Scale Invariance in Global Terrorism

@misc{citeulike:229190, abstract = {Traditional analyses of international terrorism have not sought to explain the emergence of rare but extremely severe events. Using the tools of extremal statistics to analyze the set of terrorist attacks worldwide between 1968 and 2004, as compiled by the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT), we find that the relationship between the frequency and severity of terrorist attacks exhibits the ``scale-free'' property with an exponent of close to two. This property is robust, even when we restrict our analysis to events from a single type of weapon or events within major industrialized nations. We also find that the distribution of event sizes has changed very little over the past 37 years, suggesting that scale invariance is an inherent feature of global terrorism.}, archivePrefix = {arXiv}, author = {Clauset, Aaron and Young, Maxwell}, citeulike-article-id = {229190}, comment = {Fascinating. It presents an interesting property that terrorism is scale-invariant, which I only sort of believe because it still \_looks\_ log-normal! Still, a combination of methods to determine the distribution (different weapons) is right, and I like the explanation. I think I should re-analyze the paper for my thesis, focusing on a couple weaknesses, grabbing some of the data and re-analyzing it and pointing out how even a distribution like this doesn't rule out nuclear terrorism.}, eprint = {physics/0502014}, keywords = {network, terrorist, thesis}, month = {May}, posted-at = {2005-06-16 08:43:40}, priority = {4}, title = {Scale Invariance in Global Terrorism}, url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0502014}, year = {2005} }

TY - ELEC ID - citeulike:229190 L3 - citeulike-article-id:229190 N2 - Traditional analyses of international terrorism have not sought to explain the emergence of rare but extremely severe events. Using the tools of extremal statistics to analyze the set of terrorist attacks worldwide between 1968 and 2004, as compiled by the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT), we find that the relationship between the frequency and severity of terrorist attacks exhibits the ``scale-free'' property with an exponent of close to two. This property is robust, even when we restrict our analysis to events from a single type of weapon or events within major industrialized nations. We also find that the distribution of event sizes has changed very little over the past 37 years, suggesting that scale invariance is an inherent feature of global terrorism. TI - Scale Invariance in Global Terrorism KW - network KW - terrorist KW - thesis N1 - Fascinating. It presents an interesting property that terrorism is scale-invariant, which I only sort of believe because it still _looks_ log-normal! Still, a combination of methods to determine the distribution (different weapons) is right, and I like the explanation. I think I should re-analyze the paper for my thesis, focusing on a couple weaknesses, grabbing some of the data and re-analyzing it and pointing out how even a distribution like this doesn't rule out nuclear terrorism. AU - Clauset, Aaron AU - Young, Maxwell PY - 2005/05/01/ UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0502014 ER -