| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"maff" |
| Date: |
04 Aug 2005 04:01:27 AM |
| Object: |
Power law |
This means war
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1541615,00.html
The July 7 attacks in London were not an individual act of terrorism
but one episode in a worldwide conflict, say researchers at Oxford
University. Philip Ball reports
Thursday August 4, 2005
The Guardian
The third world war has already started. It is not George Bush's
rhetorical "war on terror", but terrorism itself. In other words,
terrorism is the new war. Journalistic cliche? Apparently not. A recent
analysis of the casualty statistics of global terrorism shows they
follow the pattern previously observed for conventional conflicts
ranging from small local skirmishes to the second world war.
In at least two continuing conflicts not generally regarded as
terrorist in nature - in Iraq and Colombia - the statistics are
converging on the form seen for global terrorism, perhaps indicating
that governments need to deal with wars differently. According to Neil
Johnson, a physicist at Oxford University and one of the team that
studied the figures, the findings raise the possibility that both
conflicts "are a part of one big ongoing global war - a mother of all
wars".
Life
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/
Power law
http://news.google.com/news?q=%22Power%20law%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&sa=N&tab=gn
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Power+law%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&tab=nw&ie=UTF-8&sa=N
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Power+law%22&btnG=Search+Directory&hl=en&cat=gwd%2FTop
http://groups-beta.google.com/groups?q=%22Power%20law%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&sa=N&scoring=d&tab=wg
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| User: "Bobby D. Bryant" |
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| Title: Re: Power law |
04 Aug 2005 05:06:21 AM |
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On Thu, 04 Aug 2005, "maff" <maff91@yahoo.com> wrote:
This means war
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1541615,00.html
The July 7 attacks in London were not an individual act of terrorism
but one episode in a worldwide conflict, say researchers at Oxford
University. Philip Ball reports
Thursday August 4, 2005
The Guardian
The third world war has already started. It is not George Bush's
rhetorical "war on terror", but terrorism itself. In other words,
terrorism is the new war. Journalistic cliche? Apparently not. A recent
analysis of the casualty statistics of global terrorism shows they
follow the pattern previously observed for conventional conflicts
ranging from small local skirmishes to the second world war.
In at least two continuing conflicts not generally regarded as
terrorist in nature - in Iraq and Colombia - the statistics are
converging on the form seen for global terrorism, perhaps indicating
that governments need to deal with wars differently. According to Neil
Johnson, a physicist at Oxford University and one of the team that
studied the figures, the findings raise the possibility that both
conflicts "are a part of one big ongoing global war - a mother of all
wars".
The news article doesn't make the reasoning sound very... uh, sound.
They seem to be comparing the statistics of individual *actions* in
Iraq to the statistics of individual *wars* in earlier studies.
IMO if they want to look at Iraq they should be comparing the
statistics of individual actions in that war to similar statistics for
other earlier insurgencies, or else look at the *overall* casualties
in Iraq (unfortunately, the number isn't in yet) and see whether it
lies on the curve for similar invasion-then-insurgency events in the
past.
And even then you might expect some changes in the slope over time,
due to changes in technology, e.g. if you compared George's Big
Adventure in Iraq to Napoleon's Big Adventure in Spain.
Similarly, if they want to compare the statistics of individual acts
of terrorism around the world, they should be comparing to historical
acts of terrorism. Compare events _within_ a terrorist campaign, or
compare aggregate statistics of entire campaigns, but don't draw
conclusions from mixing the twain.
And again you might expect some changes in the statistics due to
changes in technology, e.g. what Guy Fawkes could hope to do with
gunpowder vs. what Osama could hope to do with airliners and
skyscrapers, vs. what the near future will bring when terrorists of
some stripe eventually get their hands on effective chemical/
nuclear/biological weapons (as they surely will). [We've already seen
the beginnings of c/n/b use in terrorism, but fortunately so far only
on the "small action" end of the spectrum -- unsurprisingly, given the
power law hypothesis.]
At any rate, there has always been a difference between "hot" wars and
"asymmetric" warfare. In fact there's probably a continuum stretching
from "hot" through "asymmetric" and on to terrorist movements and
assassinations by disgruntled or insane individuals. Technologies
such as communications, transport, and compact explosives surely make
terrorism possible on scales that wouldn't have been practical 50,
100, or 1000 years ago, and the same technologies also allow for a
grander scale of the cultural conflicts that evoke terrorism, so some
changes in the statistics of terrorism should not IMO be at all
surprising. A more interesting question is whether there has been a
change in the frequency or other statistics for conventional warfare,
and if so whether that can be pinned on the introduction of WMD 60
years ago.
