Related papers: Jihad over Centuries
Recent terrorist attacks carried out on behalf of ISIS on American and European soil by lone wolf attackers or sleeper cells remind us of the importance of understanding the dynamics of radicalization mediated by social media communication…
In this paper we delve into the historical evolution of data as a fundamental element in communication and knowledge transmission. The paper traces the stages of knowledge dissemination from oral traditions to the digital era, highlighting…
We propose a new framework for education in conflict zones, considering the explosive growth of social media, web services, and mobile Internet over the past decade. Moreover, we focus on one conflict zone, Afghanistan, as a case study,…
This paper provides an assessment of experiences and understanding of digital technologies from within an African place. It provides philosophical reflections upon the introduction and existence - appropriation - of digital technologies.…
Some of the most pivotal moments in intellectual history occur when a new ideology sweeps through a society, supplanting an established system of beliefs in a rapid revolution of thought. Yet in many cases the new ideology is as extreme as…
More than a billion people around the world experience intermittence in their water supply, posing challenges for urban households in Global South cities. An intermittent water supply (IWS) system prompts water users to adapt to service…
Quantities with right-skewed distributions are ubiquitous in complex social systems, including political conflict, economics and social networks, and these systems sometimes produce extremely large events. For instance, the 9/11 terrorist…
We introduce a two-variable model to describe spatial polarization, radicalization, and conflict. Individuals in the model harbor a continuous belief variable as well as a discrete radicalization level expressing their tolerance to…
The twentieth century was a period of outstanding economic growth together with an unequal income distribution. This paper analyses the international distribution of growth rates and its dynamics during the twentieth century. We show that…
Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of natural disasters worldwide. Media coverage of these events may be vital to generate empathy and mobilize global populations to address the common threat posed by climate change.…
This paper presents a physical perspective on the human migration phenomenon claiming that human social behaviors are somehow but not completely inspired by nature. Human displacement or migration in the world is highly affected by…
We analyze conflict between a citizenry and an insurgent group over a fixed resource such as land. The citizenry has an elected leader who proposes a division such that, the lower the land ceded to the insurgents, the higher the cost of…
We propose a simple mathematical model to describe the evolution of violent crimes. For such purpose, we built a model based on ordinary differential equations that take into account the number of violent crimes and the number of legal and…
Multiple lines of evidence point to one or more moderately nearby supernovae, with the strongest signal ~2.6 Ma. We build on previous work to argue for the likelihood of cosmic ray ionization of the atmosphere and electron cascades leading…
We present and analyze a model of the frequency of severe terrorist attacks, which generalizes the recently proposed model of Johnson et al. This model, which is based on the notion of self-organized criticality and which describes how…
Fashion is intertwined with external cultural factors, but identifying these links remains a manual process limited to only the most salient phenomena. We propose a data-driven approach to identify specific cultural factors affecting the…
Flood risk changes in time and is influenced by both natural and socio-economic trends and interactions. In Europe, previous studies of historical flood losses corrected for demographic and economic growth ("normalized") have been limited…
The correlation between increased Sahel rainfall and reduced Saharan surface pressure is well established in observations and global climate models, and has been used to imply that increased Sahel rainfall is caused by a stronger shallow…
Our understanding of risk preferences can be sharpened by considering their evolutionary basis. The existing literature has focused on two sources of risk: idiosyncratic risk and aggregate risk. We introduce a new source of risk, heritable…
We examine statistical pictures of violent conflicts over the last 2000 years, finding techniques for dealing with incompleteness and unreliability of historical data. We introduce a novel approach to apply extreme value theory to…