Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Yes, this course is offered in Spring, 2021!

You can see the topic list and syllabus from the last time the course was taught by clicking the tab (above on the left) labeled "Topic list and syllabus."


For a quick glance at the course, check out the flyer!





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Thursday, April 30, 2020

COVID-19 and Its (Much) Broader Context

Why is America unable to act decisively on important things?

... like covid 

... while broad measures of societal well-being decline:
Structural-Demographic Theory

  • A theory of how societies cycle between 
    • "things going well" and
    • "things going poorly"

  • Let's look at the web site

Where is society headed now?


  • Politics

  • images.google.com
  • query: political polarization graph

Here are some interesting slides:




What controls whether social harmony or discord predominates?
  • Turchin’s answer  (ref.: Ages of Discord)
The US, the Roman Empire, medieval France, etc. –
cycle through
“integrative” and “disintegrative” phases
  • Integrative
The country is working
  • Disintegrative
Things are falling apart
  • Disintegrative phases are driven by:
1) Hardship among the general populace
No big surprise here

2) National financial crises
No big surprise here either

3) Political division among the power elite
This is the *most* important factor!
(Why?)

  • According to Turchin:
Peasant or worker uprisings alone don’t work
A unified elite suppresses them

A fragmented elite is a different story:
One fragment can use discord (e.g. uprisings)…
…as a tool to fight another fragment

Fiscal crisis weakens government…
…which then cannot control the disintegration

  • Turchin has a computer model
It predicts:
The US is now in a disintegrative phase
The low point lies a number of years ahead
The last low point was the civil war
Model does not predict 
    how low the next low point will be
    how high the next high point will be
    when the next low or high point will be
    the model is arguably not quite cyclic
        ... call it quasi-cyclic if you like


The cycle: how it works

The players:
The power holders (usually wealthy; sociologists call them the “elite”)
The masses

~~~The cycle (start with any step)~~~

The masses grow in quantity
The masses compete for work
Wages decrease while the elite gather wealth
Wealth disparity (unequal distribution) grows
The elite segment has space for new entrants while the masses are increasingly squeezed   
The masses increasingly aspire to join the elite
The elite grows too much
The elite struggle among themselves (intra-elite competition)
The country becomes mired in internal conflict
“Immiserated masses” and elite in-fighting leads to social conflict
Pandemics become
more likely
worse
Eventually the elites are trimmed
Wealth then flows to the masses
The elite unify (less intra-elite competition)
The country enters a period of harmony and strength
The masses grow… and back to the beginning

(that I prepared for another course...)

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Thursday, March 12, 2020

COVID-19 items

Some projections:

 Resource projections:
https://covid19.healthdata.org/

Case counts in arkansas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_Arkansas

 US
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/cases-in-us.html

 International comparisons
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-confirmed-cases-since-100th-case

 Daily cases by continent:
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/geographical-distribution-2019-ncov-cases

 Italy daily cases:
https://www.statista.com/chart/21099/coronavirus-in-italy

 ----------------------
We've talked about exponential growth
Why COVID-19? Why now?

        We have questions

         Structural-Demographic Theory claims to have answers
COVID-19 provides an example

 Let's check a spreadsheet with some proof-of-concept epidemiological simulations

       Shows epidemic qualitative behaviors

       Not an attempt to model this or any specific epidemic

 Assume:



  • US pop. = 331,000,000

  • Let's do a back-of-the-napkin spreadsheet
    • Col. A: new cases at 2.55x
    • Col. B: cumulative total cases
    • Col C: unexposed population
    • Col D: if we reduce the 2.55 
      • How might we do that?
    • Col. E: Rate of increase using doubling time
    • That's as far as I got today
      • ...more next week(?)
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Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Welcome to Spring 2020

Welcome to Spring semester 2020!
This is the course website for the course Information, Computing and the Future.
Please see the tabs for important pages, such as the syllabus.

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