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."

Parent wan't a gerneralization.

[Anonymous Coward]

If the parent was generalizing, her would have said something like Muslims are the terrorists.

Let's say this - if we stopped meddling in Middle Eastern affairs, we'd see a huge reduction in terrorism. Because, in the last 15 years most of the terrorist attacks have been made by Muslims (mostly Arab) pissed off at the US for supporting Israel, being in the Middle East and basically throwing our weight around like we own the Goddamn planet.

Yes, we'll still have to occasional Tim McVeigh or abortion clinic bombing, yeah, yeah, yeah - heard it all before.

Re:Here is the stat that really matters

[schwnj]

I assume you're taking into account being hit by an SUV while driving a different car. There are plenty of incidents involving SUV drivers hitting and killing others when those injuries would have been far reduced if the person was driving a smaller car. Put another way, if everyone drove mid-size cars instead of SUVs, how many lives would be saved each year? (It's certainly a non-zero number; whether it's more than terror victims I don't know.) I tried to explain this recently to my elderly mother who needed a new car. I begged her to get a nice safe sedan, but she insisted on a giant Buick SUV thing. I didn't have the heart to tell her that I wasn't worried about her safety, I was worried about everyone else's.

Re:How about...

[cold fjord]

That is one of the worst citation mangling cases I have seen in a while. Moderated troll for only lifting the parts that support your argument from the linked doc and then attempting to speak with authority. Feeble when the sources are one click away

You are a sad little troll. You aren't part of the Electronic Jihad [jihadwatch.org] by any chance? Or maybe simply practicing Taqiyya [danielpipes.org]?

Please read the links. They support my statements, although I wish they didn't. I would prefer that we could live in peace.

Another useful story: What al-Qaida Really Wants [spiegel.de].

Re:How about...

[SteelAngel]

I'm surprised that this got modded up to 4 - people have not taken the time to critically reflect on the letter that Bin Laden openly promulgated, and when they do, they tend to dismiss it as ravings of a madman. It is not the workings of a madman. It is the work of a very sane, highly intelligent man who happens to be a major figure in a world-wide death cult dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal slaves to a hateful, spite-filled deity known as Allah.

The problem comes about because we in the west would rather look at 'statistical analysis of terrorist attacks' rather than arguing down the obvious insanity of the ideology that drives terrorists.