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A mathematical study of terrorist attacks need not leave us fearing the worst
I thought this was sufficiently interesting to post in its entirety. BTW, the headline doesn't make sense to me. Statistically speaking, it seems that things can only get worse. A study of the statistics of global terrorism concludes that attacks will become more severe in the future, and that an attack that kills as many people as the destruction of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 is likely within the next seven years.It all sounds very depressing and seems to imply, depending on your viewpoint, either that the 'war on terror' is essential or that it is futile. But can we really assert these things based on statistics alone? Computer scientists Aaron Clauset and Maxwell Young of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, have analysed the data on terrorist attacks compiled by the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism in Oklahoma City. They say the numbers follow a 'power-law' relationship. A graph of the number of attacks n plotted against their severity x (in terms of injuries and/or fatalities) reveals that n is roughly proportional to x -1.85. Put simply, this means that the frequency of attacks decreases as their size increases - which is what you'd expect - but also that this relationship holds for events ranging from those that injured or killed just a few people to those that, like the Nairobi car bomb in August 1998, produced over 5000 casualties. Posted by: phil_b 2005-02-20 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=56902 |