24. Rodrigue J-P., ‘Stages of a bubble’, extract from The Geography of Transport Systems (Routledge, New York, 2017). https://transportgeography.org/?page_id=9035.
25. Sornette D. et al., ‘Financial bubbles: mechanisms and diagnostics’, Review of Behavioral Economics, 2015.
26. Coffman K.G. et al., ‘The size and growth rate of the internet’, First Monday, October 1998.
27. Odlyzko A., ‘Internet traffic growth: Sources and implications’, 2000.
28. John Oliver on cryptocurrency: ‘You’re not investing, you’re gambling’, The Guardian, 12 March 2018.
29. Data from: https://www.coindesk.com/price/bitcoin. Price was $19,395 on 18 December 2017 and $3,220 on 16 December 2018.
30. Rodrigue J-P., ‘Stages of a bubble’, extract from The Geography of Transport Systems (Routledge, New York, 2017). https://transportgeography.org/?page_id=9035.
31. Kindleberger C.P. et al., Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 1978).
32. Odlyzko A., ‘Collective hallucinations and inefficient markets: The British Railway Mania of the 1840s’, 2010.
33. Sandbu M., ‘Ten years on: Anatomy of the global financial meltdown’, Financial Times, 9 August 2017.
34. Alessandri P. et al., ‘Banking on the State’, Bank of England Paper, November 2009.
35. Elliott L. and Treanor J., ‘The minutes that reveal how the Bank of England handled the financial crisis’, The Guardian, 7 January 2015.
36. Author interview with Nim Arinaminpathy, August 2017.
37. Brauer F., ‘Mathematical epidemiology: Past, present, and future’, Infectious Disease Modelling, 2017; Bartlett M.S., ‘Measles Periodicity and Community Size’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A, 1957.
38. Heesterbeek J.A., ‘A Brief History of R0 and a Recipe for its Calculation’, Acta Biotheoretica, 2002.
39. Smith D.L. et al., ‘Ross, Macdonald, and a Theory for the Dynamics and Control of Mosquito-Transmitted Pathogens’, PLOS Pathogens, 2012.
40. Nájera J.A. et al., ‘Some Lessons for the Future from the Global Malaria Eradication Programme (1955–1969)’, PLOS Medicine, 2011. A proposal to eradicate smallpox had also been made in 1953, but was met with limited enthusiasm.
41. Background on the reproduction number from: Heesterbeek J.A., ‘A Brief History of R0 and a Recipe for its Calculation’, Acta Biotheoretica, 2002.
42. Reproduction number estimates: Fraser C. et al., ‘Pandemic potential of a strain of influenza A (H1N1): early findings’, Science, 2009; WHO Ebola Response Team, ‘Ebola Virus Disease in West Africa – The First 9 Months of the Epidemic and Forward Projections’, NEJM, 2014; Riley S. et al., ‘Transmission dynamics of the etiological agent of SARS in Hong Kong’, Science, 2003; Gani R. and Leach S., ‘Transmission potential of smallpox in contemporary populations’, Nature, 2001; Anderson R.M. and May R.M., Infectious Diseases of Humans: Dynamics and Control (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992); Guerra F.M. et al., ‘The basic reproduction number (R0) of measles: a systematic review’, The Lancet, 2017.
43. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ‘Transmission of Measles’, 2017. https://www.cdc.gov/measles/transmission/html.
44. Fine P.E.M. and Clarkson J.A., ‘Measles in England and Wales – -I: An Analysis of Factors Underlying Seasonal Patterns’, International Journal of Epidemiology, 1982.
45. ‘How Princess Diana changed attitudes to aids’, BBC News Online, 5 April 2017.
46. May R.M. and Anderson R.M., ‘Transmission dynamics of hiv infection’, Nature, 1987.
47. Eakle R. et al., ‘Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) in an era of stalled hiv prevention: Can it change the game?’, Retrovirology, 2018.
48. Anderson R.M. and May R.M., Infectious Diseases of Humans: Dynamics and Control (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992).
49. Fenner F. et al., ‘Smallpox and its Eradication’, World Health Organization, 1988.
50. Wehrle P.F. et al., ‘An Airborne Outbreak of Smallpox in a German Hospital and its Significance with Respect to Other Recent Outbreaks in Europe’, Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 1970.
51. Woolhouse M.E.J. et al., ‘Heterogeneities in the transmission of infectious agents: Implications for the design of control programs’, PNAS, 1997. The idea built on an earlier observation by nineteenth-century economist Vilfredo Pareto, who’d spotted that 20 per cent of Italians owned 80 per cent of the land.
