Space and time symmetry in the compartmental voter model

Today we continue our series of posts on compartmental voter model. Today we ask a question: is there a symmetry between stationary (temporal) and spatial distributions? Note that we have observed this symmetry in the infinite capacity case, but we haven't yet looked from this perspective in the finite capacity case. In this case we just know that we no longer observe the Beta distributions, which we have observed in the infinite capacity case.

Extra Credits: The 1929 Stock Market Crash

It seems that COVID-19 "wind" has blown on the house of cards, which we have been carefully rebuilding since 2008 crisis. Though the markets are not the economy, but the economy is likely to stall as it did after so many crashes before. We invite you to watch an Extra History episode (by Extra Credits), which provides historical retrospective on The 1929 Crash, which was followed by The Great Depression.

What do you think will our economy fall as the financial markets did?

Compartmental voter model

In sociological papers it is quite common to see the analysis of how specific socio-demographic factors influence voting behavior. In opinion dynamics on the other hand we are usually interested only in contagion effects. Though some of the models sometimes are more sophisticated and include things like bounded confidence, explicit or implicit (like in Ishii's trust and suspicion models we have recently discussed) network structure, which effectively segment the society into separate groups. Yet these groups are surely not equivalent to the socio-demographic groups.

Khan Academy: Estimating actual COVID-19 cases based on deaths

Khan Academy is an American non-profit educational organization. This organization produces short educational videos, which are more similar to your every day lecture than your typical popular science video. Due to COVID-19 outbreak this educational website has opened up variety of educational content, including videos related to COVID-19 outbreak itself.

This video discusses basic intuition on how to estimate the actual cases of an epidemic outbreak. In general same methodology works for any epidemic outbreak as long as we are still in the exponential growth phase. The actual numbers are estimated for the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak and are taken from a blog post by Tomes Pueyo. We invite you to watch it.