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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."
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.
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
"'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.