All this informs the book, The Pirate Organization by Vergne and Rodolphe Durand, which seems to be largely based on this paper and this one by Vergne. The key points of the book are made here. It establishes what defines a pirate: Which is essentially those who counter authoritarian monopolies of unregulated commons. It remains fascinating how the word has remained a pejorative all this time. Most likely, a lot of your rights are owed to acts designated as piracy at some point in history.

By in large, humans are predictable creatures, we just don’t like to think of ourselves as such. A couple of years back, a study showed how analysis of mobile phone data showed the predictability of how people move. The visualisation showed a sort of ant trail, or bird migration kind of repetitive cycle. The Center for Complex Network Research analysis of the data found that human behavior is 93 percent predictable. What’s invisible to the ground-eye view is much more apparent when sitting from a high vantage point with the correct data displayed in the right way. This works for a lot of things. It evidently works for some types of crime.

People as a species seem overly proud of our “big brain” advantage over the rest of the animal kingdom, but that may be an illusion. Our huge brain spends a lot of its processes trying to find short cuts to doing real work, employing what Sorin Pintilie refers to as psychological tripwires to take on the heavy lifting: “When we’re thinking, what we’re trying to do is to look for the nearest, available pattern. Once we can find it, we can stop thinking and just follow along the pattern. This makes for a very efficient computing machine we call our brain.”

Human predictability upscales very nicely. Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler studied social networks (real world ones, not websites) to create a predictive model about epidemics. This seems to have morphed into research using Twitter data to predict the onset of a flu epidemic. Using what Science Daily describes as Syndromic surveillance of online microblogging data, researchers predicting flu outbreaks on a wider scale “obtained a 95 percent correlation with the national health statistics collected by the CDC. In addition, the results were comparable to figures collected by Google with its Flu Trends service, which tracks influenza rates by analyzing trends in query terms.” Speaking of Google’s Flu Trends: “We’ve found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity.” Being able to predict the liklihood of certain types of crimes in time and space works similarly.

In the video above, Emory University researcher Donal Bisanzio created a data visualization of the movement routines of people in Iquitos, Peru.Good data visualisation comes in by not only mapping location, but time. “Spatiotemporal” data processing leads to better predictions when it’s culled and presented in a meaningful way. It works in trending lots of things, from voting trends to advertising.

Crime records are often very comprehensive, so they certainly qualify. I can’t say what police may be using behind the scenes, but it seems demonstratively as reactive as the public view of UK and London crime stats that are published on various websites. Let’s take a look at them:

GLA strategic crime analysis: Numbers are up or down, but not much on where, when or why. It doesn’t get to a borough level, and has no predictive capacity. This tells you very little, really.

Lots of information, but it doesn’t drill down that far or show any dynamic trending.

A little bit better

London Met Crime Map: The image at left is about as far as you can drill into a trend and region and given period and compare. It’s more detailed, but it would be difficult to see what’s coming or to spot a real trend. You can see some area-by-area information, and the raw data has more of a chance to be used in a better way, but it’s not quite in focus. You wouldn’t divine from this where the robbers are going to hit next, really.

This is a better view. The numbers can be changed, somewhat, on a time scale, but it still lives in the past.

Police.uk maps: Now we’re getting somewhere with data visualisation. Good data visualisation tells a story.It can be artistic, it can also narrate some kinds of events  in the future tense with an increasing degree of reliability.

This is where we get into choppy waters. “We should always keep in mind that any new technology that helps the police to better protect citizens can also be used to better oppress them” writes Reason’s  Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey. This is demonstratively true, as history repeatedly shows. But it’s too late to pretend this one doesn’t exist. Police in our area, and throughout the city use electronic mapping, but seemingly little more than a Web 2.0 version of putting tacks in a wall map.

The data is now being collected, it’s just put to poor use. This model does away with socially corrosive and grossly inaccurate systems such as racial profiling, which London police have been accused of on more than one occasion. UCLA’s model is based on data interpretation of already established events, devoid of racial overtones: “Predictive policing is based on the idea that some crime is random—but a lot isn’t. For example, home burglaries are relatively predictable. When a house gets robbed, the likelihood of that house or houses near it getting robbed again spikes in the following days.” And unlike racial profiling, or so-called “random” stop-and-search, there’s evidence of effectiveness. I’ll take the data, thanks.

