siliconwafer writes "The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is looking to acquire a vehicle license plate tracking system, to be used at the national level. According to the solicitation obtained by the Washington Post, commercial readers, supplied by a private company, would scan the plate of vehicles and store them in a "National License Plate Recognition" (NLPR) database. This is already being done at the state level, and privacy advocates are up in arms, with EFF and ACLU suing California over their automatic plate readers. Now that this has potential to become a broad and national program."
[ED Note: "Shortly after the Washington Post broke the story on the national plate reading system, it appears the DHS has shelved their plans for the tracking system, by order of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, at least in the interim."]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Sunday February 23 2014, @12:30PM
As the Snowden revelations keep coming and the anger boils up and up I have had Asimov's psychohistory much on my mind. His mathematical sociologists in the Foundation series were able to predict human events on the large scale. Part of me wonders if somewhere in the machinery of government or the masters-of-the-universe there are psychohistorians who calculate they can keep pushing their luck because they do keep pushing their luck. The Arab Spring and the events coming out of the Ukraine in the last 24 hours would rather give me pause were I in their shoes. And I wonder what it would take for the same threshold moment to occur in the United States where the illusion of stability pops and the status quo quickly unravels. Perhaps the collapse of the Student Loan system, with its trillion dollar debt load? Magnitude of events is a factor, but so too does velocity of their occurrence seem to matter. Has anyone tried to model this mathematically?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RedGreen on Sunday February 23 2014, @01:09PM
"Has anyone tried to model this mathematically?"
I have, people + no money + no hope = shit hits the fan.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Sunday February 23 2014, @03:18PM
There have been models that show when food prices rise beyond a certain point, riots occur. I'm sure there are other specific areas of study, but I doubt they've got together. I have a feeling if all of these studies were brought together, people would realize we're a lot closer to major upheaval than most think.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by demonlapin on Sunday February 23 2014, @05:09PM
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Sunday February 23 2014, @06:24PM
The US isn't the only country in the world, and I don't think uprisings will start there first (well, they obviously haven't).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kebes on Sunday February 23 2014, @03:45PM
But on the other hand, it's worth remembering that many complex real-world systems are inherently chaotic. So one can compare social systems (stock markets, the will of the people) to weather and climate. Very large-scale trends can probably be predicted (market will go up, there will be a revolution at some point), but making more local predictions is very, very difficult. And making predictions about common occurrences (how many people will watch the Olympics) is easy compared to making predictions about outlier evens (like revolutions).
If you look at the state-of-the-art in neuroscience, psychology, sociology, and economics, it's clear that we're a long way from being able to make robust predictions about unpredictable and game-changing events.
So, you're right: it's likely that government analysts will not be able to predict threshold moments. Another one may well be upon us.
(Score: 1) by weilawei on Sunday February 23 2014, @07:31PM
The point of pyschohistory in Asimov's novels was that it WASN'T intended to predict the individual human. It was meant to apply only on a mass scale. In fact, since I have copies of them handy:
Emphasis mine.
Now, while the beginning of the 1st novel suggests that Seldon developed psychohistory sufficiently well to predict the actions of individuals, the rest of the novels rely on the Foundation itself remaining largely ignorant, and later novels introduce the idea of psychic manipulation by outside forces, and various other twists that place less and less emphasis on psychohistory. The initial definition of psychohistory remains the most relevant to the span of novels in general.
From the second book:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2014, @12:14AM
Posting AC because I haven't yet thought of a name.