52. Lloyd-Smith J.O. et al., ‘Superspreading and the effect of individual variation on disease emergence’, Nature, 2005.
53. Worobey M. et al., ‘1970s and “Patient 0” hiv-1 genomes illuminate early hiv/aids history in North America’, Nature, 2016.
54. Cumming J.G., ‘An epidemic resulting from the contamination of ice cream by a typhoid carrier’, Journal of the American Medical Association, 1917.
55. Bollobas B., ‘To Prove and Conjecture: Paul Erdős and His Mathematics’, American Mathematical Monthly, 1998.
56. Potterat J.J., et al., ‘Sexual network structure as an indicator of epidemic phase’, Sexually Transmitted Infections, 2002.
57. Watts D.J. and Strogatz S.H., ‘Collective dynamics of “small-world” networks’, Nature, 1998.
58. Barabási A.L. and Albert R., ‘Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks’, Science, 1999. A similar idea had emerged in the 1970s, when physicist Derek de Solla Price analysed academic publications. He’d suggested preferential attachment could explain the extreme variation in the number of citations: a paper was more likely to be cited if it was already highly cited. Source: Price D.D.S., ‘A General Theory of Bibliometric and Other Cumulative Advantage Processes’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 1976.
59. Liljeros F. et al., ‘The web of human sexual contacts’, Nature, 2001; de Blasio B. et al., ‘Preferential attachment in sexual networks’, PNAS, 2007.
60. Yorke J.A. et al., ‘Dynamics and control of the transmission of gonorrhea’, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, 1978.
61. May R.M. and Anderson R.M., ‘The Transmission Dynamics of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (hiv)’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 1988.
62. Foy B.D. et al., ‘Probable Non–Vector-borne Transmission of Zika Virus, Colorado, USA’, Emerging Infectious Diseases, 2011.
63. Counotte M.J. et al., ‘Sexual transmission of Zika virus and other flaviviruses: A living systematic review’, PLOS Medicine, 2018; Folkers K.M., ‘Zika: The Millennials’ S.T.D.?’, New York Times, 20 August 2016.
64. Others independently reached the same conclusion. Sources: Yakob L. et al., ‘Low risk of a sexually-transmitted Zika virus outbreak’, The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 2016; Althaus C.L. and Low N., ‘How Relevant Is Sexual Transmission of Zika Virus?’ PLOS Medicine, 2016.
65. Background on early hiv/aids transmission from: Worobey et al. ‘1970s and “Patient 0” hiv-1 genomes illuminate early hiv/aids history in North America’, Nature, 2016.; McKay R.A., ‘“Patient Zero”: The Absence of a Patient’s View of the Early North American aids Epidemic’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2014.
66. This was before the CDC name changed to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1992.
67. McKay R.A. “Patient Zero”: The Absence of a Patient’s View of the Early North American aids Epidemic. Bull Hist Med, 2014.
68. Sapatkin D., ‘aids: The truth about Patient Zero’, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 6 May 2013.
69. WHO. Mali case, ‘Ebola imported from Guinea: Ebola situation assessment’, 10 November 2014.
70. Robert A. et al., ‘Determinants of transmission risk during the late stage of the West African Ebola epidemic’, American Journal of Epidemiology, 2019.
71. Nagel T., ‘Moral Luck’, 1979.
72. Potterat J.J. et al., ‘Gonorrhoea as a Social Disease’, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, 1985.
73. Potterat J.J., Seeking The Positives: A Life Spent on the Cutting Edge of Public H
ealth (Createspace, 2015).
74. Kilikpo Jarwolo J.L., ‘The Hurt – and Danger – of Ebola Stigma’, ActionAid, 2015.
75. Frith J., ‘Syphilis – Its Early History and Treatment until Penicillin and the Debate on its Origins’, Journal of Military and Veterans’ Health, 2012.
76. Badcock J., ‘Pepe’s story: How I survived Spanish flu’, BBC News Online, 21 May 2018.
77. Enserink M., ‘War Stories’, Science, 15 March 2013.
78. Lee J-W. and McKibbin W.J., ‘Estimating the global economic costs of SARS’, from Learning from SARS: Preparing for the Next Disease Outbreak: Workshop Summary (National Academies Press, 2004).
79. Haldane A., ‘Rethinking the Financial Network’, Bank of England, 28 April 2009.
80. Crampton T., ‘Battling the spread of SARS, Asian nations escalate travel restrictions’, New York Times, 12 April 2003. Although travel restrictions were imposed during the outbreak, such restrictions are likely to have had less effect on containment than measures such as case identification and contact tracing. Indeed, WHO did not recommend restrictions during this period: ‘World Health Organization. Summary of WHO measures related to international travel’, WHO, 24 June 2003.