These skinny little lines are what London Police look at with Geotime software, and this is why there’s little ability to tackle the most common crimes that are on the rise. This isn’t predictive, it’s predatory.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the method that London Police are taking. To be clear: They’re doing it exactly wrong. Instead of using evidence-based predictive software, they’ve brought the simplistic profiling to computers. They use Geotime to track individual suspects movements. This doesn’t really tackle trends or reduce the types of crime that impact a sizable chunk of society, but is applying error-fraught human element of choosing who to track in a more invasive way that’s also subject to being abused by authorities. This leads to people involved in political dissent (not a crime) being monitored, and money being wasted that could be going to make communities actually more safe.

Using something like Geotime may seem logical to people, but it’s backwards: Resources are going into trying to predict the movement of individuals police know the identity of, but are not sure if they’ve done anything. This is instead of tracking crime trends that have been verified with the goal of predicting where they’ll happen next and then seeing who’s doing it. The first one may lead to random one-off successes and making a number of mistakes along the way. The second has evidence in reversing crime trends.

Returning to the premise that humans are essentially predicable creatures, there are elements missing from UK published crime maps: What were the locations of police, street by street, during these time periods? It would be interesting to show a visual movement of police over a given time period in the same map view showing crime movement. My guess is that in both cases a pattern of predictability would be apparent and overlap very little.

Tragedies eventually happen. Sometimes people cause them, and some of these people are religious. When this happens, people then look to the faith cited in order to try to figure out why. Here, a CNN blog tries to identify 4 factors that a religion is about to go postal. Here, a newspaper editorial tries to reconcile the Boston bombing with the Islam the writer knows. This is useless. They’re looking in the wrong place.

I don’t happen to think faith causes anything. As pervasive as religion is, we need to look at it as one ingredient that can make things happen. I offer one atheist’s argument that faith, or any other singular thing, isn’t the actual problem: It’s just one potential (but not required) ingredient in a stew that may consist of a hodge podge of different elements which can result in fantastically catastrophic results if combined just right. The ingredients themselves don’t actually  matter as much as the percentages do. How does a potentially horrible thing come about? Like most beliefs, good or bad or indifferent, really. They require the following:

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.

First: You need 10% of a population to have an unshakable belief that something is true, or at least have a good reason for thinking they do. Researchers at the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center looked at historical patterns and ran mathematical simulations to show that when a tenth of a given population is firmly convinced of a thing, whatever that thing is, it will quickly be adopted by the majority of the society. The belief doesn’t have to be true.

Second: How does a critical mass of believers build up? I think Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody was on to something that can be extrapolated here: In order to create a crowd sourced project, such as a free encyclopedia like Wikipedia, participants must sense the potential of personal gain out of joining a project. It isn’t important that the promise be delivered, but it has to convincing enough to propel people to action. I think this works in religions, nation building and political movements, the economy, and lots of other areas, such as homoeopathy, online role-playing games and post-graduate studies.

Third: This belief has to survive and be able to adapt over time. David Sloan Wilson created a brilliant framework for studying why some beliefs outlive others. Spoiler: The rationality of the belief itself is irrelevant. The only commonalities among the victors throughout the ages are:

• The system encourages a lot of breeding.
• It creates believers through conversion.
• It’s able to survive attacks by competitors that see it as a threat.

Fourth: Leverage. People aren’t naturally more prone to beat one another than shake hands. Both eventualities (and others) are possible given various conditions. Like our non-religious, apolitical cousins in the primate world it turns out that how we treat neighbours has little to do with indoctrination, but is subject to a variety of other conditions. Letting these conditions play out naturally doesn’t lead to predictable markets or voting trends. Steering crowds toward some sort of zealous idea is more cost effective. Some people understand this. That’s why:

• There’s a battle to control dominant media.
• Telecom companies try to use courts to stop changes that appeal to human nature as opposed to adapting to it.
• Banks and financial institutions work hard to enforce the concept that a debt crisis exists.
• Pro-surveillancesupporters outspend opponents.
• Weapons industries spend millions to compel people to believe keeping things in their community that do more harm than good is a good idea.

