933 research outputs found
From old wars to new wars and global terrorism
Even before 9/11 there were claims that the nature of war had changed
fundamentally. The 9/11 attacks created an urgent need to understand
contemporary wars and their relationship to older conventional and terrorist
wars, both of which exhibit remarkable regularities. The frequency-intensity
distribution of fatalities in "old wars", 1816-1980, is a power-law with
exponent 1.80. Global terrorist attacks, 1968-present, also follow a power-law
with exponent 1.71 for G7 countries and 2.5 for non-G7 countries. Here we
analyze two ongoing, high-profile wars on opposite sides of the globe -
Colombia and Iraq. Our analysis uses our own unique dataset for killings and
injuries in Colombia, plus publicly available data for civilians killed in
Iraq. We show strong evidence for power-law behavior within each war. Despite
substantial differences in contexts and data coverage, the power-law
coefficients for both wars are tending toward 2.5, which is a value
characteristic of non-G7 terrorism as opposed to old wars. We propose a
plausible yet analytically-solvable model of modern insurgent warfare, which
can explain these observations.Comment: For more information, please contact [email protected] or
[email protected]
From old wars to new wars and global terrorism
The 9/11 attacks created an urgent need to understand contemporary wars and their relationship to older conventional and terrorist wars, both of which exhibit remarkable regularities. The frequency-intensity distribution of fatalities in "old wars", 1816-1980, is a power-law with exponent 1.80. Global terrorist attacks, 1968-present, also follow a power-law with exponent 1.71 for G7 countries and 2.5 for non-G7 countries. Here we analyze two ongoing, high-profile wars on opposite sides of the globe - Colombia and Iraq. Our analysis uses our own unique dataset for killings and injuries in Colombia, plus publicly available data for civilians killed in Iraq. We show strong evidence for power-law behavior within each war. Despite substantial differences in contexts and data coverage, the power-law coefficients for both wars are tending toward 2.5, which is a value characteristic of non-G7 terrorism as opposed to old wars. We propose a plausible yet analytically-solvable model of modern insurgent warfare, which can explain these observations.
Impact assessment of irrigation management transfer in the Alto Rio Lerma Irrigation District, Mexico
Irrigation managementPrivatizationAssessmentEconomic aspectsLegal aspectsData collectionWater rightsWater allocationWater distributionGroundwaterFinancingMaintenanceOperationsAgricultural productionWater users' associationsFarmer participation
Performance of two transferred modules in the Lagunera Region: Water relations
Water policy / Performance / Privatization / Irrigation systems / Operations / Maintenance / Irrigation efficiency / Water users' associations / Water rights / Water allocation / Water supply / Water distribution
Complexity of the Online Distrust Ecosystem and its Evolution
Collective human distrust (and its associated mis-disinformation) is one of
the most complex phenomena of our time. e.g. distrust of medical expertise, or
climate change science, or democratic election outcomes, and even distrust of
fact-checked events in the current Israel-Hamas and Ukraine-Russia conflicts.
So what makes the online distrust ecosystem so resilient? How has it evolved
during and since the pandemic? And how well have Facebook mitigation policies
worked during this time period? We analyze a Facebook network of interconnected
in-built communities (Facebook pages) totaling roughly 100 million users who
pre-pandemic were just focused on distrust of vaccines. Mapping out this
dynamical network from 2019 to 2023, we show that it has quickly self-healed in
the wake of Facebook's mitigation campaigns which include shutdowns. This
confirms and extends our earlier finding that Facebook's ramp-ups during COVID
were ineffective (e.g. November 2020). Our findings show that future
interventions must be chosen to resonate across multiple topics and across
multiple geographical scales. Unlike many recent studies, our findings do not
rely on third-party black-box tools whose accuracy for rigorous scientific
research is unproven, hence raising doubts about such studies' conclusions, nor
is our network built using fleeting hyperlink mentions which have questionable
relevance
Rise of post-pandemic resilience across the distrust ecosystem
Why is distrust (e.g. of medical expertise) now flourishing online despite
the surge in mitigation schemes being implemented? We analyze the changing
discourse in the Facebook ecosystem of approximately 100 million users who
pre-pandemic were focused on (dis)trust of vaccines. We find that
post-pandemic, their discourse strongly entangles multiple non-vaccine topics
and geographic scales both within and across communities. This gives the
current distrust ecosystem a unique system-level resistance to mitigations that
target a specific topic and geographic scale -- which is the case of many
current schemes due to their funding focus, e.g. local health not national
elections. Backed up by detailed numerical simulations, our results reveal the
following counterintuitive solutions for implementing more effective mitigation
schemes at scale: shift to 'glocal' messaging by (1) blending particular sets
of distinct topics (e.g. combine messaging about specific diseases with climate
change) and (2) blending geographic scales
A computational science approach to understanding human conflict
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