--
Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas
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| User: "Robert Grumbine" |
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| Title: Re: Power law |
04 Aug 2005 04:41:07 PM |
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In article <dcspar$rf4$1@geraldo.cc.utexas.edu>,
Bobby D. Bryant <bdbryant@mail.utexas.edu> wrote:
On Thu, 04 Aug 2005, "maff" <maff91@yahoo.com> wrote:
This means war
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1541615,00.html
The July 7 attacks in London were not an individual act of terrorism
but one episode in a worldwide conflict, say researchers at Oxford
University. Philip Ball reports
[snip the snippet of the original report from
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050711/full/050711-5.html ]
The news article doesn't make the reasoning sound very... uh, sound.
They seem to be comparing the statistics of individual *actions* in
Iraq to the statistics of individual *wars* in earlier studies.
They also botch Lewis F. Richardson and his work. As he's one of
my favorite people, and the botch addresses some of your concerns,
a bit of biography and history.
L. F. Richardson was a meteorologist in his first career. While
in that field, he invented numerical weather prediction and did
much very important work on turbulence. Both of those have connections
to World War I and the fact that he was a Quaker. First, being a
Quaker, he was a consciencious objector. UK did not appreciate such
much, so he was given duty as an ambulance driver, much more dangerous
to him than if he'd taken a weapon and never fired it. In between
runs, he carried out the first numerical weather prediction. See
_Weather Prediction by Numerical Means_, 1922 iirc. Second, WWI
used gas warfare. Pacts not to do so didn't come for many years.
Richardson did his work on meteorological turbulence (atmospheric
boundary layer problems) for years, up to the point where he learned
the military was using it to plan gas warfare attacks (ca 1926 iirc).
He then destroyed his notes, quit working on the subject, and entered
sociology.
In his second career, in sociology, he studied war itself, producing,
among other things, two books: _Arms and Arms Races_ (iirc, not one I've
read) in which he looked at mathematical representations of possible
interactions between entities (nations, blocs, ..) and what could be
done to ensure that the interaction terms were such as to avoid exponential
growth of military spending (arms races). The article is simply wrong
in calling him a mathematician.
The second book is the important one here, _Statistics of Deadly
Quarrels_. In it, he examined events in which people died at the hands
of other people. As he noted himself, labels like 'war', 'civil war',
'insurrection', etc. (today he'd include 'terrorist act'), are very
political, arbitrary, and don't help the effort at doing science.
Bodies can be counted much more reliably than motives. At that,
he observed a gap in reportage. Events in which a few people were
killed (ordinary murders included) were pretty well reported. Evennts
in which many people were killed (larger wars) were also pretty well
reported. In a middle ground, ca. 316 iirc (he worked on a logarithmic
scale) reportage was very incomplete.
One of the major findings in his book was that there was no difference
between the recurrance time law for a few deaths and for major wars. Death
was death and fell on the same curve. This is quite contrary to the report
saying that Richardson's findings were for traditional warfare.
It is possible that warfare, or, rather, killing people, could and
did change nature in the 60 years since his work (which covered from
early 1800's to WWII, iirc). But, given his care in objectivity and
caution in conclusions he did draw, I'm confident that what he found
holds true through the span of his data set. (I have a copy of it.)
He did speculate that things might be different post WWII (original
version of the book was before the war, but the copy I borrowed was post-).
But he didn't yet have data to support that the statistics of deadly
quarrels had indeed changed during the period of record.
In terms of the data he examined, though, a point I came away with
was, there's no fundamental difference between you killing me, and
a bunch of 'them' killing a bunch of 'us'. Same curve, same human
nature, just less likely to escalate enough to being large bunches.
His hope, and reason for trying to hurry the book into print
before WWII broke out, was that if we knew about the backdrop,
we could choose to act against it.
[snip]
A more interesting question is whether there has been a
change in the frequency or other statistics for conventional warfare,
and if so whether that can be pinned on the introduction of WMD 60
years ago.
Skip 'conventional warfare' label, for above reasons. But, yes,
it would be interesting to see whether there has been a change
in the statistics of deadly quarrels. I suspect that it will also
be important to split the post WWII period in to 1945-1990,
1991-present. Remember, incidentally, that as deadly quarrels,
genocides count. They might not be observed as 'wars'. But
people died, sometimes in droves.
Some of the regularities Richardson found:
The more borders a counntry has, the more often it is involved in a
deadly quarrel.
Deadly quarrels are more probable between entities of the same religion
(even after controlling for above and number of shared religion borders).
Deadly quarrels are more probable between Christians than Moslems,
and between same of either than between Christian and Moslem.
After controlling for all the above, the most 'warlike' state was
not Prussia/Germany, but the UK.
--
Robert Grumbine http://www.radix.net/~bobg/ Science faqs and amateur activities notes and links.
Sagredo (Galileo Galilei) "You present these recondite matters with too much
evidence and ease; this great facility makes them less appreciated than they
would be had they been presented in a more abstruse manner." Two New Sciences
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