Spreadsheets And Global Mayhem -- Somini Sengupta, New York Times
IN this age of fine-grained prediction, a variety of algorithms hover around us all the time to divine what we might buy, whom we might mate with, and whom we are likely to vote for at election time. Now social scientists are using some of these same tools to predict when we are likely to do horrible things to one another.
Australian researchers say they have developed a mathematical model to predict genocide. A Swiss sociologist has sifted through a century of news articles to predict when war will break out — both between and within countries. A Duke University lab builds software that it says can be used to forecast insurgencies. A team assembled by the Holocaust Museum is mining hate speech on Twitter as a way to anticipate outbreaks of political violence: It will be rolled out next year for the elections in Nigeria, which have frequently been marred by violence.
What makes these efforts so striking is that they rely on computing techniques — and sometimes huge amounts of computing power — to mash up all kinds of data, ranging from a country’s defense budget and infant mortality rate to the kinds of words used in news articles and Twitter posts.
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My Comment: Man is very predictable. One of my favorite expressions is to claim that we are all "creatures of habit" .... both individually and collectively. But a mathematical algorithm to predict major wars and genocide .... now that is a bit of a stretch .... and frightening if true.
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