Soob

Politics, Foreign Policy, Current Events and Occasional Outbursts Lacking Couth

The Santa Fe Institute, who specialize in complex systems, has a new publication out entitled 'Conflict: What It Can Teach Us-- About Our Brains, The Internet, Ecosystems, and Financial Markets?' (warning: big pdf, found via 3quarks daily). It has a number of articles relating to datamining and terrorism, urban complex systems, and malware adaptation. Very interesting set of articles.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

I read through the article on prediction of terror events at the global scale based on statistical analysis. The base premise is flawed under the "garbage in, garbage out" line of reasoning. Having robust statistics and accurate statistics are *not* the same thing. The data they are attempting to work with just doesn't have the empirical validity that should be required for a predictive algorithm. Even the authors admit their curve breaks down regionally - which means they are unable to account for spikes or lulls that are outside the norm they've established by globally distributing the tallied events. I do hope they aren't using my tax money...