arXiv subjects

Alex Rutherford

Publications and source records attributed to Alex Rutherford.

14 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2022

Longitudinal Complex Dynamics of Labour Markets Reveal Increasing Polarisation

In this paper we conduct a longitudinal analysis of the structure of labour markets in the US over 7 decades of technological, economic and policy change. We make use of network science, natural language processing and machine learning to uncover structural changes in the labour market over time. We find a steady rate of both disappearance of jobs and a shift in the required work tasks, despite much technological and economic change over this time period. Machine learning is used to classify jobs as being predominantly cognitive or physical based on the textual description of the workplace tasks. We also measure increasing polarisation between these two classes of jobs, linked by the similarity of tasks, over time that could constrain workers wishing to move to different jobs.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2022

The Dynamic Resilience of Urban Labour Networks

Understanding and potentially predicting or even controlling urban labour markets represents a great challenge for workers and policy makers alike. Cities are effective engines of economic growth and prosperity and incubate complex dynamics within their labour market, and the labour markets they support demonstrate considerable diversity. This presents a challenge to policy makers who would like to optimise labour markets to benefit workers, promote economic growth and manage the impact of technological change. While much previous work has studied the economic characteristics of cities as a function of size and examined the exposure of urban economies to automation, this has often been from a static perspective. In this work we examine the structure of city job networks to uncover the diffusive properties. More specifically, we identify the occupations which are most important in promoting the diffusion of beneficial or deleterious properties. We find that these properties vary considerably with city size.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2021

The Network Limits of Infectious Disease Control via Occupation-Based Targeting

Policymakers commonly employ non-pharmaceutical interventions to manage the scale and severity of pandemics. Of non-pharmaceutical interventions, social distancing policies -- designed to reduce person-to-person pathogenic spread -- have risen to recent prominence. In particular, stay-at-home policies of the sort widely implemented around the globe in response to the COVID-19 pandemic have proven to be markedly effective at slowing pandemic growth. However, such blunt policy instruments, while effective, produce numerous unintended consequences, including potentially dramatic reductions in economic productivity. Here we develop methods to investigate the potential to simultaneously contain pandemic spread while also minimizing economic disruptions. We do so by incorporating both occupational and network information contained within an urban environment, information that is commonly excluded from typical pandemic control policy design. The results of our method suggest that large gains in both economic productivity and pandemic control might be had by the incorporation and consideration of simple-to-measure characteristics of the occupational contact network. However we find evidence that more sophisticated, and more privacy invasive, measures of this network do not drastically increase performance.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2020

Impossible by Conventional Means: Ten Years on from the DARPA Red Balloon Challenge

Ten years ago, DARPA launched the 'Network Challenge', more commonly known as the 'DARPA Red Balloon Challenge'. Ten red weather balloons were fixed at unknown locations in the US. An open challenge was launched to locate all ten, the first to do so would be declared the winner receiving a cash prize. A team from MIT Media Lab was able to locate them all within 9 hours using social media and a novel reward scheme that rewarded viral recruitment. This achievement was rightly seen as proof of the remarkable ability of social media, then relatively nascent, to solve real world problems such as large-scale spatial search. Upon reflection, however, the challenge was also remarkable as it succeeded despite many efforts to provide false information on the location of the balloons. At the time the false reports were filtered based on manual inspection of visual proof and comparing the IP addresses of those reporting with the purported coordinates of the balloons. In the ten years since, misinformation on social media has grown in prevalence and sophistication to be one of the defining social issues of our time. Seen differently we can cast the misinformation observed in the Red Balloon Challenge, and unexpected adverse effects in other social mobilisation challenges subsequently, not as bugs but as essential features. We further investigate the role of the increasing levels of political polarisation in modulating social mobilisation. We confirm that polarisation not only impedes the overall success of mobilisation, but also leads to a low reachability to oppositely polarised states, significantly hampering recruitment. We find that diversifying geographic pathways of social influence are key to circumvent barriers of political mobilisation and can boost the success of new open challenges.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2020

China's First Workforce Skill Taxonomy

China is the world's second largest economy. After four decades of economic miracles, China's economy is transitioning into an advanced, knowledge-based economy. Yet, we still lack a detailed understanding of the skills that underly the Chinese labor force, and the development and spatial distribution of these skills. For example, the US standardized skill taxonomy O*NET played an important role in understanding the dynamics of manufacturing and knowledge-based work, as well as potential risks from automation and outsourcing. Here, we use Machine Learning techniques to bridge this gap, creating China's first workforce skill taxonomy, and map it to O*NET. This enables us to reveal workforce skill polarization into social-cognitive skills and sensory-physical skills, and to explore the China's regional inequality in light of workforce skills, and compare it to traditional metrics such as education. We build an online tool for the public and policy makers to explore the skill taxonomy: skills.sysu.edu.cn. We will also make the taxonomy dataset publicly available for other researchers upon publication.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2018

