the risk of a large attack can be estimated by studying the frequency of small attacks. It’s a calculation that turns the usual thinking about terrorism on its head. 'The conventional viewpoint has been there is "little terrorism" and "big terrorism," and little terrorism doesn't tell you anything about big terrorism,' Clauset explains. 'The power law says that's not true.' Massive acts of violence, like 9/11 or the devastating 1995 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi, obey the same statistical rules as a small-scale IED attack that kills no one, Clauset's work suggests. 'The power law form gives you a very simple extrapolation rule for statistically connecting the two,' he says."
The observation of scale invariance in this kind of data tells you nothing about the short term relationship between low level and high level attacks. Physicists really shouldn't be doing statistics...
Statistical analysis shows that the amount of terrorist incidents is actually quite small, but the governments around the world like to exaggerate how many there actually are, to deprive decent hard working people of their freedom and democracy, and pee a lot of money up a wall in the process.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
These are the same type of guys that gave us statistically accurate risk modeling for the complex derivative securities and we know how well that turned out. One must be careful with mathematical models, especially when you're modeling sentiment.
Then they wouldn't be terrorist attacks. The element of surprise is the chief weapon.
It's the same concept behind password cracking; passwords are supposed to be difficult to predict, however certain passwords (e.g. 123456) are used very frequently and so if I want to crack your account I'll try that first. Just because people try to be unpredictable doesn't mean they act in a way that cannot be predicted.
The trick being, of course, that they are all 100% worthless for predicting future trends.
Actually, they're pretty good at predicting broad trends. It's just that they're not good at predicting specific outcomes. In the same way that understanding the odds of roulette doesn't let you predict what number will come up on a specific spin. The only way to really use the odds is to bet across the entire table to take advantage of the trend - that's what the house does.
Actually, it's very simple: Blowing up innocent people, just because you can, is terrorism.
Wether you do it from a Comanche helicopter or with pipe bombs doesn't make much difference.
Why make it more complicated than that?
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Americans seem to ignore the most important stat about terrorism that there is, you are almost infinitely more likely to be killed by an SUV than you are by a terrorist. And yet Americans are uber paranoid about terrorism and yet go apeshit for their shitty ass, ugly, poorly performing, insanely dangerous SUVs. Wake the fuck up people.
Monstar L
Well, for heading off an anticipated terrorist attack, this is a good result. Good = "attack didn't happen".
It's probably pretty similar to how the FBI views serial killers and rapists, except in this case they have more leeway with how to deal with suspected perps overseas. At some level, the flow chart kind of goes like "we killed someone(s), and the big boom didn't happen. We probably got the right perps." Or, "we did something, and the expected big boom didn't happen or we (think) we interrupted it", so that's good too.
While Donald Rumsfeld was being a bit trite and sarchastic (shock!) when he gave his infamous "what we don't know" speech, he probably got it right as far as this area goes.
The professionals involved realize that it's a probability game, though. The Politicians and polity expect exactitude, though, which in the US, really sucks these days. We (in the polity) don't seem to want to accept probabilities anymore. Our political mobthink currently is that "80% sure" isn't good enough. Nor is 90% or 95% or 99-44/100ths sure good enough, because...we really like to grasp on to the "but what if it was your kid that was the .00001%" these days, and "shit happens" has left our collective meme space, as has some level of reasonableness and perspective, not only as a whole, but individually.
We in the US (and western Europe?) are pretty self-deluded in that we think we respond rationally and deliberately, but really we just seem to react right now like a big pack of baboons when a lion or hyena has been spotted.
But I'm likely preaching to the choir anyways...
or rather, as soon as it starts to work, and stops terrorist attacks...
well then it stops working, doesn't it?
You reply suggests that you misunderstood.
The power law doesn't suggest where and when an attack happens, so it can't stop a single one from happening. Statistics doesn't predict that just like statistical climate laws won't predict whether it rains tomorrow or not.
The power law only says how many attacks will probably happen in the next period of time in a certain large area - within a certain degree of freedom.
And with that infinite wisdom, politicians are able to take appropriate measures. That's the whole point of it.
Today, politicians scream the loudest so that all voters can hear they take the strongest measures against terrorism of all. That may not be necessary when terrorism can be regarded with the same statistics as traffic deaths, plane crashes, diseases and other causes of death.
Maybe in the future politicians will say that it is indeed a little pointless to allocate 20% of the annual governmental budget to prevent 3000 terror-deaths, while the same money could save 100,000 in hospitals if it were to be spent on medicine rather than anti-terror measures. (But maybe that's just my wishful thinking).
Besides, I don't think you can't stop terrorism. You can only motivate people not to be a terrorist in the first place.
Once people cross a line, and decide they want to hurt our society, they will. Somehow.
You forgot about, or intentionally omitted, Northern Ireland, and having done so, you are able to come to the naive conclusion that it's as simple as getting out of Iraq/Afghanistan. Self-governance, peace accords, rafts of "freedom fighters" released from prison early, former leaders of a terrorist organisation allowed seats in government, and still there is conflict in Northern Ireland. The cat's out of the bag. If you stop meddling in Middle Eastern affairs, you won't see a "huge reduction" in terrorism. Not in our lifetimes, or your great-great-grandchildren's. Terrorists worldwide won't suddenly throw their arms down and embrace us in a grand gesture of peace, love and understanding, numbnuts.
There's no doubt that Bin Laden is a fervent Islamist fundamentalist. Without doubt, he will not be satisfied with anything less than the subjugation and conversion of the entire world to Islam. The real question, though, is how does he continue to attract so many followers and so much support? The vast majority of people, no matter their religion, are perfectly happy spending their life living as best they can (being the "sheeple" that some around here seem to detest so much) - they wouldn't have anything to do with such dangerous ideology if there wasn't something driving them to do it. The way that those who want peace can win is by leaving fanatics left all alone.
Muslims support Bin Laden because he strokes their heartstrings about a hallowed by-gone era when they thought they ruled the world; his reason they don't now is because they aren't Islamic enough. So they send him money and their sons who are dumb enough to think it is a winning proposition.
And they cannot simply be left alone, that's blaming the victim (us). The easy analogy is leaving the Nazies and Japan alone. When they were screwing over small peoples the West didn't care that much about, it was okay. The Nazies and Japan were not satisfied with that, it didn't satisfy their blood lust. Leaving the Musllims extremists alone will not satisfy their blood lust either. The only way they can show the rest of the Muslims that they are their political future is by causing and winning a war with the West. If China were the top dog, they'd be going after them. It isn't personal, war for them is merely a stepping stone to political power. Even Islam itself is irrelevant in this regard to them. It too is merely a (willing) stepping stone. And that is one reason never to trust Islam. Islam has the Breshnev Doctrine: What's mine is mine and what's yours is open to discussion.
Exactly. The problem isn't politicians expecting 100% safety. It's VOTERS expecting, and demanding 100% safety. For a politician, saying "we'll prevent 99% of attacks" is suicide.
The problem isn't politicians, or management, it's us.
(of course we all know how > 99% of terror attacks could be prevented easily, however that would violate "freedom of 'religion'" (of course, of the 2 ideologies currently using terrorism, one is barely a religion, just that everyone calls it such, and one isn't a religion at all))