Talking Shade
If you are part of any friend group of large size, say over 20 to 25 people, this is a common occourance. This behavior can be characterized by the following behaviors. Treating each of the people in the friend group as nodes in a directed network graph, Person A lying, exaggerating events, or violating trust […]
epidemic control
Source: http://allafrica.com/stories/201511091951.html This article talks about an international response that was headed by the UK to end ebola in Sierra. This article states that the UK funded 6 treatment centers and also trained over 4,000 Sierra Leonean and international health care workers. The article goes on to list the various other things that the UK did to support […]
Tragedy of the Commons
The “tragedy of the commons” states that in some cases, when individuals act independently of each other and in their own self-interest, it can actually be detrimental overall to the group that the individuals are in by depleting the common resource. Common examples are rhinoceroses (because rhinos don’t belong to anyone, poachers are mindlessly murdering […]
The Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible model and its approximations
An undirected graph G(N,L) with N nodes and L links. The links are represented in a symmetric adjacency matrix A, in the matrix, if there is a link between nodes i and j, then aij =aji =1, if not, aij = 0. The state of a node i is specified by a Bernoulli random variable […]
Contagion in Financial Networks
The recent financial crisis was caused, in part, by the spread of “contagion” through a highly-connected network of financial institutions. Network models can be used to understand how loan defaults cascade through the balance sheets of banks that have contractual obligations to each other, and whether increasing the number of connections in the graph amplifies or dissipates the effects […]
Scandal in Daily Fantasy Sports
A few months ago, a scandal broke involving two daily fantasy football websites, DraftKings and FanDuel, and an employee who won $350,000. Daily or weekly fantasy sports leagues charge a small fee to enter and advertise large pools where players can compete against dozens of opponents and win up to millions of dollars. These websites […]
Single Transferable Vote (STV) in the Animal (and Human) Kingdom
In many countries, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, major elections (e.g. selecting electors for the Electoral College) use a simple first-past-the-post form of voting in which the winner is decided by whomever receives a plurality of votes. For example, in the United States Presidential Election, the candidate who receives a simple […]
How to Spoil the Elections
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/spoil-proofing-elections http://faculty.georgetown.edu/kingch/Electoral_Systems.htm http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/thepoliticalsystem/a/electcollege_2.htm Concerning the presidential elections, the United States’ voting system revolves around a method called plurality voting. This system dictates that voters place a vote for one candidate and the candidate collecting the most votes wins in the end. Compared to a majority vote, a candidate is not required to receive more […]
Modeling the spread of epidemics using a Poisson process
Recently the focus of lectures has covered modeling the spread of epidemics, and we introduced the basic SIR modeling. Here I found this interesting idea of modeling the epidemics using a Poisson process, a statistical approach. The major strength of the Poisson process is that its simple framework means it can be used to extract important […]
Ending the Ebola Epidemic
As we have studied recently, we have attempted to describe and model how diseases and epidemics spread about. Additionally, we have studied how and why they spread and how much longer the epidemic travels before there are no cases whatsoever. We described this using the reproductive number R, which is the probability the disease transmits, […]
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