Computer system predicts social unrest and civil war

from the Not-quite-Hari-Seldon dept.
A press release from the New Scientist magazine (27 October 2001) reports researchers at Harvard and Ohio State Universities have developed what they term a "conflict barometer" gives a week-by-week measure of the scale of civil unrest. The system is based on a computer program that analyses several thousand news stories from Reuters daily, which classifies events into about 200 categories. These are then used to calculate the proportions of events involving civil protests, repressive government actions and outbreaks of violence. These three factors are fed into an equation to give a nation's "conflict carrying capacity" or CCC. The researchers reported their results in The Journal of Conflict Resolution.