The LBC topic this week is online shopping, and this isn't about online shopping, but metamathematical analysis and predications to the London riots and looting which took place in 2011.
Hannah Fry from UCL has a nice video for the analysis. It seems that, yes the riots could be predicted, how the riot would spread, but not the spark to set things off.
It turns out that the distribution of rioters travelling to the riots match the distribution of shoppers travelling (or rather retail spending flows).
And as for the five finger discount, or "shopping with violence", matches shopping analysis and also the predator-prey model.
Looking at mobile phone analysis (memo, turn your phone in the airplane mode, or off before rioting), the spread of the "idea to riot" follows the contagion model, and the spark zones matches the recent budget cuts.
Which means I need to look at the new austerity measures a lot more closely…
