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 …
Continue reading "I am concerned about the UK Government’s approach to social distancing"
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 …
Continue reading "Social Distancing using Play-Doh and Matches"
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"
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 …
Continue reading "Techincal Note: Calculating Hamming Distances Between Two Binary Strings in Excel"
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, …
Continue reading "Agent-Based Strategizing: New Book Published at Cambridge University Press"
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.
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"
An updated map of Monday's Indicative Votes but including last week's votes for the Withdrawal Agreement. Note more analysis here: https://duncanrobertson.com/2019/03/28/mapping-brexit/ This network map shows each MP that voted for each of 5 propositions: Parliamentary Sovereignty, Confirmatory Public Vote, Customs Union, Common Market 2.0, or the Withdrawal Agreement. The large dots show the number of …
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 …
