Complexity and Criticality of Geterogeneous or Anisotropic Spreading Models

From Santa Fe Institute

Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, University of Vermont Models of how things spread often assume that transmission mechanisms are fixed over space and time. However, the transmission of infectious diseases can depend on local human behaviour or quality of the surrounding infrastructure. Likewise, social contagions like the spread of ideas, beliefs, and innovations depend on local norms or culture, and they can lose or gain in momentum as they spread. Diseases mutate and find subpopulations where they ...