81. Owens R.E. and Schreft S.L., ‘Identifying Credit Crunches’, Contemporary Economic Policy, 1995.
82. Background and quotes from author interview with Andy Haldane, July 2018.
83. Soramäki K. et al., ‘The topology of interbank payment flows’, Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Report, 2006.
84. Gupta S. et al., ‘Networks of sexual contacts: implications for the pattern of spread of hiv’, aids, 1989.
85. Haldane A. and May R.M., ‘The birds and the bees, and the big banks’, Financial Times, 20 February 2011.
86. Haldane A., ‘Rethinking the Financial Network’, Bank of England, 28 April 2009.
87. Buffett W., Letter to the Shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., 27 February 2009.
88. Keynes J.M., ‘The Consequences to the Banks of the Collapse of Money Values’, 1931 (from Essays in Persuasion).
89. Tavakoli J., Comments on SEC Proposed Rules and Oversight of NRSROs. Letter to Securities and Exchange Commission, 13 February 2007.
90. Arinaminpathy N. et al., ‘Size and complexity in model financial systems’, PNAS, 2012; Caccioli F. et al., ‘Stability analysis of financial contagion due to overlapping portfolios’, Journal of Banking & Finance, 2014; Bardoscia M. et al., ‘Pathways towards instability in financial networks’, Nature Communications, 2017.
91. Haldane A. and May R.M., ‘The birds and the bees, and the big banks’, Financial Times, 20 February 2011.
92. Authers J., ‘In a crisis, sometimes you don’t tell the whole story’, Financial Times, 8 September 2018.
93. Arinaminpathy N. et al., ‘Size and complexity in model financial systems’, PNAS, 2012.
94. Independent Commission on Banking. Final Report Recommendations, September 2011.
95. Withers I., ‘EU banks spared ringfencing rules imposed on British lenders’, The Telegraph, 24 October 2017.
96. Bank for International Settlements. Statistical release: ‘OTC derivatives statistics at end-June 2018’, 31 October 2018.
97. Author interview with Barbara Casu, September 2018.
98. Jenkins P., ‘How much of a systemic risk is clearing?’ Financial Times, 8 January 2018.
99. Battiston S. et al., ‘The price of complexity in financial networks’, PNAS, 2016.
3. The measure of friendship
1. Background from: Shifman M., ITEP Lectures in Particle Physics, arXiv, 1995.
2. Pais A. J., Robert Oppenheimer: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2007).
3. Goffman W. and Newill V.A., ‘Generalization of epidemic theory: An application to the transmission of ideas’, Nature, 1964. There are some limits to Goffman’s analogy, however. In particular, he claimed that the SIR model would be appropriate for the spread of rumours, but others have argued that simple tweaks to the model can produce very different results. For example, in a simple epidemic model, we usually assume people stop being infectious after a period of time, which is reasonable for many diseases. Daryl Daley and David Kendall, two Cambridge mathematicians, have proposed that in a rumour model, spreaders won’t necessarily recover naturally; they may only stop spreading the rumour when they meet someone else who’s heard the rumour. Source: Daley D.J. and Kendall D.G., ‘Epidemics and rumours’, Nature, 1964.
4. Landau genius scale. http://www.eoht.info/page/Landau+genius+scale.
5. Khalatnikov I.M and Sykes J.B. (eds.), Landau: The Physicist and the Man: Recollections of L.D. Landau (Pergamon, 2013).
6. Bettencourt L.M.A. et al., ‘The power of a good idea: Quantitative modeling of the spread of ideas from epidemiological models’, Physica A, 2006.
7. Azouly P. et al., ‘Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?’, National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, 2015.
8. Catmull E., ‘How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity’, Harvard Business Review, September 2008.
9. Grove J., ‘Francis Crick Institute: “gentle anarchy” will fire research’, THE, 2 September 2016.
10. Bernstein E.S. and Turban S., ‘The impact of the “open”workspace on human collaboration.’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2018.
11. Background and quotes from: ‘History of the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles’. Witness Seminar held by the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, London, on 14 December 2009.
12. Mercer C.H. et al., ‘Changes in sexual attitudes and lifestyles in Britain through the life course and over time: findings from the National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal)’, The Lancet, 2013.
13. http://www.bbc.co.uk/pandemic.
