A Poisson model of incidents of international terrorism in the United States

Abstract

Various haphazard, and often uncoordinated, efforts have been devoted to discouraging and combatting terrorism. Unfortunately, there has been a noticeable lack of quantitative studies of the problem of terrorism. Nevertheless, it can be expected that the problem of international terrorism will eventually be a focus for operations researchers. A factor fundamental to any OR study is an understanding of the underlying generating process for incidents of terrorism. Based on incidents of terrorism from 1968 to 1974, this paper notes that the Poisson is a good model for the occurrence of incidents of international terrorism in the United States. Results of both chi‐square and Kolmogorov‐Smirnov tests are presented. Finally, an unusual result, inconsistent with popular beliefs, is noted.     

Approaches to the Politics of Systemic Economic Reform in the Soviet Union

Political support for economic reform in the USSR is evaluated at five different levels of Soviet society, or more properly, of the political-administrative hierarchy: the top leader (Gorbachev himself), the collective leadership (Politburo), the bureaucracy, knowledge specialists (intelligentsia), and the population at large. Attitudes and motivations within each group are examined in order to demonstrate how interest group relations in the Soviet Union have made and will continue to make basic economic change a protracted, complex, and unpredictable process. journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: 052, 113.     

Is the internet an instrument of global democratization?

This article explores the hypothesis that people in less democratic nations will use the Internet newsgroups devoted to those countries as a relatively ‘safe’ form of political discussion and even protest. Also, it is expected that nationals of those countries living overseas will use these newsgroups to more openly discuss politics in those nations than they could otherwise do so. Before turning to a content analysis of the messages posted in non‐United States Usenet groups, the number of these groups and the levels of political discussion in them are quantified. The article quantifies the international usage of the Usenet as a first attempt to find some patterns in this usage that may be politically motivated. After all, many pundits imagine that the Internet will become the vaunted ‘global village’ and source of ‘grass‐roots democracy’, and not merely in the United States. An examination of the content of about 2500 messages in 41 Usenet groups then follows, with a view to establishing the following: how many messages are explicitly political; how many are in opposition to the current government; how many are pro‐government; whether they primarily serve as alternative sources of news; whether they are attempts to recruit people in the subject country and around the world into some sort of political action; and whether richer nations are more likely to have higher levels of discussion in their newsgroups than poorer ones. The findings conclude that newsgroups devoted to countries with lower levels of democratization have a much higher percentage of anti‐government messages than the newsgroups about nations that are more democratic.