Hong Qi

Abstract:
Over the past two decades, school shootings within the United States have repeatedly devastated communities and shaken public opinion. Many of these attacks appear to be `lone wolf' ones driven by specific individual motivations, and the identification of precursor signals and hence actionable policy measures would thus seem highly unlikely. Here, we take a system wide view and investigate the timing of school attacks and the dynamical feedback with social media. We identify a trend divergence in which college attacks have continued to accelerate over the last 25 years while those carried out on K-12 schools have slowed down. We establish the copycat effect in school shootings and uncover a statistical association between social media chatter and the probability of an attack in the following days. While hinting at causality, this relationship may also help mitigate the frequency and intensity of future attacks.

Abstract:
Society's techno-social systems are becoming ever faster and more computer-orientated. However, far from simply generating faster versions of existing behaviour, we show that this speed-up can generate a new behavioural regime as humans lose the ability to intervene in real time. Analyzing millisecond-scale data for the world's largest and most powerful techno-social system, the global financial market, we uncover an abrupt transition to a new all-machine phase characterized by large numbers of subsecond extreme events. The proliferation of these subsecond events shows an intriguing correlation with the onset of the system-wide financial collapse in 2008. Our findings are consistent with an emerging ecology of competitive machines featuring ‘crowds’ of predatory algorithms, and highlight the need for a new scientific theory of subsecond financial phenomena.