Phil Henshaw wrote: > OK, so let's take half the defense budget and spend it on Bucky's > 'livingry' rather than weaponry. How much you need? It certainly > couldn't be more of a waste than spending it threaten fanatic community > groups to obtain nuclear weapons... >
Half the U.S. defense budget is $209 billion and half of Homeland Security is $15 billion. Together $50 billion is being spent on domestic defense. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/interactives/budget06/budget06Agencies.html For starters pull an amount of 1% of the scale of the domestic defense budget from the larger defense budget. That would be $500 million dollars. Plenty to buy the best supercomputers and a team of a few dozen project managers, political scientists, intelligence experts, and modelers. Take say $100 million to reimburse the CIA and NSA for their time on data collection. > I'd still have some major doubts about the adequacy of present modeling > assumptions. No one seems to have recognized that growth systems are > locally invented compounding instabilities to themselves yet, or that > natural system networks are mostly linked opportunistically rather than > deterministically, or that the variables of our relationship statements > generally refer to things that keep changing definition with little > notice. I don't think it's an easy problem. > I agree there is a lot that can't be modeled effectively without heavy data collection and lots of focused attention. And some social phenomena are probably too fleeting to capture and the precedents too silent. But consider elections in this country. Usually it is pretty clear how things will go once some exit polls are taken. I'm thinking of how to study the demographics of change as a function of military and civil violence, occupation, propaganda and relief efforts. Situations where known perturbations have been made to the system, and then an effort is made to model how those perturbations can be used to predict rates and intensity of near and medium term disruptive events. Insurgency, say, must have some common properties and unfold in ways that are a function of the number of young people prepared to die, explosives, technology, and money available and so forth. I imagine such models not so much for precise prediction on the ground, but to be developed over a long periods to fit abstract scenarios. To help planners understand social risk as well as direct tactical risk. I know some programs like this are already underway, but it's unclear to me the degree of funding. Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
