37. Editorial, ‘Epidemiology is a science of high importance’, Nature Communications, 2018.
38. Background on smoking and cancer from: Howick J. et al., ‘The evolution of evidence hierarchies: what can Bradford Hill’s “guidelines for causation” contribute?’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 2009; Mourant A., ‘Why Arthur Mourant Decided To Say “No” To Ronald Fisher’, The Scientist, 12 December 1988.
39. Background from: Ross R., Memoirs, With a Full Account of the Great Malaria Problem and its Solution (London, 1923).
40. Racaniello V., ‘Koch’s postulates in the 21st century’, Virology Blog, 22 January 2010.
41. Alice Stewart’s obituary, The Telegraph, 16 August 2002.
42. Rasmussen S.A. et al., ‘Zika Virus and Birth Defects – Reviewing the Evidence for Causality’, NEJM, 2016.
43. Greene G., The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Alice Stewart and the Secrets of Radiation (University of Michigan Press, 2001).
44. Background and quotes from author interview with Nicholas Christakis, June 2018.
45. Snijders T.A.B., ‘The Spread of Evidence-Poor Medicine via Flawed Social-Network Analysis’, SOCNET Archives, 17 June 2011.
46. Granovetter M.S., ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’, American Journal of Sociology, 1973.
47. Dhand A., ‘Social networks and risk of delayed hospital arrival after acute stroke’, Nature Communications, 2019.
48. Background from: Centola D. and Macy M., ‘Complex Contagions and the Weakness of Long Ties’, American Journal of Sociology, 2007; Centola D., How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions (Princeton University Press, 2018).
49. Darley J.M. and Latane B., ‘Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1968.
50. Centola D., How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions (Princeton University Press, 2018).
51. Coviello L. et al., ‘Detecting Emotional Contagion in Massive Social Networks’, PLOS ONE, 2014; Aral S. and Nicolaides C., ‘Exercise contagion in a global social network’, Nature Communications, 2017.
52. Fleischer D., Executive Summary. The Prop 8 Report, 2010. http://prop8report.lgbtmentoring.org/read-the-report/executive-summary.
53. Background on deep canvassing from: Issenberg S., ‘How Do You Change Someone’s Mind About Abortion? Tell Them You Had One’, Bloomberg, 6 October 2014; Resnick B., ‘These scientists can prove it’s possible to reduce prejudice’, Vox, 8 April 2016; Bohannon J., ‘For real this time: Talking to people about gay and transgender issues can change their prejudices’, Associated Press, 7 April 2016.
54. Mandel D.R., ‘The psychology of Bayesian reasoning’, Frontiers in Psychology, 2014.
55. Nyhan B. and Reifler J., ‘When Corrections Fail: The persistence of political misperceptions’, Political Behavior, 2010.
56. Wood T. and Porter E., ‘The elusive backfire effect: mass attitudes’ steadfast factual adherence’, Political Behavior, 2018.
57. LaCour M.H. and Green D.P., ‘When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality’, Science, 2014.
58. Broockman D. and Kalla J., ‘Irregularities in LaCour (2014)’, Working paper, May 2015.
59. Duran L., ‘How to change views on trans people? Just get personal’, Take Two®, 7 April 2016.
60. Comment from: Gelman A., ‘LaCour and Green 1, This American Life 0’, 16 December 2015. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/12/16/lacour-and-green-1-this-american-life-0/
61. Wood T. and Porter E., ‘The elusive backfire effect: mass attitudes’ steadfast factual adherence’, Political Behavior, 2018.
62. Weiss R. and Fitzgerald M., ‘Edwards, First Lady at Odds on Stem Cells’, Washington Post, 10 August 2004.
63. Quotes from author interview with Brendan Nyhan, November 2018.
64. Nyhan B. et al., ‘Taking Fact-checks Literally But Not Seriously? The Effects of Journalistic Fact-checking on Factual Beliefs and Candidate Favorability’, Political Behavior, 2019.
65. Example: https://twitter.com/brendannyhan/status/
859573499333136384.
66. Strudwick P.A., ‘Former MP Has Made A Heartfelt Apology For Voting Against Same-Sex Marriage’, BuzzFeed, 28 March 2017.
67. There’s also evidence that people who have changed their mind about a topic, and explain why they’ve changed their mind, can be more persuasive than a simple one-sided message. Source: Lyons B.A. et al., ‘Conversion messages and attitude change: Strong arguments, not costly signals’, Public Understanding of Science, 2019.
68. Feinberg M. and Willer R., ‘From Gulf to Bridge: When Do Moral Arguments Facilitate Political Influence?’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2015.
