Epidemic spread in adaptive networks with multitype agents

by Wang2011
J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 44 (2011) 035101 (9pp)

Adds rewiring probability to SIR formulation. rewiring allows a susceptible person to break off contact with an infected, thus reducing the transmission probability from I to S.

Rewiring slows disease transmission.

I don't understand if they have an actual network or only a mean-field approximation. I suspect it is only MF. But they claim that rewiring can create susceptible clusters with large variance in degree distribution, to explain the bistability of their results.

This is one possible journal for the zombie paper (except impact factor is 1.64)

investment timing

Mebane Faber wrote a paper “A Quantitative Approach to Tactical Asset Allocation.” which showed that using a 10 month moving average to time entry/exit positions resulted in highly signifcant improvement in returns over buy and hold, with few false signals or whiplash.

The method assumes bulls and bears are symmetrical, while tops tend to be long events and bottoms move faster towards a crash.

The decline of diffidence

Thoughts on Rick Salutin's editorial in the Toronto Star

I paraphrase him:
The last year has seen a collapse of respect for the conventional repositories of authority and respect. Arab Spring --> government. The West --> big business & finance.

And the big reason for the change:

But there were other factors in the decline of authority. I doubt it has ever shocked people to learn that their era’s main deciders were incompetent. But someone had to do it and you hoped for the best. What’s often been lacking is a sense that there are other plausible ways to reach decisions. That sense of an alternative way to run things is what the Internet may have implanted.

The power of authority diminishes when you can hear credible, contesting voices. Print tends to be monotonal and univocal, unlike the oral tradition that preceded it. But the Internet, though it often lacks actual speech, is oral in the sense of interactive, like a Socratic dialogue. In oral mode, less is often more because speech is so laden with gesture, tone etc.; even something as short as a tweet can suffice. That too diminishes normal authority, which likes to rumble on.

I put this in the context of the third industrial revolution. Communication in the first was print. In the second it was the telephone. In the third it is the internet.

Dynamic network of disease phenotype-- Hidalgo 2009

Another pub from one of the kings of networks.

Has a huge clinical database. Makes a network of most stated diseases in database, where a link indicates that the two diseases occur in the same patient at a higher than chance frequency.

He uses two measures of association which have opposite biases.
Relative Risk (RR)-- overestimates relationships involving rare diseases while discounting common ones
Phi-correlation (phi) accurate for diseases with the same frequency, discounts comorbidity between rare and common disease

The network's predicitive power is on the same order as family studies and/or some genetic studies.

Some discussion on inferring directionality

Statistical mechanics of money-- Dragulescu 2000

Meh.

If you make a large number of unrealistic assumptions, then you can treat money as a closed system in which the Boltzmann-Gibbs law applies. This law says that the probability distribution of X (originally energy, but here money) follows a power law:

C e^{- epsilon/T}

T is temperature, and C is a normalizing constant

In short, any conserved quantity in a large system will/should have an exponential distribution at equilibrium.

This paper would be interesting if:
money had an equilibrium
money was conserved

the LTV squad

The LTV squad explores NYC.

Reminds me of an idea I had to photograph "forbidden Seattle" back in my misspent youth. The linked blog tracks where that project would have lead.

UE urban exploration. google it

Police state

Just some clips from around the web

Police in ND using predator drone to aid arrest of local citizens accused of holding 6 cows which strayed into their land.
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/10/nation/la-na-drone-arrest-20111211

Obama signs indefinite detention of US citizens without trial into law, specifically the
National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/president-obama-signs-indefinite-detention-law
"The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield."