The Rules of Contagion

In particular, he claimed that the SIR model would be appropriate for the spread of rumours, but others have argued that simple tweaks to the model can produce very different results. For example, in a simple epidemic model, we usually assume people stop being infectious after a period of time, which is reasonable for many diseases. Daryl Daley and David Kendall, two Cambridge mathematicians, have proposed that in a rumour model, spreaders won’t necessarily recover naturally; they may only stop spreading the rumour when they meet someone else who’s heard the rumour. Source: Daley D.J. and Kendall D.G., ‘Epidemics and rumours’, Nature, 1964.

4. Landau genius scale. http://www.eoht.info/page/Landau+genius+scale.

5. Khalatnikov I.M and Sykes J.B. (eds.), Landau: The Physicist and the Man: Recollections of L.D. Landau (Pergamon, 2013).

6. Bettencourt L.M.A. et al., ‘The power of a good idea: Quantitative modeling of the spread of ideas from epidemiological models’, Physica A, 2006.

7. Azouly P. et al., ‘Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?’, National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, 2015.

8. Catmull E., ‘How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity’, Harvard Business Review, September 2008.

9. Grove J., ‘Francis Crick Institute: “gentle anarchy” will fire research’, THE, 2 September 2016.

10. Bernstein E.S. and Turban S., ‘The impact of the “open”workspace on human collaboration.’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2018.

11. Background and quotes from: ‘History of the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles’. Witness Seminar held by the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, London, on 14 December 2009.

12. Mercer C.H. et al., ‘Changes in sexual attitudes and lifestyles in Britain through the life course and over time: findings from the National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal)’, The Lancet, 2013.

13. http://www.bbc.co.uk/pandemic.

14. Van Hoang T. et al., ‘A systematic review of social contact surveys to inform transmission models of close contact infections’, BioRxiv, 2018.

15. Mossong J. et al., ‘Social Contacts and Mixing Patterns Relevant to the Spread of Infectious Diseases’, PLOS Medicine, 2008; Kucharski A.J. et al., ‘The Contribution of Social Behaviour to the Transmission of Influenza A in a Human Population’, PLOS Pathogens, 2014.

16. Eames K.T.D. et al., ‘Measured Dynamic Social Contact Patterns Explain the Spread of H1N1v Influenza’, PLOS Computational Biology, 2012; Eames K.T.D., ‘The influence of school holiday timing on epidemic impact’, Epidemiology and Infection, 2013; Baguelin M. et al., ‘Vaccination against pandemic influenza A/H1N1v in England: a real-time economic evaluation’, Vaccine, 2010.

17. Eggo R.M. et al., ‘Respiratory virus transmission dynamics determine timing of asthma exacerbation peaks: Evidence from a population-level model’, PNAS, 2016.

18. Kucharski A.J. et al., ‘The Contribution of Social Behaviour to the Transmission of Influenza A in a Human Population’, PLOS Pathogens, 2014.

19. Byington C.L. et al., ‘Community Surveillance of Respiratory Viruses Among Families in the Utah Better Identification of Germs-Longitudinal Viral Epidemiology (BIG-LoVE) Study’, Clinical Infectious Diseases, 2015.

20. Brockmann D. and Helbing D., ‘The Hidden Geometry of Complex, Network-Driven Contagion Phenomena’, Science, 2013.

21. Gog J.R. et al., ‘Spatial Transmission of 2009 Pandemic Influenza in the US’, PLOS Computational Biology, 2014.

22. Keeling M.J. et al., ‘Individual identity and movement networks for disease metapopulations’, PNAS, 2010.

23. Odlyzko A., ‘The forgotten discovery of gravity models and the inefficiency of early railway networks’, 2015.

24. Christakis N.A. and Fowler J.H., ‘Social contagion theory: examining dynamic social networks and human behavior’, Statistics in Medicine, 2012.

25. Cohen-Cole E. and Fletcher J.M., ‘Detecting implausible social network effects in acne, height, and headaches: longitudinal analysis’, British Medical Journal, 2008.

26. Lyons R., ‘The Spread of Evidence-Poor Medicine via Flawed Social-Network Analysis’, Statistics, Politics, and Policy, 2011.

27. Norscia I. and Palagi E., ‘Yawn Contagion and Empathy in Homo sapiens’, PLOS ONE, 2011. Note that although it’s fairly easy to set up yawn experiments, there can still be challenges with interpreting the results. See: Kapitány R. and Nielsen M., ‘Are Yawns really Contagious? A Critique and Quantification of Yawn Contagion’, Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, 2017.

28. Norscia I. et al., ‘She more than he: gender bias supports the empathic nature of yawn contagion in Homo sapiens’, Royal Society Open Science, 2016.

29. Millen A. and Anderson J.R., ‘Neither infants nor toddlers catch yawns from their mothers’, Royal Society Biology Letters, 2010.

30. Holle H. et al., ‘Neural basis of contagious itch and why some people are more prone to it’. PNAS, 2012; Sy T. et al., ‘The Contagious Leader: Impact of the Leader’s Mood on the Mood of Group Members, Group Affective Tone, and Group Processes’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2005; Johnson S.K., ‘Do you feel what I feel? Mood contagion and leadership outcomes’, The Leadership Quarterly, 2009; Bono J.E. and Ilies R., ‘Charisma, positive emotions and mood contagion’, The Leadership Quarterly, 2006.

31. Sherry D.F. and Galef B.G., ‘Cultural Transmission Without Imitation: Milk Bottle Opening by Birds’, Animal Behaviour, 1984.

32. Background from: Aplin L.M. et al., ‘Experimentally induced innovations lead to persistent culture via conformity in wild birds’, Nature, 2015. Quotes from author interview with Lucy Aplin, August 2017.

33. Weber M., Economy and Society (Bedminster Press Incorporated, New York, 1968).

34. Manski C., ‘Identification of Endogenous Social Effects: The Reflection Problem’, Review of Economic Studies, 1993.

35. Datar A. and Nicosia N., ‘Association of Exposure to Communities With Higher Ratios of Obesity With Increased Body Mass Index and Risk of Overweight and Obesity Among Parents and Children’ JAMA Pediatrics, 2018.

36. Quotes from author interview with Dean Eckles, August 2017.

37. Editorial, ‘Epidemiology is a science of high importance’, Nature Communications, 2018.

38. Background on smoking and cancer from: Howick J. et al., ‘The evolution of evidence hierarchies: what can Bradford Hill’s “guidelines for causation” contribute?’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 2009; Mourant A., ‘Why Arthur Mourant Decided To Say “No” To Ronald Fisher’, The Scientist, 12 December 1988.

39. Background from: Ross R., Memoirs, With a Full Account of the Great Malaria Problem and its Solution (London, 1923).

40. Racaniello V., ‘Koch’s postulates in the 21st century’, Virology Blog, 22 January 2010.

41. Alice Stewart’s obituary, The Telegraph, 16 August 2002.

42. Rasmussen S.A. et al., ‘Zika Virus and Birth Defects – Reviewing the Evidence for Causality’, NEJM, 2016.

43. Greene G., The