69. Roghanizad M.M. and Bohns V.K., ‘Ask in person: You’re less persuasive than you think over email’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2016.
70. How J.J. and De Leeuw E.D., ‘A comparison of nonresponse in mail, telephone, and face-to-face surveys’, Quality and Quantity, 1994; Gerber A.S. and Green D.P., ‘The Effects of Canvassing, Telephone Calls, and Direct Mail on Voter Turnout: A Field Experiment’, American Political Science Review, 2000; Okdie B.M. et al., ‘Getting to know you: Face-to-face versus online interactions’, Computers in Human Behavior, 2011.
71. Swire B. et al., ‘The role of familiarity in correcting inaccurate information’, Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition, 2017.
72. Quotes from author interview with Briony Swire-Thompson, July 2018.
73. Broockman D. and Kalla J., ‘Durably reducing transphobia: A field experiment on door-to-door canvassing’, Science, 2016.
4. Something in the air
1. Background and quotes from author interview with Gary Slutkin, April 2018.
2. Statistics from: Bentle K. et al., ‘39,000 homicides: Retracing 60 years of murder in Chicago’, Chicago Tribune, 9 January 2018; Illinois State Fact Sheet. National Injury and Violence Prevention Resource Center, 2015.
3. Slutkin G., ‘Treatment of violence as an epidemic disease’, In: Fine P. et al. John Snow’s legacy: epidemiology without borders. The Lancet, 2013.
4. Background on John Snow’s work on cholera from: Snow J., On the mode of communication of cholera. (London, 1855); Tulodziecki D., ‘A case study in explanatory power: John Snow’s conclusions about the pathology and transmission of cholera’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2011; Hempel S., ‘John Snow’, The Lancet, 2013; Brody H. et al., ‘Map-making and myth-making in Broad Street: the London cholera epidemic, 1854’, The Lancet, 2000.
5. Reason for abstraction: Seuphor M., Piet Mondrian: Life and Work (Abrams, New York, 1956); Tate Modern, ‘Five ways to look at Malevich’s Black Square’, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/kazimir-malevich-1561/five-ways-look-malevichs-black-square.
6. Background on cholera: Locher W.G., ‘Max von Pettenkofer (1818–1901) as a Pioneer of Modern Hygiene and Preventive Medicine’, Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine, 2007; Morabia A., ‘Epidemiologic Interactions, Complexity, and the Lonesome Death of Max von Pettenkofer,’ American Journal of Epidemiology, 2007.
7. García-Moreno C. et al., ‘WHO Multi-country Study on Women’s Health and Domestic Violence against Women’, World Health Organization, 2005.
8. Quotes from author interview with Charlotte Watts, May 2018.
9. Background on factors influencing contagion of violence: Patel D.M. et al., Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary (National Academies Press, 2012).
10. Gould M.S. et al., ‘Suicide Clusters: A Critical Review’, Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, 1989.
11. Cheng Q. et al., ‘Suicide Contagion: A Systematic Review of Definitions and Research Utility’, PLOS ONE, 2014.
12. Phillips D.P., ‘The Influence of Suggestion on Suicide: Substantive and Theoretical Implications of the Werther Effect’, American Sociological Review, 1974.
13.
WHO. ‘Is responsible and deglamourized media reporting effective in reducing deaths from suicide, suicide attempts and acts of self-harm?’, 2015. https://www.who.int.
14. Fink D.S. et al., ‘Increase in suicides the months after the death of Robin Williams in the US’, PLOS ONE, 2018.
15. Towers S. et al., ‘Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings’, PLOS ONE, 2015.
16. Brent D.A. et al., ‘An Outbreak of Suicide and Suicidal Behavior in a High School’, Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 1989.
17. Aufrichtig A. et al., ‘Want to fix gun violence in America? Go local’, The Guardian, 9 January 2017.
18. Quotes from author interview with Charlie Ransford, April 2018.
19. Confino J., ‘Guardian-supported Malawi sex workers’ project secures funding from Comic Relief’, The Guardian, 9 June 2010.
20. Bremer S., ‘10 Shot, 2 Fatally, at Vigil on Chicago’s Southwest Side’, NBC Chicago, 7 May 2017.
21. Tracy M. et al., ‘The Transmission of Gun and Other Weapon-Involved Violence Within Social Networks’, Epidemiologic Reviews, 2016.
22. Green B. et al., ‘Modeling Contagion Through Social Networks to Explain and Predict Gunshot Violence in Chicago, 2006 to 2014’, JAMA Internal Medicine, 2017.
