You are not in control.
Study examines suicide contagion following celebrity deaths, opening avenues for prevention
Jul 2024, phys.org
This researcher normally does infectious disease models [I'll refer to these as SIR models] but made a new model for suicide contagion. The suicides of Robin Williams in 2014, and of Kate Spade, and Anthony Bourdain, in 2018 led to large increases in suicidal thought and behavior. The model saw a thousand-fold increase of the likelihood that a person would begin to ideate suicide following news of Williams' death (measured by calls to the national suicide hotline), and it lasted for two weeks.
via Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health: Jeffrey Shaman, Quantifying Suicide Contagion at Population Scale, Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adq4074.
Image credit: 3D reconstruction of mouse lung after infection with fluorescent Sendai virus - Italo Araujo Castro for Washington University Medicine - Sep 2024 [link]
ADHD - How many of us will end up being diagnosed?
Sep 2024, BBC News
“What has changed is the number of patients we are diagnosing. It’s almost like the more we diagnose, the more word spreads.”
Are ideas contagious? How the structure of human-interaction networks affects spread of both illness and information
Oct 2024, phys.org
(This write up doesn't seem to talk about the results, so I looked at the source article)
Using a time series of binary node states as input, we show how to jointly identify the network’s structure and the dynamical rules that generated the contagion. Our method is conceptually related to that of Refs. [19, 11, 20], which all reconstruct a network and its dynamical rules from binary time-series. Unlike these previous studies, however, we put few restrictions on the contagion rules, and we generate a complete posterior distribution over parameters and contagion rules instead of point estimates.
We then use this framework to examine the difficulty of network reconstruction as a function of the contagion process’s rules.
We describe network contagions with a neighborhood-based susceptible–infected–susceptible (SIS) model. [not SIR] [21]
They use Zachary's karate club, see below.
In the context of social media where the spread of information is often modeled as a complex contagion process, our results imply that we will learn less than would be expected if we simply translate prior reconstructability results for simple contagion processes with empirically determined estimates of R0. For extremely viral trends or information, however, we may be able to recover the effective contact networks with more precision than previously estimated. These results will not only inspire future network reconstruction methods but also guide how well different types of experimental data can hope to inform network reconstruction.
19. K. Liu, X. Lü, F. Gao, and J. Zhang, Expectation-maximizing network reconstruction and most applicable network types based on binary time series data, Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena 454, 133834 (2023).
11. Thomas W. Valente, Network models of the diffusion of innovations, Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory 2, 10.1007/bf00240425 (1996).
20. P. S. Dodds and D. J. Watts, Universal Behavior in a Generalized Model of Contagion, Physical Review Letters 92, 218701 (2004).
21. W. W. Zachary, An Information Flow Model for Conflict and Fission in Small Groups, Journal of Anthropological Research 33, 452 (1977).
Post Script: Zachary's Karate Club is a social network of a university karate club studied by Wayne W. Zachary for a period of three years from 1970 to 1972. The network captures 34 members of a karate club, documenting links between pairs of members who interacted outside the club. During the study a conflict arose between the administrator "John A" and instructor "Mr. Hi" (pseudonyms), which led to the split of the club into two. Half of the members formed a new club around Mr. Hi; members from the other part found a new instructor or gave up karate. Based on collected data Zachary correctly assigned all but one member of the club to the groups they actually joined after the split.
Zachary Karate Club Club is an honorific group of scientists who have used Zachary's Karate Club as an example in a scientific presentation.
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