Equation can spot a failing neighbourhood

If you worry that your neighbourhood is going downhill, there could be a way to spot the signs before it happens.

A way of predicting civil war

THE dictator General Pervez Musharraf leads a country on the brink. As the war in Afghanistan intensifies, he is torn between appeasing the US and pacifying Pakistani rioters baying for his resignation. The danger his country faces is obvious, but researchers in the US have devised a system they claim could predict much earlier any countries approaching civil war.

ET too bored by Earth transmissions to respond

Social physics – the application of mathematical techniques to societies – also provides good material potentially interesting to the alien. "We know that every human social network behaves as a gas, what we don't know is how universal that is beyond Earth."

Was Hari Seldon pulling our leg?

If we look at the stories themselves, we see them explained by the characters as consistent with psychohistory. But their explanations may not be correct. Consider the first Crisis: Hardin chases Anacreon off Terminus by appealing to Anacreon's three neighbors. This is, we're told, the only possible solution-- which it may well be. There is no discussion, however, of what might have gone wrong.