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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...
Interesting article. I however have a beef with the thought that "“This gives you hope that terrorism is understandable from a scientific perspective.” " Furthermore, I have a problem with his thought that patterns of probability can be seen to develop over time, while not explicitly stating _when_ an attack will happen. To me, that's akin to stating that the San Andreas fault-system will trigger with a mounting probability over the years. Of course it will - as tension builds at some point it's inevitable that the fault will release. When world governments have bad foreign policy (which most seem to have at least some time, if not most of the time), of course you're going to create disenfranchised members of the world community - and when you arm and train them like Al Quaeda & Taliban were when the west wanted them to fight the Soviets they will turn on you. It's not a matter of if, but when. Stating that over time the likelihood of an attack increases seems to not scientific, but rather obvious as somebody (or some group) is almost guaranteed to slip through the security net in place to detect/predict such actions. My $0.02
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.
Yes, because of course all terrorists are the same color and come from the same place, and only attack people that are actively engaging them militarily. There's nothing but ignorant generalizations in your post, and personally, I'd take masturbation over nose-picking any day.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
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.
This is just like all those crap magazines you can buy to show you how to make millions in the stock market. There is always someone willing to look at a graph of past occurrences, draw a line through it, and show you the formula for what happened.
The trick being, of course, that they are all 100% worthless for predicting future trends. The only thing you know in the stock market is this: If a stock is going up, it can continue to go up. Or it might stay the same or go down. The only thing this guy will learn from his analysis is that there might be another terrorist attack. Or there might not. And it might be more, equal, or less severe than previous attacks.
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.
If the parent was generalizing, her would have said something like Muslims are the terrorists.
Let's say this - if we stopped meddling in Middle Eastern affairs, we'd see a huge reduction in terrorism. Because, in the last 15 years most of the terrorist attacks have been made by Muslims (mostly Arab) pissed off at the US for supporting Israel, being in the Middle East and basically throwing our weight around like we own the Goddamn planet.
Yes, we'll still have to occasional Tim McVeigh or abortion clinic bombing, yeah, yeah, yeah - heard it all before.
Does the quoted author mean the 1998 Nairobi embassy bombing?
Or is he just so meta he doesn't even need to get the date right?
An old prof told me that everything is a straight line in the log-log paper. You can literally draw any conclusion you want once you choose the axes to be logarithmic.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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...
> Fear and surprise.
And ruthless efficiency.
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.
"'The power law form gives you a very simple extrapolation rule for statistically connecting the two,' he says" ..as long as all terrorists are perfectly spherical and act in a complete vacuum.
Terrorism is also threatening to blow people up just because you can. It's also threatening economic sanctions or embargoes if certain ultimatums are not satisfied. By this measure, the United States government is the largest and best funded terrorist organization in the world.
There are a variety ways we express it: an private diplomatic threat, a publicly implied threat, an threat of economic sanctions through the UN (while we ignore UN resolutions against us), military "exercises", CIA coups, and of course, the outright invasions and public threats of invasion.
America is like the local mafia that you have to do business with, or else you could end up like that guy down the street.
How about we just stop killing and otherwise pissing off brown-skinned people?
You don't understand what is actually happening. Read Bin Laden's Letter to America. You will see that the actual demand isn't to be "left alone". Bin Laden's first demand is:
Bin Laden demands that we convert to Islam. He follows that up with demands that we ditch the Constitution, implement Islamic Sharia law, and do away with the separation of church and state. Among other things we would have to start killing homosexuals and adulterers, end the charging of interest on bank loans, put an end to drug use, pornography, and alcohol use, amputating the hands of thieves, and many other things. Dressing "immodestly" could get you whipped, which probably means burkas for women. Men would have to grow their beards out, or face a whipping. Crucifixion may be a required punishment for some crimes. Afghanistan under the Taliban was almost ideal to them. If we do not agree to this we can expect that his minions will continue to try to kill us.
It is not especially significant that Bin Laden issued that demand to the United States, in time every country will have to deal with it. Subduing the United States is just one step along their path, and they understand that it could take 500 years. Many countries have been attacked. Stockholm had a suicide bomber this weekend. (Thankfully it appears that one of the Stockholm terrorist's bombs blew prematurely and he couldn't get about five more planted - otherwise it might have been another Madrid, London 7/7, Bali, or similar bombing.)
What Do the Terrorists Want? [A Caliphate]
Good background here.
Ignoring them won't make them go away. They have their own goals - nothing we do other than covert to Islam or fight them will dissuade them. Trying to buy them off or deal with them only delays the inevitable. We are in for a long struggle that will be far bloodier for us if we aren't clear about it. Al Qaeda has a f
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
But most people will kill innocent people just because a sociopath told them to do so, as Stanley Milgram demonstrated.
