We introduce a future orientation index to quantify the degree to which Internet users worldwide seek more information about years in the future than years in the past. We analyse Google logs and find a striking correlation between the country's GDP and the predisposition of its inhabitants to look forward.
In August 2011, several areas of London experienced episodes of large-scale disorder, comprising looting, rioting and violence. Much subsequent discourse has questioned the adequacy of the police response, in terms of the resources available and strategies used. In this article, we present a mathematical model of the spatial development of the disorder, which can be used to examine the effect of varying policing arrangements. The model is capable of simulating the general emergent patterns of the events and focusses on three fundamental aspects: the apparently-contagious nature of participation; the distances travelled to riot locations; and the deterrent effect of policing. We demonstrate that the spatial configuration of London places some areas at naturally higher risk than others, highlighting the importance of spatial considerations when planning for such events. We also investigate the consequences of varying police numbers and reaction time, which has the potential to guide policy in this area.
Models of impact oscillators using an instantaneous impact law are by their very nature discontinuous. These discontinuities give rise to bifurcations which cannot be classified using the usual tools of bifurcation analysis. However, we present numerical evidence which suggests that these discontinuous bifurcations are just the limits (in some sense) of standard bifurcations of smooth dynamical systems as the impact is hardened. Finally we show how one dimensional maps of the interval with essentially similar characteristics can exhibit the same kinds of bifurcational behaviour, and how these bifurcations are related to standard bifurcations.
Society's increasing interactions with technology are creating extensive ''digital traces'' of our collective human behavior. These new data sources are fuelling the rapid development of the new field of computational social science. To investigate user attention to the Hurricane Sandy disaster in 2012, we analyze data from Flickr, a popular website for sharing personal photographs. In this case study, we find that the number of photos taken and subsequently uploaded to Flickr with titles, descriptions or tags related to Hurricane Sandy bears a striking correlation to the atmospheric pressure in the US state New Jersey during this period. Appropriate leverage of such information could be useful to policy makers and others charged with emergency crisis management.S teadily increasing quantities of data are being generated through society's interactions with technology, automatically documenting human actions in a previously unimaginable fashion [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] . Analysis of such ''big data'' is opening up new windows for a more precise quantification of real world social phenomena. A particularly fruitful area of research has focused on the analysis of Internet user search queries, as logged by search engines such as Google. Strong links have been found between changes in the information users are seeking online and events in the real world, ranging from reports of flu infections across the USA 11 to trading volume in the US stock markets 12 . A recent study has also shown that Internet users from countries with a higher per capita GDP are significantly more likely to search for information about years in the future than years in the past 13 . Preis, Moat and Stanley have demonstrated that changes in the number of searches for financially related terms on Google may have contained early warning signs of stock market moves 14 . Moat et al. presented evidence that increases in the number of views of financially related pages on Wikipedia could be detected before stock market falls 15 .Collective human attention to topics can be measured by various indices into online information flow. While analysis of search volume provides insight into the information that people are seeking, there are other data sources which one can analyze to gain insight into information that people are distributing. This information can take various forms, from text to multimedia, such as photos and videos.In this case study, we analyze the usage of a prominent photo sharing website, Flickr 16-20 . We investigate whether we can identify any relationship between catastrophic events such as natural disasters, and users' photo sharing activity on Flickr, to provide insight into the dynamics of human attention to such events.
A mathematical formulation is developed to model the dynamics of sand dunes. The physical processes display strong non-linearity that has been taken into account in the model. When assessing the success of such a model in capturing physical features we monitor morphology, dune growth, dune migration and spatial patterns within a dune field. Following recent advances, the proposed model is based on a discrete lattice dynamics approach with new features taken into account which reflect physically observed mechanisms
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