Posted on 02/18/2018 6:05:25 AM PST by Theoria
It was December 2015, and Dr Weisi Guo was having dinner and listening to the grim news about the conflict in Syria.
Over the previous decade, Dr Guo had grown increasingly troubled by the amount of violence towards civilians. He had worked in UNHCR refugee camps in Algeria and seen the human cost at first hand.
His own expertise - as an academic specialising in communication networks and telecoms - seemed a world away. But as a physical scientist he wanted a model to help understand the nature of conflict, and so a highly innovative approach began to take shape.
That night he looked at a map of where the Islamic State group was operating and noticed an overlap with locations on the old Silk Road - the route that had taken traders from China through Asia and the Middle East to the Mediterranean thousands of years ago.
"What I slowly started to notice was that a lot of these areas prone to repeated violence were along ancient trade routes. And I thought, 'Is there a reason to this?'"
That night he wrote an algorithm on his laptop that connected the locations of cities and towns, and mapped them against data about conflict sourced from The Global Terrorism Database and The Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO).
"The results were amazing," he says. His first reaction was to assume that he had made a mistake, and so he tried again. The results were better. He asked a mathematician colleague to run an independent test, which generated the same answers.
Dr Guo's algorithm connected the world as a mesh of towns and cities, and looked at the connections between them. In Dr Guo's graph, certain towns show up as larger circles signifying dense connections.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Isn’t that racial profiling? This past Century, Europeans were VERRRY good at that.
Sounds like the Numbers tv show that was on a number of years ago on CBS.
So is it permissible to create barriers which might contribute to internal stability and peace which could be considered ‘self-defense’? ... or must a people open the doors in the name of cultural diversity, which may have a tendency to bring instability and even violence against the native people?
From the article:
“His hope is ambitious: that an evidence base can be created which will help sustainable development of infrastructure on a truly global basis, and in doing so reduce conflict significantly.”
That’s a huge leap.
He somehow failed to include the violence that left 60 million dead in his home country.
Does this ‘model’ predict what is going to happen as Hezbolla, al-Qods, SAA, and Russian S-400 forces and troops build up opposite the US forces on the other side of the Eurphrates River in the Deir al-Zour region? Last time, Feb 9th, they tried to assault US positions 200-300 Russian and assorted other troops died.
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