This year I got to teach a numerical methods course to first year students in Faculty of Physics (Vilnius University). As theory is somewhat boring and feels somewhat detached from practice, I have decided to provide students with practical showcase on how to work with empirical data. For this showcase I have selected a small subset of a larger football data set. Namely, I decided to take a look at English Premier League's 2000/2001 season.

All of the opinion dynamics models we have considered so far had discrete opinions. However it would be rather natural to think about opinions as being continuous. Opinions become discrete only due to the way we observe them, namely ballots in the elections and questionnaires in the polls can have only discrete options (even in case you can write in your own preference). Also discrete opinions are easier to analyze, only then one can talk about the majority or compare their popularity.

Nevertheless there are few interesting models with continuous opinions. Usually these models are based on the concept of bounded confidence. Meaning that people tend to listen to other people who have a relatively similar opinion to theirs. Here in this post we will discuss one of these bounded confidence models proposed by Deffuant et al. in [1].

Last week we have talked about what drives formation of social groups. We have understood that people both want to belong to some group and also want to feel special. Having many different social groups is natural, but also dangerous as the need the groups need to feel safe and somewhat superior to the other groups. These needs might be manipulated to give rise to a social conflict or war.

Another theory claims that social conflicts or wars might be driven by the greed, will to obtain some resource. This type of conflicts were modeled by Sebastian Schutte of International Conflict Research Group at ETH Zurich. While his work is built upon something similar to regression models, his insights are nevertheless valuable in the context of Physics of Risk. We invite you to watch the videos below.

Let us try to discuss a bit different model by social scientist this time. In [1] a social scientist built a simple model to illustrate that differences between the social groups could be emergent property inherent to how we communicate.

We have been talking about different models of opinion dynamics, but we have never mentioned that electoral system can distort the actual opinions of the populace. In some cases electoral system can be rigged to favor one of the competing parties. One of such example is found in the United States.

In the US boundaries of electoral districts play a major role, because during the elections there it does not matter how many votes are cast for each of the parties. Only who ``won'' that district matters. So you can actually noticeably influence the election outcome by drawing electoral boundaries in a smart way.

More details about gerrymandering in the following video by Above the Noise. We invite you to watch it.