From Good Magazine….

If you listen to Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and a lot of people don’t, he’ll claim that mathematics can tell you the future. In fact, the professor says that a computer model he built and has perfected over the last 25 years can predict the outcome of virtually any international conflict, provided the basic input is accurate. What’s more, his predictions are alarmingly specific. His fans include at least one current presidential hopeful, a gaggle of Fortune 500 companies, the CIA, and the Department of Defense. Naturally, there is also no shortage of people less fond of his work. “Some people think Bruce is the most brilliant foreign policy analyst there is,” says one colleague. “Others think he’s a quack.”

The man has a better track record then most quacks. From later on in the article….

He is wildly controversial, though. As one of the foremost scholars of game theory—or “rational choice,” as its political-science practitioners prefer to call it—Bueno de Mesquita is at the center of a raging hullabaloo that has taken over some of the most prestigious halls of learning in this country. Exclusive, highly complex mathematically, and messianic in its certainty of universal truths, rational-choice theory is not only changing the way political science is taught, but the way it’s defined.

To verify the accuracy of his model, the CIA set up a kind of forecasting face-off that pit predictions from his model against those of Langley’s more traditional in-house intelligence analysts and area specialists. “We tested Bueno de Mesquita’s model on scores of issues that were conducted in real time—that is, the forecasts were made before the events actually happened,” says Stanley Feder, a former high-level CIA analyst. “We found the model to be accurate 90 percent of the time,” he wrote. Another study evaluating Bueno de Mesquita’s real-time forecasts of 21 policy decisions in the European community concluded that “the probability that the predicted outcome was what indeed occurred was an astounding 97 percent.” What’s more, Bueno de Mesquita’s forecasts were much more detailed than those of the more traditional analysts. “The real issue is the specificity of the accuracy,” says Feder. “We found that DI (Directorate of National Intelligence) analyses, even when they were right, were vague compared to the model’s forecasts. To use an archery metaphor, if you hit the target, that’s great. But if you hit the bull’s eye—that’s amazing.”

The whole article is an interesting read. All I have to say on the issue is that quants make predictions about the stock market in a manner similar to Mr. de Mesquita. In the financial markets, this method works until it doesn’t. And when it stops working, the people who depend on the quants are up a river without a paddle.

I imagine that Mr. de Mesquita’s method will have another problem similar to the quants. What happens when everyone starts using his methods?

This piece from the Jerusalem Post brought back memories…

At sunset on October 30, 1917, on the dusty outskirts of present-day Beersheba, more than 500 cavaliers from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACS) charged in what trooper Eric Elliot called “the bravest, most awe-inspiring sight” he’d ever witnessed: the 4th Australian Light Horse regiment overtaking the Turkish trenches and seizing Beersheba.

The victory, later known as the Third Battle of Gaza, took place the “very day the British War Cabinet agreed to the Balfour Declaration,” Australian historian and author Kelvin Crombie told The Jerusalem Post in 2003.

Ninety years after the military triumph, 70 Aussies have returned to Israel to commemorate the Light Horsemen’s success. The highlight of their visit will be the “In the Steps of the Light Horse” three-day trek through the Negev on the same route the original regiment took from Shellal to Beersheba. The group will reenact the charge – one of the last successful mounted charges in Western warfare – on the same ground on Wednesday.

One of my Grandpa’s favorite movies was based on that charge. I watched the movie with him more then once. Rereading accounts of that battle I am struck by how closely my memories of the movie follow what really happened. I guess the story was gripping enough they did not feel the need to embellish it much.

Every now and again the media gets all hysterical about drug resistant bacteria. If you follow the news, you know that we are going through another bout of hysteria right now due to a Brooklyn kid getting killed by a drug resistant staph infection.

Hysteria is not called for. It too hard to sustain and this does not look like the end of the world as we know it yet. But the problem is getting worse. This quote is from the Houston Chronicles…

Based on data from 2005, the agency estimated that about 94,400 patients nationwide suffer an invasive MRSA infection each year. And in the vast majority of cases, the infections originated in health care settings.

“This is an alarming number of infections and a very significant number of deaths,” said Dr. Monina Klevens, a medical epidemiologist with the CDC. “This is really a call to action for health care facilities to do a better job at preventing MRSA.”

The once-rare, drug-resistant germ causes more than half of all skin infections treated in U.S. emergency rooms, the CDC reported last year. But until now, there was no solid data on the number of cases nationwide to serve as a benchmark.

The federal study tracked only the most serious type of MRSA, the potentially fatal infection that can cause pneumonia, bloodstream infections and surgical wound infections. Staph infections on skin, which look like pimples or boils, are more common and easier to treat. Both spread by person-to-person contact and are resistant to certain antibiotics.

The study referenced in the article also estimate that 18,700 had died from drug resistant infections. If this estimate is accurate, then more people are dying because of drug resistant bacteria than are dying because of aids. And most of the people who are dying because of the drug resistant bacteria are getting these infections simply by being hospitalized. But there is real danger that locker rooms, prisons, and public rest rooms could start spreading these infections.

The steady growth of drug resistant bacteria has got people thinking about what the future of infection fighting is going to look like. Derek Lowe suggests that it may look a lot like the fight against cancer now. As he puts it…

It struck me the other day that antiinfectives, as a drug research field, might be moving toward a similar spot to oncology. In both cases, you have a problem with rapidly multiplying cells, giving you a serious medical outcome – often in cancer, and increasingly with infections. The average tumor is a lot more worrisome than the average infection, of course, but that’s something we can only say with confidence in the industrialized world, and we’ve only been able to say it for the last sixty or seventy years. As cancer gradually becomes more manageable and infections gradually become less so, the two might eventually meet – or even switch places, which would be bad news indeed. (In some genetically bottlenecked species, in fact, the two problems can overlap, which is fortunately extremely unlikely in humans).

There are, of course, a lot of differences between the two fields, not least of which is that you’re fighting human cells in one case and prokaryotes (or worse, viruses) in the other. But many of those differences actually come out making infectious diseases look worse. The transmissibility of bacteria and viruses make them serious contenders for causing havoc, as they have innumerable times in human history, and they can grow more quickly in vivo than any cancer.