"It was senior year, and I had just taken a semester off to work for the Clinton campaign in Philadelphia. So I figured it'd be the easiest A ever if I signed up for an urban politics class.
The professor, a pearl-wearing blond fresh out of grad school, confessed she had never actually lived in a city before. But that didn't stop her from having all kinds of theories about how urban politics really worked. And that included a formula --- a mathematical formula -- that she said described how mayors and aldermen made their decisions. I think I laughed out loud when she first wrote it on the blackboard.
This Navy proposal (scroll down) is way more serious, of course. And they claim that it's already worked before. But I couldn't help thinking of that professor back at Georgetown, when I read about the Navy's idea to use a computer program to predict insurgent attacks in places like Iraq.
In current U.S. operations, terrorist and insurgent forces enjoy a significant advantage by being able to launch surprise attacks, whether by small arms, mortar, or improvised explosive devices (IEDs), against weakly defended or undefended targets and disappearing before U.S. forces can concentrate for a counterstrike. Better prediction of where and when such attacks are most likely to occur would therefore be of great benefit, allowing smart allocatio" [link]:
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