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jingofever
Joined: 16 Oct 2005
Posts: 1837
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 Posted: Thu Feb 12, 2009 11:30 pm Post subject: Power laws behind terrorist attacks |
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arxivblog points to a paper that looks at the frequency of terrorist attacks against the number of people killed in terrorist attacks and finds a power law:
| Quote: | Plot the number of people killed in terrorists attacks around the world since 1968 against the frequency with which such attacks occur and you’ll get a power law distribution, that’s a fancy way of saying a straight line when both axis have logarithmic scales.
The question, of course, is why? Why not a normal distribution, in which there would be many orders of magnitude fewer extreme events?
Aaron Clauset and Frederik Wiegel have built a model that might explain why. The model makes five simple assumptions about the way terrorist groups grow and fall apart and how often they carry out major attacks. And here’s the strange thing: this model almost exactly reproduces the distribution of terrorists attacks we see in the real world.
These assumptions are things like: terrorist groups grow by accretion (absorbing other groups) and fall apart by disintegrating into individuals. They must also be able to recruit from a more or less unlimited supply of willing terrorists within the population. |
The reference section of the paper points to another paper that looks at the conflicts in Columbia and Iraq and finds power laws and suggests a power law holds in Afghanistan as well. What is interesting is that the paper constructs a simple model of a terrorist cell that is able to reproduce a very similar graph as is seen in the data.
It may be possible to use this for 'false flag detection' in a way similar to how Benford's Law is used for fraud detection though I suspect you would need a good sample size of false flag events. (It wouldn't be able to detect state financed or encouraged terror, only state implemented, like the Russian apartment bombings. (But then, proper tweaking of the model might differentiate between the two.) I assume the military planting bombs leaves a different fingerprint than legitimate terror cells, if the model is correct. It should at least have a different exponent.) |
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madeupname452
Joined: 13 Feb 2006
Posts: 131
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| Posted: Fri Feb 13, 2009 7:46 pm Post subject: thanks for the information |
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That is very interesting.If one is lucky one can learn something new almost every day.I read up on Benford's Law on wikipedia.  |
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jingofever
Joined: 16 Oct 2005
Posts: 1837
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smoking since 1879
Joined: 20 Apr 2009
Posts: 41
Location: CZ
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| Posted: Sat Dec 19, 2009 9:33 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | These assumptions are things like: terrorist groups grow by accretion (absorbing other groups) and fall apart by disintegrating into individuals. They must also be able to recruit from a more or less unlimited supply of willing terrorists within the population. |
These assumptions are things like: political* groups grow by accretion (absorbing other groups) and fall apart by disintegrating into individuals. They must also be able to recruit from a more or less unlimited supply of willing political wannabes within the population.
there, fixed it for ya 
* actually, you could substitute that for pretty much anything, socks in a dryer, for instance. |
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