The hidden traits of endemic illiteracy in cities
arXiv:1809.10302 · doi:10.1016/j.physa.2018.09.153
Abstract
In spite of the considerable progress towards reducing illiteracy rates, many countries, including developed ones, have encountered difficulty achieving further reduction in these rates. This is worrying because illiteracy has been related to numerous health, social, and economic problems. Here, we show that the spatial patterns of illiteracy in urban systems have several features analogous to the spread of diseases such as dengue and obesity. Our results reveal that illiteracy rates are spatially long-range correlated, displaying non-trivial clustering structures characterized by percolation-like transitions and fractality. These patterns can be described in the context of percolation theory of long-range correlated systems at criticality. Together, these results provide evidence that the illiteracy incidence can be related to a transmissible process, in which the lack of access to minimal education propagates in a population in a similar fashion to endemic diseases.
arXiv comment19 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, supplementary information; accepted for publication in Physica A
References in corpus (10)
- Power-law distributions in empirical data
- Weak pairwise correlations imply strongly correlated network states in a neural population
- Multiscale mobility networks and the large scale spreading of infectious diseases
- Scale-free correlations in bird flocks
- Are biological systems poised at criticality?
- Laws of Population Growth
- Modeling Urban Growth Patterns with Correlated Percolation
- Distance to the scaling law: a useful approach for unveiling relationships between crime and urban metrics
- Scale-adjusted metrics for predicting the evolution of urban indicators and quantifying the performance of cities
- Spatial correlations, clustering and percolation-like transitions in homicide crimes