Lobbying happens because it works. If you don’t have the time to make your case to that 10 percent of the population and wait for the generational change required for a huge ideological tilt in your favour, you can buy your way to the front of the queue. Leverage manufactures situations, negative or positive, that wouldn’t naturally occur within a given time frame.

All those people cited in the first paragraph are trying to get leverage as they’re well under the 10% mark. They also share a common goal of seeking a national structure based around their specific brand of ideology.  Nationalism exaggerates everything and requires dogmatic allegiance to prosper. But who’s going to be effective at delivering a solid threat?

Someone out there who calls themselves the same thing you do is probably a twat. Consider that before making your next rash generalisation.

• That Buddhist monk Wirathu calls himself the ‘Burmese Bin Laden’ and his goal is to defend the “Buddhist Nation” from invasion by inciting followers to attack their Muslim neighbours. But he’s not really got the leverage on a grand scale, and is a mouthpiece for a globally discredited military junta on the way out. His rhetoric is possibly a threat on a local level for a short time, but it doesn’t upscale. His potential audience doesn’t stretch that far.
• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu keeps alive the memory of Rabbi Yaakov Yosef in spite of his racist incitement and support of a doctrine on How to Kill Goyim because it speaks to his far-right Eretz Israel constituency. You could be forgiven for not recognising the name of the late rabbi, but Netanyahu is someone with international pull, and a shortcut to influencing American policy. This is leverage. Threat.
• Anjem Choudary pantomimes a comedic act of nationalist Islam, shouting for Sharia on every street, and getting a stage on Fox News instead of a bit of pavement at Speaker’s Corner. It does speak to a group of believers: Some of them may actually want what he’s banging on about. Others want to believe he represents a serious threat, because then there’s a face to put to their irrational fears of something that isn’t going to happen. He’s not a threat.
• John Hagee is, like the aforementioned rabbi, also pushing for Israel’s ethnic/religious-based national-identity, but for different ends than a rabbi or Bibi might intend. Hagee represents a constituency of Americans and can also bend the ear of those in seats of power. He’s got the leverage to make things happen. Threat.
• Militant atheists have come under more recent attack as of late, but again, it’s not until you add nationalism that things get toxic. These aren’t those atheists, and they possess little influence outside a particular fan base. Not really threats.

But what is an actual global threat? The World Economic Forum’s “Global Risks 2013″ provides a basis for rating threats. Religious fanaticism and terrorism do make the list, but they appear pretty far down the scale from the top five most likely concerns:

• Income disparity
• Fiscal imbalance
• Increasing greenhouse gas emission
• Water supply crisis
• Mismanagement of an aging population

We can see that in spite of the Fox guest spot, the likes of fanatics like Anjem Choudary and the militants he allegedly inspires don’t amount to all that. The “militant” atheists, for all their huff, don’t really have pull, either. None of our guys really rank up there. So why do we hear so much guff about faith extremists, instead of actual issues facing the world? We have a war against terrorism, but not one against income disparity. Perhaps these people and these people are the bigger threats. What if we looked at a clearly quantifiable method of gauging extremism: monetary support for agendas that increase risks to significant numbers of people around the globe. The nightly news would look pretty different.

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed CISPA. It now goes to the Senate, and then on to President Obama, who has pledged to veto it. Already, the pro-surveillance lobby is using the Boston Marathon attack to justify CISPA to a fearful nation. Lobbyists representing companies supporting warrantless internet spy tapping have spent 140 times more than opponents could muster to lobby Congress critters.

Leading CISPA backer, Rep. Mike Rogers, has kept quiet about the fact that his wife’s company, which has an intelligence providing contract with the State Department, stands to gain huge from the act’s passing into law.

CISPA won’t protect us from cyber threats, but it will violate our 4th Amendment right to privacy.

• It lets the government spy on you without a warrant.
• It makes it so you can’t even find out about it after the fact.
• It makes it so companies can’t be sued when they do illegal things with your data.
• It allows corporations to cyber-attack each other and individuals outside of the law.
• It makes every privacy policy on the web a moot point, and violates the 4th amendment.

