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Web Game Helps Predict Spread of Epidemics
An anonymous reader writes "Using data from the web game wheresgeorge.com, which traces the travels of dollar bills, scientists have unveiled statistical laws of human travel and developed a mathematical description that can be used to model the spread of infectious disease."
I wonder how much of what we do on a daily basis is a result of free will when I hear about science like this.
Overall statistical laws don't say much about free will or not. There are always going to be regular patterns in behaviour (caused by things like the fact that most people don't want to walk 10 miles to work every day).
Governments would love equations that predict human behavior on a macroscopic scale.
The Australian Reserve Bank uses equations to predict macroeconomic conditions and adjusts interest rates accordingly.
"The physicists were intrigued: Like viruses, money is transported by people from place to place. " The problem is that you give a bill to only one person. Most disease is not like that.
Urban Dead gets no love? That webgame is truly infectious -- what with its "243,575 dead and rising" :)
Power to the Peaceful
Although the fact it failed due to a genetic mutation was a bit silly.
And note psychohistory couldn't predict everything, even outside genetic mutation. The First Foundation was to 'change history' by keeping a storehouse of knowledge, without any psychohistory at all, but the Second wasn't only to fix any minor problems that crop up, but to narrow the possiblities to one that were predictable.
If you want an analogy...everyone else thought they were playing roulette, but the psychohistorians figured out a way to make everyone play blackjack, and only they knew it. The fact they were counting cards and knew optimal betting patterns was trivial to the fact they were defining the game.
You can read it and get the impression Seldon predicts the exact events of the un-altered fall for thousands of years, and he likewise predicts the exact events after he changes them, but he really just predicts the long fall itself, we have no indication he can figure out stuff to any extent within it. And he rigs the new future history so he can control it.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Hey, it works for atoms when we can't even solve the three body problem analytically. And yet somehow when there's 10^23 of the things, we can get the scaling laws, phase diagrams, equations of state, etc with pen and paper. I don't find it hard to believe at all that while one person's behavior may be very hard to predict well, the average behavior and even scale of the fluctuations in behavior of a few billion people would be very easy to predict.
Population density seems to be a good place to start... so many things seem to be tightly coupled to population density. If you look at political affiliations in the US for example, there's a correlation between liberal/conservative and population density. Crime, etc of course scales with population density.
In a sense its a measure of 'how much am I affected by other people'. In a low density area, encounters with other people that have a significant unintentional and undesired effect are low. In a high density area, you can't help but press up against dozens of people a day who might mug you, smoke near you, transmit a disease to you, or whatever.
So thats one variable; there's likely to be two or three that are really important, and the rest are sort of small perturbations. Second might be economic level perhaps? Or technological? Get some output data like crime rate, distribution of causes of death, education levels, job occupancies, population density, tech level, economic level, and so on and do a principle component analysis on that. Maybe it'll reveal the significant contributors, or maybe not, but it's probably worth a shot for some grad student doing social science.
Then you can do fun things like construct a phase diagram from your data and find out little factoids like 'if the population density rises above X, dictatorships become fundamentally unstable!' that let the more power hungry analysts set up a perpetual dynasty with rules controlling population growth or something like that.
Isn't statistical mechanics fun?