CSSS 2009 Santa Fe-Projects & Working Groups

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Brainstorming

• Disease ecology of media hype. How much and event gets covered in the news often appears to depends on how much it is already covered in the news. Often this distorts reality. For example, the number of searches for "swine flu" (a proxy for media hype), do not reflect the patterns of disease spread over the same period.

Google searches for "swine flu"

Actual number of swine flu cases over the same period

While the number of flu cases increased, the searches died off, as interest in the topic waned. It would be interesting to follow the origin, spread and extinction of media hype, maybe applying models commonly used to study the spread of disease. Alexander Mikheyev

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  Change in Phoenix home prices. Source: NYT

Housing prices. The New York times has a set of dramatic graphs showing the rise and fall of home prices in select cities. Again these graphs reminded me a bit of those produced by susceptible-infected-recovered models of disease spread. Maybe there is something to it? Or maybe this phenomenon is already well understood by economists? Alexander Mikheyev