Chapter 10. Online Resources
Detecting Networks via RFIDs
Online Resource 10.1
A video introducing the RFID technology and their use in mapping social interactions.
Hospital Outbreaks
Online Resource 10.2
Bacteria resistant to current antibiotics pose an important threat to global health. Such bacteria are particularly prevalent in hospi- tals and health care facilities. The Interactive Feature by Scientific American describes the tracking of bacterical outbreaks in hospitals.
Hospital Outbreak VisualizationSpreading in Social Networks
Online Resource 10.3
"If your friends are obese, your risk of obesity is 45 percent higher. ... If your friend's friends are obese, your risk of obesity is 25 percent higher. ... If your friend's friend's friend, someone you probably don't even know, is obese, your risk of obesity is 10 percent higher. It's only when you get to your friend's friend's friend's friends that there's no longer a relationship between that per- son's body size and your own body size." Watch Nicholas Christakis explaining the spread of health patterns in social networks.
North American Flight Patterns
Online Resource 10.4
Real time flights across North America, rely- ing on data released by the Federal Aviation Administration. This global transportation network is responsible for the spread of patho- gens across continents. Consequently flight schedules represent the input for epidemic forecasts. While this video, produced by Aaron Koblin, could easily be seen as a purely scien- tific illustration, it is also viewed as digital art by the art community. Indeed, the video is now in Media Art collection of the Museum of Mod- ern Art (MoMA) in New York.
Aaron KoblinGLEAM
Online Resource 10.5
A video describing the GLEAM software package for epidemic prediction.
GLEAMvizThe Speed of a Pandemic
Online Resource 10.6
The spread of a pathogen, as predicted by GLEAM, from three initial outbreak locations. While the geographic spreading pattern is difficult to interpret, in the effective distance representation the pandemic follows a regular radial pattern (Figure 10.31). The observed spreading patterns prompt us to ask: What is the speed of a typical pathogen as it spreads around the globe? The speed de- pends on three key parameters: 1. The basic reporduction number R0, which is in the vicinity of 2 for influenza type viruses (Table 10.2). 2. The recovery rate, which is approximately 3 days for influenza. 3.The mobility rate, which represents the total fraction of the population that travels during a day. This parameter is in the range of 0.01-0.001. Running GLEAM (Figure 10.26) with these pa- rameters we can compute the correlation between the arrival time and the geographic distance to the source of the epidemic, obtaining a speed of about 250-300 km/day. Therefore an influenza virus moves through a continent with the speed of a sports car or of a smaller airplane [89].
GLEAMviz