If you think President Obama will veto this, well, you might be right. On the other hand, remember what he said about indefinite detention and the Guantanamo Bay prison. AT&T, Boeing, Microsoft and Time Warner, Facebook, Google and other huge data-gathering behemoths are supporting CISPA, because it’s in their direct financial advantage to do so. It provides a stunning new market for their data and infrastructure.

In the battle over dystopian futures, George Orwell may soon have a few points up on Aldus Huxley.

Money talks. Help me tell it to shut the hell up and give Democracy a turn in Washington, DC, by signing the American Anti-Corruption Act. I have this page that you can sign, and if I get 50 people to do it then the website tells me that I got 50 people to do it. Then it will probably do something like tell me to get more. Yeah, not a huge prize, really. Not a coffee mug. But I support the idea behind this one enough to engage in a little point-n-click activsta time wasting. My problem with the page is that there isn’t enough swearing in it. It’s trying really hard to be positive, but it really needs to be angry. Pissed off. Fucking raging! So I’m going to use that page, but add some swearing.

I live in the UK, but I still vote in Washington State. My driver’s license is expired there, and I don’t have one here yet, so I’m riding my bike around London, and the news still reminds me to be pissed off at American politics. It’s exhausting, you know! To be peddling up the hill to my place, huffing and wheezing and thinking about corrupt, bought out political processes across the Atlantic. That’s time zones away! The Represent.Us has a plan to stop lobbyists from bribing politicians, end secret election money and put voters back in control of elections. The country is run by lbig oil, pharmaceuticals, military contractors, labor unions, trial lawyers, insurance companies, food corporations, the NRA, AIPAC.

Where do I want to be? New Zealand. While the UK parliament eulogizes a war criminal and the U.S. Congress caves into NRA money on gun legislation and IBM money to destroy privacy with CISPA, over in Middle Earth the parliament made same-sex marriage legal (without caveats like this place’s Church of England clause, or crap similar to U.S. “states rights” bigotry) and then everyone broke into song. You can’t lobby people in the middle of traditional Maori chorus. It’s just not possible. There should be a singing clause in the Represent.us act. That would be better. Every time the House passes something they must do a sea shanty. The Senate needs to do a full show tune.

Due to The Thing That Is Happening In London Today the buses are all over the place. They don’t have a clue what they’re doing. Exciting.

— TLF Travel Alerts (@TlfTravelAlerts) April 17, 2013

A Palestinian demonstrator hurls a stone at Israeli soldiers during clashes after the weekly Friday prayers in the village of Beit Omar village near the West Bank town of Hebron, 16 February 2007. (Flickr image by crazymaq)

Inciting who? The kids who throw stones? They only need to look out the window and see what the settlements, occupation patrols and their own diminishing prospects present. That’s incitement enough. It’s doubtful that they need a daily Israeli newspaper column to give them the extra verve to lob a stone at an invading force.  To me, this is more inciting, in that respect.

I hate it when words are rendered useless through poor usage. Let’s reclaim incitement.

You know who’s more inciting? Barbara Boxer. She’s signed her name to AIPAC ghost-written legislation that promotes racist treatment of American citizens, her constituents, who may travel to Israel. The U.S. makes reciprocal agreements with countries to waive visa requirements for entry. One of the requirements is that the other country must also allow entry of American citizens without a visa. Barbara is inciting racist action.

In order for the US to permit citizens of a foreign country to enter the US without a visa, that country must agree to certain conditions. Chief among them is reciprocity: that country must allow Americans to enter without a visa as well. Except this one would give Israel a pass, and the right to exclude selected Americans from this visa-free right of entrance. Enter the right for religious, racial and ethnic targeting. It’s incitement.

Incitement comes from the American registered charities that fund illegal settlements in the West Bank listed here. You can find out more about them here. Check them out some more here.  Don’t forget this.

A few rocks against the billions the U.S. throws back is nothing. Amira Hass has nothing on AIPAC when it comes to incitement.

By the by, AIPAC will be in Cincinnati next week for a fundraiser.

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I’m sort of enjoying auto-pilot fitness. The lady on the mp3 tells me when to walk and when to run. The mind goes blank and the half hour slips by. That, combined with this, gives more time to think about more weighty matters. That’s the yin to the yang of a technology reliant culture. The yang is that the batteries will one day run out.