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 …
Continue reading “Coronavirus: The First Big Test of Behavioral Science”
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 – …
Continue reading “Contagion: How to Model It and What R-nought (R0) Actually Means”
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 …
Continue reading “Speech given at a meeting of Congregation of the University of Oxford, 7 May 2019”
Wednesday’s indicative votes in the House of Commons produced no definitive answer of the way forward. By using social network analysis showing the size of each voting bloc and ‘Hamming distances’ (ironically usually used for error correction), we can map how close MPs are to each other, giving an indication of how a coalition could …
Right now, Houston is going through one of the most severe storms ever to hit the USA. The main conversation on today’s news was whether the Mayor (who has authority to do such things) should have evacuated the City prior to the arrival of Hurricane Harvey. For a start, NOAA did not forecast a direct …
Continue reading “Why The Mayor of Houston Was Right to Not Evacuate the City”
I am looking for high quality, numerate, candidates to fill these exciting PhD studentships with me as a (co-) supervisor at Loughborough’s School of Business and Economics. Please note that this post has been updated with new links (in blue, below). The first is modelling dynamic responses to dynamic threats; the second is using analytics …
The Conservative Party have announced their manifesto for the 2017 General Election. Included in this (on page 64-65) is proposed We will introduce a single capital floor, set at £100,000, more than four times the current means test threshold. This will ensure that, no matter how large the cost of care turns out to be, …
Continue reading “The Conservative Manifesto: Care Fees as a Percentage of Initial Wealth”
The ‘℮’ symbol, or the ‘e-mark’ is a symbol you will see on packaging such as tins or packets in Europe. Millions of us will see this symbol every day, but what does it actually mean? The raison d’etre for the e-mark comes from the problem of selling goods to the public. We would all like to …
Eight Mile, epitomized by Eminem in the film of the same name, is a street in Detroit that marks the boundary between the majority white northern suburbs and the majority black neighborhoods closer to the inner city. But what causes this segregation in the first place? Hypothesis 1: The Central Planner In Detroit’s case, as …
Continue reading “Eight Mile and the Emergence of Segregation”
In 2003, as part of a project to document coastal erosion in California, the following photo was posted on the californiacoastline.org website. It is a picture of a beach, some cliffs, lots of trees, and a rather nice house complete with swimming pool, that turns out to be the home of one Barbara Streisand. For those not …
Continue reading “The Unintended Consequences of Unintended Consequences”
