Category: Media

Simplifying Complexity

In our last episode, Neil Johnson explained how there was an underlying power law with a slope of 1.8 that described the number of casualties that occur in wars.

Today’s episode digs deeper into where this power law comes from, the route that Neil’s research took to explain it, and how the arrival of the internet finally provided the missing datasets required to understand the underlying structure of something seemingly as chaotic as war.

Neil is Professor of Physics and Head of the Dynamic Online Networks Lab at George Washington University.

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Simplifying Complexity

When we think of what caused a certain number of people to die in a specific war, we tend to think about a number of factors. for example, the terrain or political drivers. But what if the number of deaths that occur in a war is actually dictated by something far less obvious?

Neil Johnson, Professor of Physics and Head of the Dynamic Online Networks Lab at George Washington University, has returned to explain how studying the casualties of war can give us a greater understanding of the causes of war.

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Physics World

Across the world, varying factions of society seem to be angrier and more divided than ever. But as Anna Demming explains, physicists are doing their best to shed light on what has gone wrong

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The Independent

The Russian government doesn’t need to do anything to encourage the spread of extremism ‘because it’s already cooking,’ Neil Johnson tells Gustaf Kilander

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Nature Research Highlights

Harmful online information can lead to many forms of online anti-X hate, where X can be races, ethnicity, or even vaccines. Such anti-X hate can drive certain groups to extremism and induce dangerous misbehavior, such as the incident of the US capital riot in January 2021.

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NBC

Members of the loose-knit Boogaloo movement who found each other online joined armed protests against Covid lockdowns.

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Simplifying Complexity

When a system fails, how do you think about cause and effect? One way to consider this in complex systems is to imagine a pile of sand, and dropping one grain of sand at a time in random positions onto the pile. As time passes, you’ll start to form little hills. Eventually, a grain of sand will hit one of these hills, and you get an avalanche.

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The Hindu

Scientists have been able to model the dynamics of online hate communities with equations used to describe shock waves.

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GW Today

New ‘Shockwave’ Science Tracks Online Hate Speech

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Physics Magazine

A theory derived from nonlinear fluid dynamics is able to reproduce the formation dynamics of online hate communities—offering insights that could inform public policies.

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