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