23. Fitting a negative binomial offspring distribution to the cluster size distribution from Green et al., I obtained a maximum likelihood estimate for the dispersion parameter k=0.096. (Method from: Blumberg S. and Lloyd-Smith J.O., PLOS Computational Biology, 2013.) For context, MERS-CoV had R=0.63 and k=0.25 (from: Kucharski A.J. and Althaus C.L., ‘The role of superspreading in Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) transmission’, Eurosurveillance, 2015).
24. Fenner F. et al., Smallpox and its Eradication (World Health Organization, Geneva, 1988).
25. Evaluations of violence interruption methods: Skogan W.G. et al., ‘Evaluation of CeaseFire-Chicago’, U.S. Department of Justice report, March 2009; Webster D.W. et al., ‘Evaluation of Baltimore’s Safe Streets Program’, Johns Hopkins report, January 2012; Thomas R. et al., ‘Investing in Intervention: The Critical Role of State-Level Support in Breaking the Cycle of Urban Gun Violence’, Giffords Law Center report, 2017.
26. Examples of criticism of Cure Violence: Page C., ‘The doctor who predicted Chicago’s homicide epidemic’, Chicago Tribune, 30 December 2016; ‘We need answers on anti-violence program’, Chicago Sun Times, 1 July 2014.
27. Patel D.M. et al., Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary (National Academies Press, 2012).
28. Background from: Seenan G., ‘Scotland has second highest murder rate in Europe’, The Guardian, 26 September 2005; Henley J., ‘Karyn McCluskey: the woman who took on Glasgow’s gangs’, The Guardian, 19 December 2011; Ross P., ‘No mean citizens: The success behind Glasgow’s VRU’, The Scotsman, 24 November 2014; Geoghegan P., ‘Glasgow smiles: how the city halved its murders by “caring people into change”’, The Guardian, 6 April 2015; ‘10 Year Strategic Plan’, Scottish Violence Reduction Unit, 2017.
29. Adam K., ‘Glasgow was once the “murder capital of Europe”. Now it’s a model for cutting crime’, Washington Post, 27 October 2018.
30. Formal evaluations are not available for all aspects of the VRU programme, but some parts have been evaluated: Williams D.J. et al., ‘Addressing gang-related violence in Glasgow: A preliminary pragmatic quasi-experimental evaluation of the Community Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV)’, Aggression and Violent Behavior, 2014; Goodall C. et al., ‘Navigator: A Tale of Two Cities’, 12 Month Report, 2017.
31. ‘Mayor launches new public health approach to tackling serious violence’, London City Hall press release, 19 September 2018; Bulman M., ‘Woman who helped dramatically reduce youth murders in Scotland urges London to treat violence as a “disease”’, The Independent, 5 April 2018.
32. Background on Nightingale’s Crimea work from: Gill C.J. and Gill G.C., ‘Nightingale in Scutari: Her Legacy Reexamined’, Clinical Infectious Diseases, 2005; Nightingale F., Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army: Founded Chiefly on the Experience of the Late War (London, 1858); Magnello M.E., ‘Victorian statistical graphics and the iconography of Florence Nightingale’s polar area graph’, Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics Bulletin, 2012.
33. Nelson S. and Rafferty A.M., Notes on Nightingale: The Influence and Legacy of a Nursing Icon (Cornell University Press, 2012).
34. Background on Farr from: Lilienfeld D.E., ‘Celebration: William Farr (1807–1883) – an appreciation on the 200th anniversary of his birth’, International Journal of Epidemiology, 2007; Humphreys N.A., ‘Vital statistics: a memorial volume of selections from the reports and writings of William Farr’, The Sanitary Institute of Great Britain, 1885.
35. Nightingale F., A Contribution to the Sanitary History of the British Army During the Late War with Russia (London, 1859).
36. Quoted in: Diamond M. and Stone M., ‘Nightingale on Quetelet’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society A, 1981.
37. Cook E., The Life of Florence Nightingale (London, 1913).
38. Quoted in: MacDonald L., Florence Nightingale on Society and Politics, Philosophy, Science, Education and Literature (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2003).
39. Pearson K., The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton (Cambridge University Press, London, 1914).
40. Patel D.M. et al., Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary (National Academies Press, 2012).
41. Statistics from: Grinshteyn E. and Hemenway D., ‘Violent Death Rates: The US Compared with Other High-income OECD Countries, 2010’, The American Journal of Medicine, 2016; Koerth-Baker M., ‘Mass Shootings Are A Bad Way To Understand Gun Violence’, Five Thirty Eight, 3 October 2017.
