The Duck of Minerva

Drew Conway

Drew Conway, CEO and founder of Alluvium, is a leading expert in the application of computational methods to social and behavioral problems at large-scale. Drew has been writing and speaking about the role of data — and the discipline of data science — in industry, government, and academia for several years.

Drew has advised and consulted companies across many industries; ranging from fledgling start-ups to Fortune 100 companies, as well as academic institutions and government agencies at all levels. Drew started his career in counter-terrorism as a computational social scientist in the U.S. intelligence community.

Recent Posts

On The Ecology of Human Insurgency

by Drew Conway | 20 December, 2009 |

Charli highlighted the recently published work of Sean Gourley in Nature on the patter of frequency and magnitude of attacks in insurgencies, so I wanted to cross-post my critique of this work to initiate a discussion here at Duck.The cover story of this month's Nature features the work of a team of researchers examining the mathematical properties of insurgency. One of the authors is Sean Gourley, a physicist by training and TED Fellow, and this work represents the culmination of research by Gourley and his co-authors—a body of work that I have been critical of in the past. The article is...

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The External Validity of Terrorism Studies on Israel/Palestine

by Drew Conway | 2 November, 2009 |

The growing desire to understand both the rationality of suicide terrorism, as well as test theoretical concepts empirically has generated several interesting political economic studies of terrorism. As such, a recent paper in the NBER caught my eye for several reasons. The article, entitled "The Economic Cost of Harboring Terrorism," adds to this body of work by focusing on an area that has yet to be explored. Very often the question of interest in these studies is, "how do terrorist attacks affect the target economy?" In this paper the authors reverse the question and ponder, "how do...

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The Logic of Violence in Counterinsurgency

by Drew Conway | 13 October, 2009 |

I have alluded to the work of Jason Lyall on the use of indiscriminate violence in counterinsurgency in the past. Briefly, Lyall's paper (recently published in JCR) examines how the Russian army used targeted and non-targeted shelling in Chechnya through a pseudo-natural experiment. The paper is fascinating, however, I always had two major issues with it; first, Lyall claims randomization and thus indiscriminate violence through the "harass and interdiction" pattern of shelling used by Russians. With even my limited exposure to US Army protocol, it is difficult to claim that this pattern is...

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URGENT: Stop Coburn Amendment to End NSF Program for Political Science

by Drew Conway | 7 October, 2009 |

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has proposed an amendment to the Senate Commerce, Justice, Science appropriations bill, which will end the National Science Foundation's program for political science.I have set up an online petition to rally opposition to this amendment, and I ask any and all readers to sign it, and pass it on to anyone and everyone. I also encourage everyone to call their senators and ask them to stop amendment 2631 to H.R. 2847.https://www.petition2congress.com/2/2508/keep-nsf-political-science-program/UPDATE: The petition has generated over 2,000 letters to Congress in less than...

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Research and Data on September 11 Terrorist Attacks

by Drew Conway | 11 September, 2009 |

It is an appropriately gloomy day here in Manhattan, as the city and the country remembers the horror of September 11th, 2001 and attempts to continue to collectively heal. For me, part of that healing process has been trying to understand what happened, and more importantly, how to prevent it from ever happening again. Over the past eight years many others have been moved to investigate and analyze these events, which has lead to a plethora of research on 9/11—some good, some not so good.As someone who attempts to read everything that comes across my desk related to these attacks, I thought...

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How is the Afghanistan Election Model Different?

by Drew Conway | 20 August, 2009 |

Today much of the world will be focused on Afghanistan, as that country embarks on its second attempt at a democratic election. With a constant threat of violence from the Taliban, the level of participation has been limited. Also, early reports state that police have been cracking down on journalists so information coming out of Afghanistan has been limited. There are, however, several good sources still operations, and I have put together a short list of useful links for following the election below:Foreign Policy's new AfPak BlogNew York Times At War BlogThe Global PostFor those on...

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ABM in the Social Sciences

by Drew Conway | 11 August, 2009 |

While I am in the throes of designing and implementing an agent-based modeling approach to study how democracies react to extreme external shocks, I wanted to take a brief break from coding and writing to highlight two very interesting pieces in the current issue of Nature that address ABM directly. The first, "Economics: Meltdown modelling," discusses how advanced agent-based models might be able to help predict future economic crashes—complete with a vignette where a futuristic ABM prevents a collapse. The problem, as the article asserts, is that ABM is often rejected by mainstream...

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Interpreting Terrorists’ Strategies

by Drew Conway | 29 July, 2009 |

I have mentioned the outstanding blog Cheap Talk several times in my Twitter feed, but have yet to promote it in a blog post. If you are not familiar with the blog, the authors present excellent daily commentary on current events from a formal and strategic perspective—I highly reccommend it.Today, author Sandeep Baliga, Associate Professor of Managerial Economics at the Kellogg School of Management, offers examples of strategies to incite government repression from three terrorist organization: ETA (Spanish Basque separatist), ALN (leftist Brazilian rebels) and al-Qaeda. For example, here...

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The Mathematics of War, Revisited

by Drew Conway | 15 July, 2009 |

A few months back I wrote a post discussing Sean Gourley's TED talk on the Mathematics of War; specifically, noting that his finding (a power-law distribution of attack frequency and severity in Iraq) was—well—old news. This set off an excellent discussion on Sean's work, my comments, and more generally how the social and hard sciences can clash. More recently, Tom Ricks of The Best Defense blog revisited Sean's talk with his own skepticism, which induced a response from Sean, and further skepticism by Ricks. In defense of his work, Sean responded to Tom's post with the following:With this...

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Modeling Torture, and the Ethical Dilemma of the Results

by Drew Conway | 13 July, 2009 |

A few months ago fellow NYU inhabitant Joshua Tucker of The Monkey Cage asked what, if any, social science research had been done on the effectiveness of torture in obtaining valuable intelligence? Josh's primary question was an ethical one, that being if a researcher had a personal objection to the use of torture, but through an empirical analysis of data found that it in fact did extract valuable data, should the researcher attempt to get it published despite his or her personal objection? This touched off a very interesting discussion among Monkey readers, and I recommend it to all.Today,...

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