Related papers: On the Frequency of Severe Terrorist Events
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…
We identify robust statistical patterns in the frequency and severity of violent attacks by terrorist organizations as they grow and age. Using group-level static and dynamic analyses of terrorist events worldwide from 1968-2008 and a…
This paper introduces new methods for studying the prevalence of terrorism around the world and over time. Our analysis treats spatial prevalence of terrorism, the changing profile of groups carrying out the acts of terrorism, and trends in…
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…
I present a unified discussion of several recently published results concerning the escalation, timing and severity of violent events in human conflicts and global terrorism, and set them in the wider context of real-world and cyber-based…
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…
The underlying reasons behind modern terrorism are seemingly complex and intangible. Despite diverse causal mechanisms, research has shown that there exists general statistical patterns at the global scale that can shed light on human…
To this day, terrorism persists as a worldwide threat, as exemplified by the ongoing lethal attacks perpetrated by ISIS in Iraq, Syria, Al Qaeda in Yemen, and Boko Haram in Nigeria. In response, states deploy various counterterrorism…
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…
A model for terrorism is presented using the theory of percolation. Terrorism power is related to the spontaneous formation of random backbones of people who are sympathetic to terrorism but without being directly involved in it. They just…
Lewis Fry Richardson argued that the frequency and severity of deadly conflicts of all kinds, from homicides to interstate wars and everything in between, followed universal statistical patterns: their frequency followed a simple Poisson…
The frequency and magnitude of weather extreme events have increased significantly during the past few years in response to anthropogenic climate change. However, global statistical characteristics and underlying physical mechanisms are…
A review of the statistical properties of earthquakes is provided, centered mainly in the work of the author (apologies for that). We explain the scaling law for the recurrence-time distributions, its universal character for stationary…
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…
Extreme events with potential deadly outcomes, such as those organized by terror groups, are highly unpredictable in nature and an imminent threat to society. In particular, quantifying the likelihood of a terror attack occurring in an…
The September 11 attack on the US has revealed an unprecedented terrorism worldwide range of destruction. Recently, it has been related to the percolation of worldwide spread passive supporters. This scheme puts the suppression of the…
Capturing dynamics of operational similarity among terrorist groups is critical to provide actionable insights for counter-terrorism and intelligence monitoring. Yet, in spite of its theoretical and practical relevance, research addressing…
We study earthquake interval time statistics, paying special attention to inter-occurrence times in the two-dimensional (2D) stick-slip (block-slider) model. Inter-occurrence times are the time interval between successive earthquakes on all…
There is significant interest in being able to predict where crimes will happen, for example to aid in the efficient tasking of police and other protective measures. We aim to model both the temporal and spatial dependencies often exhibited…
Scaling analysis reveals striking regularities in earthquake occurrence. The time between any one earthquake and that following it is random, but it is described by the same universal-probability distribution for any spatial region and…