Also, an interesting part of the terrorism issue is that the UN was challenged to come up with a definition of terrorism that didn't also included the kind of stuff governments (including the US) do all the time. Their solution was to specifically include the rule that terrorism can only be done by "non-state actors".
I am officially gone from
You do realise that these are trivial observations and that power laws are everywhere, right? Some people are going as far as to claim that we should stop calling the normal curve by that name, because the power laws seem to be the norm in the universe. And no. Drawing up a nice distribution graph does not help in predicting anything. This work is just more of the same old publish-or-perish. By the way citations to journal articles obey a power law, as does the wealth of people, firms, and nations. The variance in the stock market prices? Power law. To go from the fucking shiny graph to the idea that I CAN PREDICT THE FUTURE!!! is nothing but modern astrology.
That is one of the worst citation mangling cases I have seen in a while. Moderated troll for only lifting the parts that support your argument from the linked doc and then attempting to speak with authority. Feeble when the sources are one click away
You are a sad little troll. You aren't part of the Electronic Jihad by any chance? Or maybe simply practicing Taqiyya?
Please read the links. They support my statements, although I wish they didn't. I would prefer that we could live in peace.
Another useful story: What al-Qaida Really Wants.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I'm surprised that this got modded up to 4 - people have not taken the time to critically reflect on the letter that Bin Laden openly promulgated, and when they do, they tend to dismiss it as ravings of a madman. It is not the workings of a madman. It is the work of a very sane, highly intelligent man who happens to be a major figure in a world-wide death cult dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal slaves to a hateful, spite-filled deity known as Allah.
The problem comes about because we in the west would rather look at 'statistical analysis of terrorist attacks' rather than arguing down the obvious insanity of the ideology that drives terrorists.
> Actually, it's very simple: Blowing up innocent people, just because you can, is terrorism.
No--terrorism requires some component of "terror." Blowing up innocent people often qualifies, but not always. For example, blowing up innocent people may be genocide, with an intention of eliminating--rather than terrifying--a population. Or it may be an untempered reaction to being a twenty-year old who's just seen his friends killed--a twenty year old with automatic weapons, who lashes out too easily at a race he dehumanizes because the enemy largely consists of people of that race.
Also, by your definition, terrorism in asymmetric warfare would not count as terrorism--because there, people aren't blowing up innocent people just because they can. They're doing it because they can *And* because it gives them something--a way to fight back against an overwhelming force, or a way to maintain control over their own people, or satisfaction of a perverted concept of honor.
It's very simple and true that blowing up innocent people is wrong--we leave aside the moral dillemna involved in blowing up an innocent person to kill Hitler or Stalin. But that doesn't mean that all blowing up of innocent people is terrorism, nor that all terrorists blow up innocent people.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
How many terrorist attacks of any sort have taken place in Sweden or The Netherlands?
Sweden had its first suicide bombing this last weekend. The Netherlands have seen a number of killings, perhaps to some disturbing views: Dutch Muslim: 'Murder is normal'.
How many middle class persons of any country - people two or three times above that country's poverty line - have parked an explosives-laden truck next to a building and blown it up?
The middle class are strongly represented among terrorists and leaders of terrorist organizations. Here are just a few examples, there are many more:
“Doctor’s Plot” Trial Examines Unexpected Source for UK Terrorist Attacks
MOHAMMED ATTA - 9/11 Ring Leader
Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri (MD) - Al-Qaeda's theological leader
It might be easier if this was all about poverty and social safety nets, but that isn't the case. Increasing numbers of young Muslims born and raised in the West are taking up arms and bombs to kill in the name of what they call Jihad. They are being radicalized in Western Europe.
The poverty/terror myth
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
as per the politicians and polity, innumeracy is a huge problem, and in my oh-so humble opinion, will eventually lead to our extinction/dark age/zombie holocaust. I don't think it's something we've lost, but something we've never really had, statistically speaking (the audience of slashdot, to a high degree, is certainly not within the standard deviation of global numeracy)
Obligatory and relevant link: itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004992.html
You forgot the words 'moon worshippers'. It is vital that next to every mention of 'death cult', you have at least one 'moon worhippers'. Get with the program ! No dessert for you.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
"... of course we all know how > 99% of terror attacks could be prevented easily, however that would violate "freedom of 'religion'"
Violate freedom of religion or be decried as . . . OMG!! ... "Racial Profiling"!
Or maybe just enforcing the F&^%$#@ immigration laws that we already have, like arresting and deporting people who are here on expired Visas (e.g. several of the 9-11 hijackers).
Tracking down a lead about people taking flying lessons but opting out of the "how to land" course might be a good idea as well, but the Federales are too busy reading our library cards and groping our genitals to be bothered with such trivial nonsense.
So what happened with the mayor today? Suicide?
With the first link, the chain is forged.