14. Van Hoang T. et al., ‘A systematic review of social contact surveys to inform transmission models of close contact infections’, BioRxiv, 2018.
15. Mossong J. et al., ‘Social Contacts and Mixing Patterns Relevant to the Spread of Infectious Diseases’, PLOS Medicine, 2008; Kucharski A.J. et al., ‘The Contribution of Social Behaviour to the Transmission of Influenza A in a Human Population’, PLOS Pathogens, 2014.
16. Eames K.T.D. et al., ‘Measured Dynamic Social Contact Patterns Explain the Spread of H1N1v Influenza’, PLOS Computational Biology, 2012; Eames K.T.D., ‘The influence of school holiday timing on epidemic impact’, Epidemiology and Infection, 2013; Baguelin M. et al., ‘Vaccination against pandemic influenza A/H1N1v in England: a real-time economic evaluation’, Vaccine, 2010.
17. Eggo R.M. et al., ‘Respiratory virus transmission dynamics determine timing of asthma exacerbation peaks: Evidence from a population-level model’, PNAS, 2016.
18. Kucharski A.J. et al., ‘The Contribution of Social Behaviour to the Transmission of Influenza A in a Human Population’, PLOS Pathogens, 2014.
19. Byington C.L. et al., ‘Community Surveillance of Respiratory Viruses Among Families in the Utah Better Identification of Germs-Longitudinal Viral Epidemiology (BIG-LoVE) Study’, Clinical Infectious Diseases, 2015.
20. Brockmann D. and Helbing D., ‘The Hidden Geometry of Complex, Network-Driven Contagion Phenomena’, Science, 2013.
21. Gog J.R. et al., ‘Spatial Transmission of 2009 Pandemic Influenza in the US’, PLOS Computational Biology, 2014.
22. Keeling M.J. et al., ‘Individual identity and movement networks for disease metapopulations’, PNAS, 2010.
23. Odlyzko A., ‘The forgotten discovery of gravity models and the inefficiency of early railway networks’, 2015.
24. Christakis N.A. and Fowler J.H., ‘Social contagion theory: examining dynamic social networks and human behavior’, Statistics in Medicine, 2012.
25. Cohen-Cole E. and Fletcher J.M., ‘Detecting implausible social network effects in acne, height, and headaches: longitudinal analysis’, British Medical Journal, 2008.
26. Lyons R., ‘The Spread of Evidence-Poor Medicine via F
lawed Social-Network Analysis’, Statistics, Politics, and Policy, 2011.
27. Norscia I. and Palagi E., ‘Yawn Contagion and Empathy in Homo sapiens’, PLOS ONE, 2011. Note that although it’s fairly easy to set up yawn experiments, there can still be challenges with interpreting the results. See: Kapitány R. and Nielsen M., ‘Are Yawns really Contagious? A Critique and Quantification of Yawn Contagion’, Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, 2017.
28. Norscia I. et al., ‘She more than he: gender bias supports the empathic nature of yawn contagion in Homo sapiens’, Royal Society Open Science, 2016.
29. Millen A. and Anderson J.R., ‘Neither infants nor toddlers catch yawns from their mothers’, Royal Society Biology Letters, 2010.
30. Holle H. et al., ‘Neural basis of contagious itch and why some people are more prone to it’. PNAS, 2012; Sy T. et al., ‘The Contagious Leader: Impact of the Leader’s Mood on the Mood of Group Members, Group Affective Tone, and Group Processes’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2005; Johnson S.K., ‘Do you feel what I feel? Mood contagion and leadership outcomes’, The Leadership Quarterly, 2009; Bono J.E. and Ilies R., ‘Charisma, positive emotions and mood contagion’, The Leadership Quarterly, 2006.
31. Sherry D.F. and Galef B.G., ‘Cultural Transmission Without Imitation: Milk Bottle Opening by Birds’, Animal Behaviour, 1984.
32. Background from: Aplin L.M. et al., ‘Experimentally induced innovations lead to persistent culture via conformity in wild birds’, Nature, 2015. Quotes from author interview with Lucy Aplin, August 2017.
33. Weber M., Economy and Society (Bedminster Press Incorporated, New York, 1968).
34. Manski C., ‘Identification of Endogenous Social Effects: The Reflection Problem’, Review of Economic Studies, 1993.
35. Datar A. and Nicosia N., ‘Association of Exposure to Communities With Higher Ratios of Obesity With Increased Body Mass Index and Risk of Overweight and Obesity Among Parents and Children’ JAMA Pediatrics, 2018.
36. Quotes from author interview with Dean Eckles, August 2017.
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