Comparing the economic development of countries is not as straightforward as it may seem to many. The most commonly used indicator—Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita or per employee—can vary significantly depending on the currency used and how inflation in goods, services, and money is accounted for. What complicates comparison most is that exchange rates between currencies do not reflect differences in purchasing power across the countries being compared.

Another interesting video by ritvikmath explains why workplace incompetence is so prevalent. In the 1960s dr. Laurence J. Peter had observed that "in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence." Originally, the observation was intended as a satire, but since then it has become an object for scientific debate.

To me explanation sound overly simplistic, but do think that the principle still holds. I have met people who have worked hard for promotion (diploma, certification, etc.), just to "relax" right after obtaining it.

From scientific point of view debate surrounding this principle reminds be the discussions about the hot hand phenomenon. Although, the Peter principle seems to be more related to the game theory rather than statistics.

Fig. 1:Modern take on Halloween scare. Illustration by Jim Benton.

You can find more funny drawings by the author on the Instagram.

After one of my first presentations at the students' conference OpenReadings, I received a comment along the lines of "it's just some fancy randomness". Well, yes, but... Over the years, I have seen lots of otherwise good students who struggle with even the most basic statistical concepts. So, being "fancy" makes it reasonably hard. Furthermore, random processes underlie many important everyday systems.

This Veritasium video tells a fascinating story about how a petty feud between two Russian mathematicians led to the development of Markov chain formalism.

Over the last few weeks we, I and Rytis, have attended two conferences. One, Polish symposium, in Warsaw and the other, Lithuanian conference, in Kaunas.

Fig. 1:Some photos of us attending 46th Lithuanian National Physics Conference and XIII Polish Symposium on Physics in Economics and Social Sciences.

The Polish symposium was particularly interesting to me, because I got to see the directions in which Econophysics and Sociophysics are developing. We had a chance to hear about fractal complex networks, correlation dynamics in cryptocurrency markets, limit order book modeling (with presenters from Finnish and German institutions) and applications of agent-based modeling to variety of problems.

The Lithuanian conference allowed us to see what is being done here in Lithuania, and by Lithuanian scientists abroad.

We have also presented our recent advances. Both of my presentations (one talk and one poster) were about the same thing - the poll-delayed voter model [1]. While Rytis talked about our work on scaled voter model [2] (sadly, it might be too complicated for Physics of Risk) and about a brand new topic on stochastic diffusion he is developing together with one of his student.

References

• A. Kononovicius, R. Astrauskas, M. Radavičius, F. Ivanauskas. Delayed interactions in the noisy voter model through the periodic polling mechanism. Physica A 652: 130062 (2024). doi: 10.1016/j.physa.2024.130062. arXiv:2403.10277 [physics.soc-ph].
• R. Kazakevičius, A. Kononovicius. Anomalous diffusion and long-range memory in the scaled voter model. Physical Review E 107: 024106 (2023). doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.107.024106. arXiv:2301.08088 [cond-mat.stat-mech].