Die ramp van Brexit

Hendrikje van Andel, bristlecone pines, and why we die.

At the moment of writing this editorial (September 2004), the oldest living person in the world is Hendrikje van Andel. She celebrated her 114th birthday on June 29 of this year, and lives in an old people’s home in Hoogeveen, the Netherlands. When interviewed by the world press she cheerfully gave away her secret: a herring and a glass of orange juice a day. While survival beyond the age of 10...

Brexit and health services.

Brexit and Translational Research

In a historic referendum on June 23, 2016, the UK voted to leave the European Union (EU) after more than four decades of membership. For the time being, the UK is still a member of the EU until the UK government triggers Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty–which probably won't happen before the end of 2016. A minimum of 2 years of negotiations will follow before theUK ceases to be an EUmember. This...

Bubbles, Blind-Spots and Brexit

In this paper we develop a well-established financial model to investigate whether bubbles were present in opinion polls and betting markets prior to the UK’s vote on EU membership on 23 June 2016. The importance of our contribution is threefold. Firstly, our continuous-time model allows for irregularly spaced time series—a common feature of polling data. Secondly, we build on qualitative compa...

The Topological "Shape" of Brexit

Persistent homology is a method from computational algebraic topology that can be used to study the “shape” of data. We illustrate two filtrations — the weight rank clique filtration and the Vietoris–Rips (VR) filtration — that are commonly used in persistent homology, and we apply these filtrations to a pair of data sets that are both related to the 2016 European Union “Brexit” referendum in t...