Charley was a character in UK Public Information Films in the 1970s. Here he is in ‘Charley Says Social Distancing’ “Treat everyone else as if they’re about to catch fire and you’re a lit match.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YmN0iV3f0I Charley: Miaoweeaawwwoa [I can’t believe I’m writing this] Narrator: This is you. You’re a match. And these are your …
Author archives: Dr Duncan Robertson
BBC Radio Interview – Social Distancing
https://youtu.be/zT7o8HEOr2Q Also appeared on LBC & Global News stations 13-14 March 2020.
I am concerned about the UK Government’s approach to social distancing
The real problem with Coronavirus Covid-19 is that when the health service becomes overloaded, the death rate goes up significantly. So, it is imperative that we keep the number of cases at any one time below or as near as possible to NHS capacity. The Government’s model relies on shifting the peak. I am not …
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Social Distancing using Play-Doh and Matches
There has been much talk about using social distancing as a response to the Coronavirus outbreak. Here’s a video of how social distancing can be used: Close Contact, where the population is infected very rapidly. This is not A Good Thing – the national health service is overwhelmed, and the death rate goes up as …
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Coronavirus: The First Big Test of Behavioral Science
The United Kingdom is at a crossroads, an ideological battle between natural science and behavioral science. Let’s hope for all our sakes we get this one right. Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, is facing a dilemma. When do we go from the so-called containment phase for controlling Covid-19 Coronavirus, to the delay phase. In …
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Contagion: How to Model It and What R-nought (R0) Actually Means
The 2011 film Contagion, starring the spectacularly ill-fated Gwyneth Paltrow, is a dramatization of a viral pandemic starting in pretty analagous circumstances to the current Wuhan Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak. It’s a good film, and is a great introduction to the work of Centers for Disease Control (CDCs) that monitor the spread – the epidemiology – …
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Techincal Note: Calculating Hamming Distances Between Two Binary Strings in Excel
I haven’t seen anywhere that does this, so here’s how to calculate the Hamming distance between two binary strings in excel. Credit: Wikipedia / en:User:Cburnett Say you have two binary strings, say 001001 and 100100. How do you calculate their Hamming distance? It turns out it isn’t that easy in Excel, but is possible. How …
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Agent-Based Strategizing: New Book Published at Cambridge University Press
My new book, Agent-Based Strategizing, has been published at Cambridge University Press. It is available to download for free until 31 July 2019 at the link below. The book is an overview of how agent-based modelling has been (and can be) used in strategic management. https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/agentbased-strategizing/4AD9D0D7416DE46AEB7F1A5478772ACF Abstract: Strategic management is a system of continual disequilibrium, …
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Spatial Transmission Models PowerPoint Slides presented at EURO2019 (30th European Conference on Opeartional Research), Dublin
These are the slides for my presentation at the 30th European Conference on Operational Research based on my Risk Analysis paper. The paper is available to download here.
Speech given at a meeting of Congregation of the University of Oxford, 7 May 2019
Dr Duncan Robertson, Fellow of St Catherine’s Vice-Chancellor, members of Congregation. I look around this room and see privilege. Every one of us here in the Sheldonian Theatre is privileged; every member of Congregation reading the Gazette is privileged. We are privileged not by our past but by our present: we all have the power …
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