相关论文: The physics of large-scale food crises

In the wake of the influenza pandemic of 1889-1890 Jacques Bertillon, a pioneer of medical statistics, noticed that after the massive death spike there was a dip in birth numbers around 9 months later which was significantly larger than…

Anticipating the outbreak of a food crisis is crucial to efficiently allocate emergency relief and reduce human suffering. However, existing food insecurity early warning systems rely on risk measures that are often delayed, outdated, or…

We examine what happens in a population when it experiences an abrupt change in surrounding conditions. Several cases of such "abrupt transitions" for both physical and living social systems are analyzed from which it can be seen that all…

We study the statistics of human deaths from wars, conflicts, similar man-made conflicts as well as natural disasters. The probability distribution of number of people killed in natural disasters as well as man made situations show power…

Critical transitions, or large changes in the state of a system after a small change in the system's external conditions or parameters, commonly occur in a wide variety of disciplines, from the biological and social sciences to physics.…

In part 1 we identified a new coupling between death spikes and birth dips that occurs following catastrophic events such as influenza pandemics and earthquakes. Here we seek to characterize some of the key features. We introduce a transfer…

Various works have already showed that common shocks and cross-country financial linkages caused the banking systems of several countries to be highly interconnected with the result that during bad times, banking crises may arise…

This paper is not (or at least not only) about human infant mortality. In line with reliability theory, "infant" will refer here to the time interval following birth during which the mortality (or failure) rate decreases. This definition…

Forest-fire and avalanche models support the notion that frequent catastrophes prevent the growth of very large populations and as such prevent rare large-scale catastrophes. We show that this notion is not universal. A new model class…

The size that an epidemic can reach, measured in terms of the number of fatalities, is an extremely relevant quantity. It has been recently claimed [Cirillo & Taleb, Nature Physics 2020] that the size distribution of major epidemics in…

In the same way as tree rings give us useful information about the climate many decades ago (or even centuries ago in the case of big trees), population pyramids allow us to know birth or death rates several decades earlier. Naturally, they…

Resilience, the ability to recover from adverse events ("shocks"), is of fundamental importance to food security. This is especially true in poor countries, where basic needs are frequently threatened by economic, environmental, and health…

Catastrophes of all kinds can be roughly defined as short duration-large amplitude events following and followed by long periods of "ripening". Major earthquakes surely belong to the class of 'catastrophic' events. Because of the space-time…

Power law distributions of macroscopic observables are ubiquitous in both the natural and social sciences. They are indicative of correlated, cooperative phenomena between groups of interacting agents at the microscopic level. In this paper…

We review the present status of our research and understanding regarding the dynamics and the statistical properties of earthquakes, mainly from a statistical physical viewpoint. Emphasis is put both on the physics of friction and fracture,…

After birth setting up an effective immune system is a major challenge for all living organisms. In this paper we show that this process can be explored by using the age-specific infant death rate as a kind of sensor. This is made possible…

Social unrest may reflect a variety of factors such as poverty, unemployment, and social injustice. Despite the many possible contributing factors, the timing of violent protests in North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 as well as…

Understanding the statistical properties of a collection of individuals subject to random displacements and birth-and-death events is key to several applications in physics and life sciences, encompassing the diagnostic of nuclear reactors…

Ensuring food supply stability is key to food security for economies, and food imports become increasingly important to safeguard food supplies in economies with inadequate food production. Food import shocks have significant impacts on…

If we assume that earthquakes are chaotic, and influenced locally then chaos theory suggests that there should be a temporal association between earthquakes in a local region that should be revealed with statistical examination. To date no…