The Physics of Terror
On Miller-McCune:
“When you start averaging over the differences, you see there are patterns in the way terrorists’ campaigns progress and the frequency and severity of the attacks,” he says. “This gives you hope that terrorism is understandable from a scientific perspective.” The research is no mere academic exercise. Clauset hopes, for example, that his work will enable predictions of when terrorists might get their hands on a nuclear, biological or chemical weapon — and when they might use it.
It is a bird’s-eye view, a strategic vision — a bit blurry in its details — rather than a tactical one. As legions of counterinsurgency analysts and operatives are trying, 24-style, to avert the next strike by al-Qaeda or the Taliban, Clauset’s method is unlikely to predict exactly where or when an attack might occur. Instead, he deals in probabilities that unfold over months, years and decades — probability calculations that nevertheless could help government agencies make crucial decisions about how to allocate resources to prevent big attacks or deal with their fallout.
…
Plotting the frequency of the 13,000 lethal attacks against their severity yielded an unexpected pattern: The more frequent attacks resulted in relatively fewer deaths, while the infrequent big attacks killed the most people, Clauset found. Such scale-invariant patterns can be detected in many phenomena that follow power laws: the variety of global languages, urban populations, financial markets and earthquakes, for example.
What fascinating research! (Ah, I had the tab open long enough I forgot this was originally posted by Give Me Something to Read. I wish I could properly link my version as a reblog, since GMSR’s post is too short for my tastes.)
