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Social media in Ebola outbreak
- L. HOSSAIN, D. KAM, F. KONG, R. T. WIGAND, T. BOSSOMAIER
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- Journal:
- Epidemiology & Infection / Volume 144 / Issue 10 / July 2016
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 04 March 2016, pp. 2136-2143
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- Article
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The West African 2014 Ebola outbreak has highlighted the need for a better information network. Hybrid information networks, an integration of both hierarchical and formalized command control-driven and community-based, or ad hoc emerging networks, could assist in improving public health responses. By filling the missing gaps with social media use, the public health response could be more proactive rather than reactive in responding to such an outbreak of global concern. This article provides a review of the current social media use specifically in this outbreak by systematically collecting data from ProQuest Newsstand, Dow Jones Factiva, Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMED) as well as Google Trends. The period studied is from 19 March 2014 (first request for information on ProMED) to 15 October 2014, a total of 31 weeks. The term ‘Ebola’ was used in the search for media reports. The outcome of the review shows positive results for social media use in effective surveillance response mechanisms – for improving the detection, preparedness and response of the outbreak – as a complement to traditional, filed, work-based surveillance approach.
1 - Introduction
- Edited by Terry R. J. Bossomaier, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, New South Wales, David G. Green, Charles Sturt University, Albury, New South Wales
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- Book:
- Complex Systems
- Published online:
- 04 August 2010
- Print publication:
- 06 July 2000, pp 1-10
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Summary
Overview
Imagine a violent storm sweeping across a beach. The wind picks up debris, swirls it around madly, dumping it somewhere else. Devastation remains, structure and order are gone. But one of the great waves of interest to break over science in the last decade has been the delicate balance between order and disorder: the patterns which appear out of nowhere through self-organisation; the fine structure of chaotic dynamics; the long range order which appears at phase transitions.
Fractal geometry in the 1970s moved from abstract mathematics to real world applications: simple rules could generate complex structures of great symmetry over an infinite range of scales. Chaos caught many peoples' imagination in the 1980s: simple rules could produce arbitrarily complex patterns which appear quite random. As the millennium draws to a close, more and more of these phenomena seem like different aspects of an underlying paradigm: complexity. Not just a new scientific theory or body of data, it challenges fundamental attitudes to the way we do science.
Although it might be intuitively apparent that a system is complex, defining complexity has proved difficult to pin down with numerous definitions on record. As yet there is no agreed theory of complexity. Much of the mathematics is intractable and computer simulation plays a major part. Thus in this book we do not try to present a uniform theory of complexity, nor do we try to describe or characterise many complex systems. We try to present the major theoretical tools and mathematics which help us along the way to these much more lofty goals.
4 - The theory of comparative eye design
- Colin Blakemore, University of Oxford, K. Adler, M. Pointon
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- Book:
- Vision
- Published online:
- 05 May 2010
- Print publication:
- 24 January 1991, pp 45-52
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Summary
Introduction
Perhaps the most fascinating and yet provocative aspect of vision is the manner in which eyes adapt to their environment. There is no single optimum eye design as physicists might like, but rather a variety of different solutions each dictated by the animals lifestyle, e.g. the ‘Four-eyed fish’, Anableps anableps, with one pair of aerial pupils and a second pair of aquatic pupils (Walls, 1942). This unique fish, which patrols the water surface, dramatizes the extreme plasticity of optics in adapting to a particular subset of the environment. The animal's life style within an environment obviously shapes many properties of the retina such as the distribution and types of rods, cones and ganglion cells (Walls, 1942; Hughes, 1977; Lythgoe, 1979). Furthermore, it is probable that the grand strategy of early visual information processing is also an adaptation to the particular world in which we live, i.e. a world of objects rather than the infinitely unexpected. We develop this perspective after considering the optical design of eyes.
Our first objective here is to show that elementary ideas of physics and information sciences can give insight into eye design. In doing so we stress the comparative approach. Only by studying diverse eyes, of both the simple and compound variety can we appreciate the common design principles necessary to apply meaningfully concepts from physics to biology. Accordingly, we try to explain observations such as: (a) the optical image quality is often superior to the photoreceptor grain; (b) the resolving power of falconiforms and dragonflies is proportional to their head size; (c) the cone outer segment diameter of diverse hawks that differ enormously in head size is fixed at about 2μm;