42. Background from: Thompson B., ‘The Science of Violence’, Washington Post, 29 March 1998; Wilkinson F., ‘Gunning for Guns’, Rolling Stone, 9 December 1993.
43. Cillizza C., ‘President Obama’s amazingly emotional speech on gun control’, Washington Post, 5 January 2016.
44. Borger J., ‘The Guardian profile: Ralph Nader’, The Guardian, 22 October 2004.
45. Background from: Jensen C., ‘50 Years Ago, “Unsafe at Any Speed” Shook the Auto World’, New York Times, 26 November 2015.
46. Kelly K., ‘Car Safety Initially Considered “Undesirable” by Manufacturers, the Government and Consumers’, Huffington Post, 4 December 2012.
47. Frankel T.C., ‘Their 1996 clash shaped the gun debate for years. Now they want to reshape it’, Washington Post, 30 December 2015.
48. Kates D.B. et al., ‘Public Health Pot Shots’, Reason, April 1997.
49. Turvill J.L. et al., ‘Change in occurrence of paracetamol overdose in UK after introduction of blister packs’, The Lancet, 2000; Hawton K. et al., ‘Long term effect of reduced pack sizes of paracetamol on poisoning deaths and liver transplant activity in England and Wales: interrupted time series analyses’, British Medical Journal, 2013.
50. Dickey J. and Rosenberg M., ‘We won’t know the cause of gun violence until we look for it’, Washington Post, 27 July 2012.
51. Background and quotes from author interview with Toby Davies, August 2017.
52. Davies T.P. et al., ‘A mathematical model of the London riots and their policing’, Scientific Reports, 2013.
53. Example: Myers P., ‘Staying streetwise’, Reuters, 8 September 2011.
54. Quoted in: De Castella T. and McClatchey C., ‘UK riots: What turns people into looters?’, BBC News Online. 9 August 2011.
55. Granovetter M., ‘Threshold Models of Collective Behavior’, American Journal of Sociology, 1978.
56. Background from: Johnson N.F. et al., ‘New online ecology of adversarial aggregates: ISIS and beyond’, Science, 2016; Wolchover N., ‘A Physicist Who Models ISIS and the Alt-Right’, Quanta Magazine, 23 August 2017.
57. Bohorquez J.C. et al., ‘Common ecology quantifies hum
an insurgency’, Nature, 2009.
58. Belluck P., ‘Fighting ISIS With an Algorithm, Physicists Try to Predict Attacks’, New York Times, 16 June 2016.
59. Timeline: ‘How The Anthrax Terror Unfolded’, National Public Radio (NPR), 15 February 2011.
60. Cooper B., ‘Poxy models and rash decisions’, PNAS, 2006; Meltzer M.I. et al., ‘Modeling Potential Responses to Smallpox as a Bioterrorist Weapon’, Emerging Infectious Diseases, 2001.
61. I’ve seen the toy train example used in a few fields (e.g. by Emanuel Derman in finance), but particular credit to my old colleague Ken Eames here, who used it very effectively in disease modelling lectures.
62. Meltzer M.I. et al., ‘Estimating the Future Number of Cases in the Ebola Epidemic – Liberia and Sierra Leone, 2014–2015’, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 2014.
63. The CDC exponential model estimated around a three-fold increase per month. Therefore a prediction three additional months ahead would have estimated 27-fold more cases than the January value. (The combined population of SL, Liberia and Guinea was around 24 million.)
64. ‘Expert reaction to CDC estimates of numbers of future Ebola cases’, Science Media Centre, 24 September 2014.
65. Background from: Hughes M., ‘Developers wish people would remember what a big deal Y2K bug was’, The Next Web, 26 October 2017; Schofield J., ‘Money we spent’, The Guardian, 5 January 2000.
66. https://twitter.com/JoanneLiu_MSF/status/952834207667097600.
67. In the CDC analysis, cases were scaled up by a factor of 2.5 to account for under-reporting. If we apply the same scaling to the reported cases, this suggests there were around 75,000 infections in reality, a difference of 1.33 million from the CDC prediction. The suggestion that the CDC model with interventions could explain outbreak comes from: Frieden T.R. and Damon I.K., ‘Ebola in West Africa – CDC’s Role in Epidemic Detection, Control, and Prevention’, Emerging Infectious Diseases, 2015.
68. Onishi N., ‘Empty Ebola Clinics in Liberia Are Seen as Misstep in U.S. Relief Effort’, New York Times, 2015.
69. Kucharski A.J. et al., ‘Measuring the impact of Ebola control measures in Sierra Leone’, PNAS, 2015.
The Rules of Contagion Page 29