Chapter 1
A trio of papers by Paul Fine has more information on the theory of mechanistic modelling and resulting concepts like herd immunity: ‘Ross’s A Priori Pathometry – A Perspective’ (Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 1975); ‘John Brownlee and the measurement of infectiousness: an historical study in epidemic theory’ (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A, 1979); ‘Herd Immunity: History, Theory, Practice’ (Epidemiological Reviews, 1993). For a more technical description of Ross’s analysis and its legacy, see David Smith and colleagues’ paper ‘Ross, Macdonald, and a Theory for the Dynamics and Control of Mosquito-Transmitted Pathogens’ (PLOS Pathogens, 2012).
Chapter 2
Donald MacKenzie and Taylor Spears’s paper ‘“The Formula That Killed Wall Street”?: The Gaussian Copula and the Material Cultures of Modelling’ (2012) provides a useful oral history of the models behind CDOs. Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street (W. W. Norton & Company, 1989) and The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (W. W. Norton & Company, 2010) by Michael Lewis, written twenty years apart, explain how mortgage trading started and the chaos it would later cause. When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management by Roger Lowenstein (Random House, 2000) covers the collapse of the titular hedge fund.
Seeking the Positives: A Life Spent on the Cutting Edge of Public Health by John Potterat (CreateSpace, 2015) gives more details of his work on how social networks shape outbreaks of gonorrhoea and other STDs. For a technical overview of disease modelling, Modelling Infectious Diseases in Humans and Animals (Princeton University Press, 2007) by Matt Keeling and Pej Rohani had been an essential textbook for me ever since I first read it as an undergraduate.
Andy Haldane’s speech ‘Rethinking the Financial Network’ (Bank of England transcript, 2009) was a timely discussion of the links between ecology, epidemiology and financial markets. His later paper with Robert May, ‘Systemic risk in banking ecosystems’ (Nature, 2011), expanded on these ideas with more technical details.
Chapter 3
Connected: The Amazing Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler (HarperPress, 2011) describes research into dynamics of social networks, including their studies on the spread of obesity and other characteristics. Their subsequent paper ‘Social contagion theory: examining dynamic social networks and human behavior’ (Statistics in Medicine, 2013) discusses the criticisms of their research, and the technical challenges involved in estimating social contagion. Damon Centola’s book How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions (Princeton University Press, 2018) covers his work on complex contagion, as well as other insights from large-scale studies of behaviour. ‘Randomized experiments to detect and estimate social influence in networks’ by Sean Taylor and Dean Eckles (Complex Spreading Phenomena in Social Systems, 2018) is a useful technical review of approaches for studying social contagion.
Further insights from the NATSAL studies can be found in David Spiegelhalter’s book Sex by Numbers: What Statistics Can Tell Us About Sexual Behaviour (Wellcome Collection, 2015). ‘Culture and cultural evolution in birds: a review of the evidence’ by Lucy Aplin (Animal Behaviour, 2019) provides an overview of cultural development in animals, with a focus on birds.
Chapter 4
For more discussion and case studies about the spread of violence, including contributions from Carl Bell, Gary Slutkin and Charlotte Watts, see the papers published in Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary, part of the Forum on Global Violence Prevention (The National Academies Collection, 2013).
Smallpox: The Death of a Disease – The Inside Story of Eradicating a Worldwide Killer by D.A. Henderson (Prometheus, 2009) has a first-hand account of how contact tracing and ring vaccination was deployed to eradicate smallpox. Neil Ferguson and colleagues’ paper ‘Planning for smallpox outbreaks’ (Nature, 2003) covers ways to model smallpox and other emerging infections, as well as their limitations. ‘Avoidable errors in the modelling of outbreaks of emerging pathogens, with special reference to Ebola’ by Aaron King and colleagues (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2015) provides a technical description of some potential pitfalls in forecasting infectious disease outbreaks.
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil (Penguin, 2016) highlights the inherent prejudices and biases in many commonly used algorithms, including ones used in policing. Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine by Hannah Fry (Penguin, 2019) has more on the roles – and risks – of algorithms in modern life.
Chapter 5
Duncan Watts’ book Everything is Obvious: Why Common Sense is Nonsense (Atlantic Books, 2011) has some useful insights into the challenges of understanding and predicting social behaviour online. His later paper with Jake Hofman and Amit Sharma, ‘Prediction and explanation in social systems’ (Science, 2017), elaborates on the technical aspects of this research. Justin Cheng and colleagues’ paper ‘Do Diffusion Protocols Govern Cascade Growth?’ (AAAI, 2018) provides a data-driven breakdown of the components of the reproduction number of online content. The Facebook Research archive (https://research.fb.com/publications) has a host of other papers further examining the spread of behaviour and content online.
Whitney Phillips’s report The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists (Data & Society, 2018) provides a valuable summary of media manipulation efforts, and potential ways to overcome these. Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe (HarperCollins, 2019) by Roger McNamee discusses the downsides of social media platforms, including more details on the work of Tristan Harris and Renée DiResta. ‘Protecting elections from social media manipulation’ by Sinan Aral and Dean Eckles (Science, 2019) has suggestions for ways to rigorously measure online manipulation and the potential implications for elections.
Chapter 6
For more on the origins and legacy of Mirai attack, see Garrett Graff’s pair of articles for Wired: ‘How a Dorm Room Minecraft Scam Brought Down the Internet’ (2017) and ‘The Mirai Botnet Architects Are Now Fighting Crime With the FBI’ (2018). Landmark papers such as ’Computer Viruses – Theory and Experiments’ by Fred Cohen (1984) and ‘How to 0wn the Internet in Your Spare Time’ by Stuart Staniford and colleagues