Mapping the Privacy-Utility Tradeoff in Mobile Phone Data for Development

Today's age of data holds high potential to enhance the way we pursue and monitor progress in the fields of development and humanitarian action. We study the relation between data utility and privacy risk in large-scale behavioral data, focusing on mobile phone metadata as paradigmatic domain. To measure utility, we survey experts about the value of mobile phone metadata at various spatial and temporal granularity levels. To measure privacy, we propose a formal and intuitive measure of reidentification risk$\unicode{x2014}$the information ratio$\unicode{x2014}$and compute it at each granularity level. Our results confirm the existence of a stark tradeoff between data utility and reidentifiability, where the most valuable datasets are also most prone to reidentification. When data is specified at ZIP-code and hourly levels, outside knowledge of only 7% of a person's data suffices for reidentification and retrieval of the remaining 93%. In contrast, in the least valuable dataset, specified at municipality and daily levels, reidentification requires on average outside knowledge of 51%, or 31 data points, of a person's data to retrieve the remaining 49%. Overall, our findings show that coarsening data directly erodes its value, and highlight the need for using data-coarsening, not as stand-alone mechanism, but in combination with data-sharing models that provide adjustable degrees of accountability and security.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2016

Twitter as a Source of Global Mobility Patterns for Social Good

Data on human spatial distribution and movement is essential for understanding and analyzing social systems. However existing sources for this data are lacking in various ways; difficult to access, biased, have poor geographical or temporal resolution, or are significantly delayed. In this paper, we describe how geolocation data from Twitter can be used to estimate global mobility patterns and address these shortcomings. These findings will inform how this novel data source can be harnessed to address humanitarian and development efforts.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2016

Inferring Mechanisms for Global Constitutional Progress

Constitutions help define domestic political orders, but are known to be influenced by two international mechanisms: one that reflects global temporal trends in legal development, and another that reflects international network dynamics such as shared colonial history. We introduce the provision space; the growing set of all legal provisions existing in the world's constitutions over time. Through this we uncover a third mechanism influencing constitutional change: hierarchical dependencies between legal provisions, under which the adoption of essential, fundamental provisions precedes more advanced provisions. This third mechanism appears to play an especially important role in the emergence of new political rights, and may therefore provide a useful roadmap for advocates of those rights. We further characterise each legal provision in terms of the strength of these mechanisms.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2016

The International Postal Network and Other Global Flows As Proxies for National Wellbeing

The digital exhaust left by flows of physical and digital commodities provides a rich measure of the nature, strength and significance of relationships between countries in the global network. With this work, we examine how these traces and the network structure can reveal the socioeconomic profile of different countries. We take into account multiple international networks of physical and digital flows, including the previously unexplored international postal network. By measuring the position of each country in the Trade, Postal, Migration, International Flights, IP and Digital Communications networks, we are able to build proxies for a number of crucial socioeconomic indicators such as GDP per capita and the Human Development Index ranking along with twelve other indicators used as benchmarks of national wellbeing by the United Nations and other international organisations. In this context, we have also proposed and evaluated a global connectivity degree measure applying multiplex theory across the six networks that accounts for the strength of relationships between countries. We conclude with a multiplex community analysis of the global flow networks, showing how countries with shared community membership over multiple networks have similar socioeconomic profiles. Combining multiple flow data sources into global multiplex networks can help understand the forces which drive economic activity on a global level. Such an ability to infer proxy indicators in a context of incomplete information is extremely timely in light of recent discussions on measurement of indicators relevant to the Sustainable Development Goals.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2014

Flooding through the lens of mobile phone activity

Natural disasters affect hundreds of millions of people worldwide every year. Emergency response efforts depend upon the availability of timely information, such as information concerning the movements of affected populations. The analysis of aggregated and anonymized Call Detail Records (CDR) captured from the mobile phone infrastructure provides new possibilities to characterize human behavior during critical events. In this work, we investigate the viability of using CDR data combined with other sources of information to characterize the floods that occurred in Tabasco, Mexico in 2009. An impact map has been reconstructed using Landsat-7 images to identify the floods. Within this frame, the underlying communication activity signals in the CDR data have been analyzed and compared against rainfall levels extracted from data of the NASA-TRMM project. The variations in the number of active phones connected to each cell tower reveal abnormal activity patterns in the most affected locations during and after the floods that could be used as signatures of the floods - both in terms of infrastructure impact assessment and population information awareness. The representativeness of the analysis has been assessed using census data and civil protection records. While a more extensive validation is required, these early results suggest high potential in using cell tower activity information to improve early warning and emergency management mechanisms.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2014

