EurekAlert May 19, 2021 A team of researchers in the US (George Washington University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, industry) compared the growth of the Boogaloos, a new and increasingly prominent U.S. extremist movement, to the growth of online support for ISIS, a militant, terrorist organization based in the Middle East to understand any system-level commonalities in the ways these movements emerge and grow. They showed that the early dynamics of these two online movements follow the same mathematical order despite their stark differences and the evolution of both movements, across scales, follows a single shockwave equation that accounts for heterogeneity […]
Category Archives: Terrorism
Predicting terror activity before it happens
Science Daily October 7, 2019 Researchers at Northwestern University developed an early-warning model that predicts the future lethality of a group using only a handful of events that occur soon after it emerges. Using the first 10 to 20 attacks or the first 10 to 20% of a group’s lifetime, the model provides about 60% of the explanatory power as would having a group’s complete lifetime data. They considered terror organizations like a business whose product is lethality and predict their success in producing that product based on the diversity of weapons, their sophistication and attack capabilities. Using publicly available […]