Patrick Meier: Quantifying Information Flow During Emergencies

Advanced Cyber/IO
0Shares
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Quantifying Information Flow During Emergencies

I was particularly pleased to see this study appear in the top-tier journal, Nature. (Thanks to my colleague Sarah Vieweg for flagging). Earlier studies have shown that “human communications are both temporally & spatially localized following the onset of emergencies, indicating that social propagation is a primary means to propagate situational awareness.” In this new study, the authors analyze crisis events using country-wide mobile phone data. To this end, they also analyze the communication patterns of mobile phone users outside the affected area. So the question driving this study is this: how do the communication patterns of non-affected mobile phone users differ from those affected? Why ask this question? Understanding the communication patterns of mobile phone users outside the affected areas sheds light on how situational awareness spreads during disasters.

Read full post with graphics.

Phi Beta Iota: N-GRAMS, from 1985, is still the best thing around and applies to any communication medium in any language. It's not an expensive enough solution for people that lack integrity and have no interst at all in creating ethical evidence-based decision-support. For the same reason, we continue to lack the all-source analytic workstation with the eighteen functionalities defined in 1985.

See Also:

2014 Robert Steele – An Open Letter

2014 Intelligence Reform (Robert Steele)

1989 General Al Gray on Global Intelligence Challenges

Graphic: 1989 USMC JNIDS VI Workup

Reference 1989 Analyst 2000

Worth a Look: 1989 All-Source Fusion Analytic Workstation–The Four Requirements Documents

Financial Liberty at Risk-728x90




liberty-risk-dark