Networks, spread of diseases and gossip
http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2015-07-21-how-do-networks-shape-spread-disease-and-gossip
The article “How do networks shape the spread of disease and gossip?” introduces a new approach to investigate the spread of contagious disease and gossip. The data set for the spread of disease is quite complicated since there is a lot of useful information that is mixed with gossip spreading over social media. Mathematicians developed ideas from topology and tried to study the shape of the data. They constructed a mathematical object called ” contagion map” to display all the related data they gathered. They suggest that by looking at the “holes” in the contagion map, researchers could distinguish between real holes, which are the actual data gathered from infection, and fake holes, which are noise arisen from gossip. The author used vivid language such as referring “holes” to “doughnuts” to make the complicated concept in the article understandable. Besides the language, the article also brings quite interesting ideas about how complicated networks could be investigated by using mathematical concepts such as topology. In addition, this article reveals the power of social media that it could sometimes add lots of misleading information in the data set and make the networks more complicated. Overall, it makes readers to consider the spread of disease from multiple angles.
The article is closely related to the lecture about epidemics. Firstly, its main topic is the spread of disease and the way to present it through network, which is what we discussed in the entire lecture. Secondly, researchers in the articles suggests that the speed of a node accepting a contagion is determined by its stubbornness. This idea enhanced what we learned in the lecture and suggests that the spread of contagion is not only depend on the number of contacts and the probability of transmission, but also on other more subtle factors. Therefore, the materials in the article elaborate on what we learned in the lecture. What’s more, the role gossip plays when constructing network for disease spreading corresponds to what professor mentioned in the lecture that the model of epidemics is quite complicated in real life.