# What's all this, then?

## Fitting the SIR model of disease to data in Python

Introduction and the problem The SIR model for spread of disease was first proposed in 1927 in a collection of three articles in the Proceedings of the Royal Society by Anderson Gray McKendrick and William Ogilvy Kermack; the resulting theory is known as Kermack–McKendrick theory; now considered a subclass of a more general theory known as compartmental models in epidemiology. The three original articles were republished in 1991, in a special issue of the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology.

## Mapping voting gains between elections

So this goes back quite some time to the recent Australian Federal election on May 18. In my own electorate (known formally as a “Division”) of Cooper, the Greens, who until recently had been showing signs of winning the seat, were pretty well trounced by Labor. Some background asides First, “Labor” as in “Australian Labor Party” is spelled the American way; that is, without a “u”, even though “labour” meaning work, is so spelled in Australian English.