1 April 2015

Modelling the mob: How computers can predict violence


The United States’ efforts to ‘win hearts and minds’ as it fought the Taliban in Afghanistan seem to have created a cruel and fatal paradox.

When political scientist Jason Lyall of Yale University in the United States surveyed the mood of villages strewn across the country’s southern provinces he found that those with the most pro-US feeling were the most likely to draw punishment attacks from the Taliban. Worse, the US was no more likely to find improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in those supportive villages. 

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