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Asimov's Psychohistory Becoming a Reality?
northernboy writes "Today's LA Times has an article describing how a Wikileaks data dump from Afghanistan plus some advanced algorithms are allowing accurate predictions about the behavior of large groups of people. From the article: 'The programmers used simple code to extract dates and locations from about 77,000 incident reports that detailed everything from simple stop-and-search operations to full-fledged battles. The resulting map revealed the outlines of the country's ongoing violence: hot spots near the Pakistani border but not near the Iranian border, and extensive bloodshed along the country's main highway. They did it all in just one night. Now one member of that group has teamed up with mathematicians and computer scientists and taken the project one major step further: They have used the WikiLeaks data to predict the future.' Considering they did not discriminate between types of skirmish, but only when and where there was violence, this seems like an amazing result. It looks like our robotic overlords will have even less trouble controlling us than I previously thought."
Researcher Sean Gourley discussed "the mathematics of war"on TED already. Not a new phenomenon, but an interesting extension.
Predicting what a group of people will do is fairly easy; Determining what a particular member of that group will do is very hard. So it can't predict who will attack; It might be able to tell you where though, and possibly when.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
We are protecting oil pipelines in Afghanistan. The towns we are deployed in coincidentally run along the pipeline route.
for those who are interested. I'm looking forward to reading it this weekend.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/07/11/1203177109
To be fair, the citizens of Foundation knew about psycho-history and that they were destined to succeed (Hari Seldon's messages emphasized this aspect in every crisis message). The thing that needed to be kept from them was how the science actually worked so updated predictions wouldn't modify the large plan. In the meantime, the second foundation would be secretly checking that there were no deviations.
As the data we can store about are lives, systems and connections grows in volume and richness, these kind of statistical analysis can prove quite useful.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
That's utter bull hockey. We have patrol bases in areas that have nothing but marijuana fields around them. We have Police Mentoring Teams (PMTs) working with Afghan National Police in towns that are on the major highway that runs in a kind of circle around the country. In all my time there, I never once even SAW an oil pipeline.
Your information is complete drivel.
My U.S. History professor, who wrote a dissertation about the civil war, agrees but in a slightly different way. He said it was an economic war. It just so happened that the economics of the South were based on slave labor. So while Congressmen in both chambers of Congress from both sides of the Mason-Dixon line were debating economic strife, the underlying issue was that the South made their money on the backs of slaves, while the North made their money on the backs of poor lower-class workers who were exploited just as bad but were free to walk away from their jobs.
Nothing was good about either side in those times, but the North was slightly less bad.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
we were at the same time giving lots of money to England in their fight against Germany
IIRC lending, not giving. They had to pay it back, and they eventually did.
Better review your history on lend-lease. Basically the US (and Canada) gave stuff to England for token payments (e.g. giving England 50 destroyer in "exchange" for lease payments for new US base locations to be located in former British colonies). Then after the war was over, the US depreciated the value of the lend-lease items by 90% (because now they were "used") and allowed England to "buy" them at the depreciated value with a 2% loan stretched out over 50 years.
Eventually, the residual of lend-lease was "paid" back on these terms on Dec 2006. Of course England could have paid it back earlier, but a 2% loan was a good deal and they of course paid it back in 50 year inflated money value...
If that kind of loan would have been made to members of congress, I think many people would have called it a gift... (e.g., lend them a $1M house, depreciate it 90% in 4 years, give them the opportunity to buy it for $100K with a 2% 50 year loan) What would you call it?
I'm not saying we shouldn't have done it, just calling a spade a spade. That whole lend-lease fiction was just to do an end-around the isolationist republican congress. It wasn't reality...
Restrepo dude. Afghanistan has a culture of repelling invaders. As in, it is in their shared cultural heritage and defines them as a people. It should be one of the last reformed places on earth. They just want to be left alone.
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You mean countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, staunch US allies who receive billions in funds?
Your naive trust in the congruence of progress and American involvement astounds me.
I've read that same argument from slaveowners in the Confederacy.
Alas, the evidence does not support your position.
The mistake you make is the "because replacing a slave is expensive" - they're not. They reproduce just like free men do. And while a child isn't good for as much labor as an adult, they were certainly put to work as children...
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Working in crappy factories where injuries were common, to include losing digits, limbs, etc., yeah. Where if you quit, the only other jobs were just as bad. Sure, slaves had to deal with stuff like being whipped, raped, etc. but the living conditions of a slave were comparable to the Northern working class, and the hope of changing one's situation was equally as abysmal. Meanwhile, the crime and other crap the working class in the North dealt with (including beatings, rape, etc) were almost as bad.
IIRC, Lincoln was questioned on the conditions between Northern factory workers and Southern slaves, his response was that none of the children of the factory workers were forced by law to be factory workers when they grew up.