Sub-Saharan Africa
Every day, five kinds of pressure in this region are measured from a public archive of the world's news: geopolitical, energy, climate, economic and digital. Each is scored from 0 to 1 by how unusual it was compared with the rest of the year — so 0.5 is about a typical day and 0.9 is a day busier than nine out of ten.
No AI is involved on this page — it is plain arithmetic over that archive, which is what lets it serve as the answer key that the language models are marked against elsewhere on this site.
What 'unusual' means here, precisely
Each reading is a fuzzy membership in Charles Ragin's sense: a 0-to-1 degree of belonging to the category "a high-pressure day", not a probability and not a percentage. It is computed from three anchors — the 10th, 50th and 90th percentiles of the calibration window ( full_out, crossover, full_in).
Because the anchors are percentiles of this window, the scale is relative to the window and to nothing else. A 0.9 says the day sits in the top tenth of the last year for that vector. It does not say the day was dangerous, and it is not comparable to a 0.9 computed under a different anchor version.
Anchors are versioned and immutable: re-deriving different numbers under an existing label is rejected, so one label can never cover two calibrations. Choosing cut-points after seeing which answer they produce is the standard way to manufacture a finding, and freezing them is the defence.
Daily chaos series
The five readings averaged into one line, day by day. Higher means a day that was unusual across several kinds of pressure at once; the dashed line is the average for the whole period, so you can see which stretches ran above their own year.
Why the average is taken over the calibrated scores, not the raw ones
The five raw measurements are not in the same unit. Geopolitical is a severity sum built from conflict events; the other four are per-million article rates. Their mean would be a number in no unit at all, dominated by whichever happens to be numerically largest.
The memberships are all on [0.001, 0.999] by construction, so averaging them is coherent. Aggregated in SQL — the 1955 indicator rows behind this line never reach the page.
Dashed cyan line is the period mean. Every day in the range carries all 5 vectors.
Threat vectors · 2026-08-26
most recent date with indicatorsThe five readings behind that average, on the most recent day. Present simply means the score landed above 0.50 and absent means it did not — it is which side of the midpoint the day fell on, not an alarm. The score itself is the number worth reading.
at or above the busy-tenth mark — among the busiest days of the window
at or above the busy-tenth mark — among the busiest days of the window
at or below the quiet-tenth mark — among the calmest days of the window
Anchors · v3
percentile@2025-08-01..2026-07-31The measuring stick. For each vector these are the quiet-tenth, middle and busy-tenth raw values of the calibration window; every 0-to-1 score above is that day's raw value read against these three numbers. They are frozen under a version label, so the same score means the same thing every time you come back.
| Vector | full_out quiet tenth (p10) → scores 0 | crossover midpoint (p50) → scores 0.5 | full_in busy tenth (p90) → scores 1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| climate | 309,516.33 | 374,724.57 | 440,448.6 |
| digital | 178,249.46 | 210,765.07 | 271,358.3 |
| economic | 467,379.59 | 556,012.37 | 662,809.92 |
| energy | 88,833.31 | 132,703.13 | 237,984.78 |
| geopolitical | 56,827.9 | 196,579.9 | 729,241.78 |