Thursday, January 27, 2011

New Air Force Sponsored Software Predicts Civil Unrest

That's what they claim:


Scientists working on a project sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory now have a forecasting model that they claim can accurately predict civil unrest against foreign governments.

A team composed of academics at Kansas State University and New York's Binghamton University developed the Predictive Societal Indicators of Radicalism Model of Domestic Political Violence Forecast. The KSU/Binghamton plans to integrate their forecasting model into applications developed by Milcord, a firm that develops web and mobile applications for various government agencies. According to Milcord's Alper Caglayan, the model "will be integrated into strategic planning, early crisis warning and contingency planning-type operations."

...
Toto, I have a feeling... aw, never mind.

In related news, similar software is being developed that predicts future commissions of crimes, so that perpetrators may be apprehended in advance. Reports say the prototype software has exceptional difficulty predicting really, criminally bad movies...

4 comments:

  1. With over 2 million in American prisons where do all the new ones go?

    ReplyDelete
  2. mandt, I can only offer the obvious answer: new prisons, probably privately owned and operated.

    ReplyDelete
  3. They have decided to either call it psychohistory or the Seldon algorithm.

    Actually, I think Glenn Beck has repurposed the concept of "psychohistory" with his "blackboard".

    You know, I think we once had people who did this. As I recall they were called "intelligence analysts", and they read the local media of countries and regions, as well as the reporting from people in the area.

    This is going to work about as well as computerized translation.

    The problem isn't knowing that there is going to be a revolution; it is knowing what you are going to do when it occurs.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Bryan, that software, like a child, should be seen and Seldon heard. You know and I know what ordinary computing equipment can and cannot be made to do; personally, I think it's absurd to assign a computer the task of intelligence analysis. But somebody managed to get a contract...

    ReplyDelete

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