Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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
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...
BS on you. The mathematicians gave a statistical analysis for a specific purpose. The brokerage managers miss-used it, and were told by their own people that they were applying it to something they should not. They went ahead and crashed the whole thing anyways. No fault to the mathematicians. Just the fault of a bunch of managers and bean counters, probably at best with a MA in business.
Losers.
Oh, wait, many of them got big bonuses and promotions. Some of them work for Obama. I guess they aren't losers, after all.
wake up and hold your nose
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.
you can have an arbitrarily high level of control over your vehicle safety and over how severe crash would be
Bullshit.
I had an accident a few years ago. I was stopped at a red light and the one-ton pickup truck coming down the road behind me at 60 mph somehow didn't see either me or the light and slammed into me. It was miraculous that I survived and didn't have any crippling injuries. What, exactly, could I have done to "have an arbitrarily high level of control" over my safety in that situation, other than stay off the road?
Another example: My aunt and uncle were in a quad-cab pickup truck with their friends, who drove through a country intersection in which the cross traffic had a stop sign. The driver of the semi truck coming down the road failed to notice the stop sign (or the large "STOP" painted on the road a couple hundred yards before the stop sign) and t-boned them at probably 65 mph. All four people in the pickup were killed. What, exactly, could they have done to "have an arbitrarily high level of control" over their safety in that situation, other than stay off the road?
The truth is that no matter how careful and skilled a driver you are, when you're on the road your life is in the hands of whatever other drivers happen to be nearby. Generally, they're at least careful enough and skilled enough not to hit you. But sometimes they're not, and there's nothing you can do about that.
And you're vastly, vastly more likely to be killed by one of those people than you are by a terrorist.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Some of them work for Obama. I guess they aren't losers, after all.
You know what I find most disgustingly ironic about all the rhetoric lately?
Too many people are forgetting that the real roots of the problems we have now don't stem from just this administration or this congress, but from decades worth of corruption and self-serving jackasses that WE - yes, WE - have elected into office.
As George Carlin said once: "Where are all the bright, honest people of conscience?"
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.