In the United Kingdom, traffic accidents led to 1782 deaths and 25,484 serious injuries in 2018. In addition to these direct human costs, crashes, collisions and breakdowns also cause severe congestion leading to significant drops in road efficiency. Hence, there is an imperative to further reduce the accident rate on UK roads.
The principles of control theory assert that feedback often leads to unstable behaviour and oscillatory dynamics. Examples include engineering systems such as thermostats and steering devices, as well as natural and biological systems.
As centres of human population and civilisation, cities have pushed the boundaries of human productivity and innovation.
Many stochastic processes in natural and man-made systems exhibit occasional extreme events which are rare in comparison to usual outcomes. Though infrequent, such events can still carry decisive weight.
The global television hit Game of Thrones, first aired in 2011, was inspired by a series of fantasy books written by George R. R. Martin. Since publication in 1996, A Song of Ice and Fire has been translated into more than 45 languages, and established a unique niche in the world of storytelling.
Scientists and public health officials have relied on a variety of epidemiological models to forecast the trajectory of the coronavirus pandemic, and to derive guidance for policies aiming to avoid overloading health facilities. All such models contain parameters, and forecasting tools tend to choose these to provide a best fit to available observations.
Late in the spring of this year, many nations around the world, especially in Europe, faced public health crises, as coronavirus infections threatened to overwhelm their intensive care facilities. Authorities responded with drastic measures to reduce social contacts, closing businesses and schools, restricting public transport and banning large social events.
Large earthquakes and the aftershocks they generate cause considerable damage to buildings. As a result, risk management, evacuation planning and rapid seismic loss estimation require good estimates of the cumulative damage likely to arise from an earthquake sequence. This is especially important in geographical regions of extreme risk.
On short timescales, earthquakes cluster in both time and space, eventually complicating the analysis of seismicity. One basic goal is to partition the earthquake catalogue into two classes of events — background events, regarded as spontaneous or independent earthquakes, and clustered events, including events triggered by other earthquakes.
Here are links to a few recent articles by LML External Fellow Mark Buchanan.
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