Estimating Food Consumption and Poverty Indices with Mobile Phone Data

Recent studies have shown the value of mobile phone data to tackle problems related to economic development and humanitarian action. In this research, we assess the suitability of indicators derived from mobile phone data as a proxy for food security indicators. We compare the measures extracted from call detail records and airtime credit purchases to the results of a nationwide household survey conducted at the same time. Results show high correlations (> .8) between mobile phone data derived indicators and several relevant food security variables such as expenditure on food or vegetable consumption. This correspondence suggests that, in the future, proxies derived from mobile phone data could be used to provide valuable up-to-date operational information on food security throughout low and middle income countries.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2013

Corruption Drives the Emergence of Civil Society

Peer punishment of free-riders (defectors) is a key mechanism for promoting cooperation in society. However, it is highly unstable since some cooperators may contribute to a common project but refuse to punish defectors. Centralized sanctioning institutions (for example, tax-funded police and criminal courts) can solve this problem by punishing both defectors and cooperators who refuse to punish. These institutions have been shown to emerge naturally through social learning and then displace all other forms of punishment, including peer punishment. However, this result provokes a number of questions. If centralized sanctioning is so successful, then why do many highly authoritarian states suffer from low levels of cooperation? Why do states with high levels of public good provision tend to rely more on citizen-driven peer punishment? And what happens if centralized institutions can be circumvented by individual acts of bribery? Here, we consider how corruption influences the evolution of cooperation and punishment. Our model shows that the effectiveness of centralized punishment in promoting cooperation breaks down when some actors in the model are allowed to bribe centralized authorities. Counterintuitively, increasing the sanctioning power of the central institution makes things even worse, since this prevents peer punishers from playing a role in maintaining cooperation. As a result, a weaker centralized authority is actually more effective because it allows peer punishment to restore cooperation in the presence of corruption. Our results provide an evolutionary rationale for why public goods provision rarely flourishes in polities that rely only on strong centralized institutions. Instead, cooperation requires both decentralized and centralized enforcement. These results help to explain why citizen participation is a fundamental necessity for policing the commons.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2013

Targeted Social Mobilisation in a Global Manhunt

Social mobilization, the ability to mobilize large numbers of people via social networks to achieve highly distributed tasks, has received significant attention in recent times. This growing capability, facilitated by modern communication technology, is highly relevant to endeavors which require the search for individuals that posses rare information or skill, such as finding medical doctors during disasters, or searching for missing people. An open question remains, as to whether in time-critical situations, people are able to recruit in a targeted manner, or whether they resort to so-called blind search, recruiting as many acquaintances as possible via broadcast communication. To explore this question, we examine data from our recent success in the U.S. State Department's Tag Challenge, which required locating and photographing 5 target persons in 5 different cities in the United States and Europe in less than 12 hours, based only on a single mug-shot. We find that people are able to consistently route information in a targeted fashion even under increasing time pressure. We derive an analytical model for global mobilization and use it to quantify the extent to which people were targeting others during recruitment. Our model estimates that approximately 1 in 3 messages were of targeted fashion during the most time-sensitive period of the challenge.This is a novel observation at such short temporal scales, and calls for opportunities for devising viral incentive schemes that provide distance- or time-sensitive rewards to approach the target geography more rapidly, with applications in multiple areas from emergency preparedness, to political mobilization.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2011

Good Fences: The Importance of Setting Boundaries for Peaceful Coexistence

We consider the conditions of peace and violence among ethnic groups, testing a theory designed to predict the locations of violence and interventions that can promote peace. Characterizing the model's success in predicting peace requires examples where peace prevails despite diversity. Switzerland is recognized as a country of peace, stability and prosperity. This is surprising because of its linguistic and religious diversity that in other parts of the world lead to conflict and violence. Here we analyze how peaceful stability is maintained. Our analysis shows that peace does not depend on integrated coexistence, but rather on well defined topographical and political boundaries separating groups. Mountains and lakes are an important part of the boundaries between sharply defined linguistic areas. Political canton and circle (sub-canton) boundaries often separate religious groups. Where such boundaries do not appear to be sufficient, we find that specific aspects of the population distribution either guarantee sufficient separation or sufficient mixing to inhibit intergroup violence according to the quantitative theory of conflict. In exactly one region, a porous mountain range does not adequately separate linguistic groups and violent conflict has led to the recent creation of the canton of Jura. Our analysis supports the hypothesis that violence between groups can be inhibited by physical and political boundaries. A similar analysis of the area of the former Yugoslavia shows that during widespread ethnic violence existing political boundaries did not coincide with the boundaries of distinct groups, but peace prevailed in specific areas where they did coincide. The success of peace in Switzerland may serve as a model to resolve conflict in other ethnically diverse countries and regions of the world.

physics.soc-ph↗