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Simulations of Society with Loren Cobb

This is a PAST event. See "Meeting Notes" section for audio, video, documents and other information.

Original event date/time: Friday August 22nd, 2008, 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

Loren Cobb will present his peculiar 15-year journey into sociological model-making for various military entities, including US Southern Command, the Swedish Ministry of Defence, the British Ministry of Defence, the United Nations, and a miscellany of Latin American countries (Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, ...).

Abstract:

Loren Cobb says:

What happens when an applied mathematician of pacifistic Quakerly tendencies tries to simulate the social-economic-political-health dynamics of a Third World country for the US military? Well, after the smoke clears and the echoes die away we begin to make out a considerably more humble mathematician, bloody yet still standing, clutching the tattered remains of some curious graphics in his smoke-stained hands.

This talk presents my peculiar 15-year journey into sociological model-making for various military entities, including US Southern Command, the Swedish Ministry of Defence, the British Ministry of Defence, the United Nations, and a miscellany of Latin American countries (Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, ...). Along the way I will demonstrate some of these models, accompanied with some painful admissions as to their dumb mistakes, blind spots, and miserable failures. All of these models were designed to support high-level civil-military-police exercises using both real-world and fictional scenarios, ranging from the jungles of Colombia to the mountains of Afghanistan, with a 5-15 year time horizon.

This is a past event.

Meeting Notes: