Imagine that you have to measure the surface area of the lake by using only a cannon! Let us assume that the geometric shape of the lake is too complex to be dealt with using simple formulas and that you have almost infinite supply of cannon balls. In such case you just have to hope that you are perfectly random shooter! Why so?

If your shots cover the hitting area of the cannon uniformly then you can obtain the area of the lake by estimating the probability to hit it:

\begin{equation} S_{fig} = p S_{hit} , \end{equation}

here \( S_{fig} \) is an estimate of the surface area of certain geometric shape (lake for example), \( p \) is an estimate of the probability to hit the shape, while \( S_{hit} \) is the hitting area of the cannon. The obtained are of course will be only approximate, but one can arrive reasonably near the actual answer.

Next we illustrate this method by applying it towards three geometric shapes - square, circle and Euclidean egg. Why the Euclidean egg? Well, there are numerous reasons for it, one of them being Easter. Happy Easter!

In February and Match three very important conference to the econophysicists were held: "Unsolved Problems on Noise", "Verhandlungen DPG" and "Open Readings" (lt. "Laisvieji skaitymai"). Our B. Kaulakys, V. Gontis, A. Kononovicius, P. Purlys and R. Kazakevičius have given oral and poster presentations at these conference. Presentations were mostly concerned with our newest achievements in the applications of Kirman model and burst statistics.

Recently in Lithuanian and world's different or global social spaces there was a lot of disccusion on anti-piracy and the proportionality of so-called "protection" of intelectual properties. The US politicians consider SOPA and PIPA, while EU countries one after another expressed will to join ACTA. In Lithuanian media and blogosphere, as most probably in the rest of the world, has split into the ACTA supporter and opposition camps.

We tackle many different problems here on Physics of Risk. Thus we can offer few different topics for students looking for supervisors and interesting topics for their term papers.

List of topics »

In the last year we have already written that work in the context of Physics of Risk provides varying insights into very different complex systems. The previous article [1] contained brief review of Physics of Risk platform and discussions on some of the models published using it. This article received great response and was even awarded the Best Paper Award by the publisher IARIA.