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Mathematical Model of Zombie Epidemics Reveals Two Types of Living-Dead Strains
KentuckyFC writes "Epidemiologists have long known how to model the way disease spreads through a population using a computer simulation. This generally involves three populations of individuals: those who are susceptible to disease, those who are infected and those who recover, return to the population and are no longer susceptible. Researchers then feed data about the number of infections and so on into the model which can then work out the disease characteristics such as infection rates. And with this information, they can predict the future evolution of the disease. Now researchers have used a similar model to simulate the spread of infection during a zombie epidemic. They've gathered infection data from real zombie movies, put this into the model and used it to predict the disease characteristics. The results show two clear types of zombie infection which differ in what happens to people after they die. In the first, epitomized by Night of the Living Dead, everybody who dies becomes a zombie. In the second, as in Shaun of the Dead, not everyone who dies becomes a zombie--contact with a zombie beforehand is required. This allows the interesting dynamic of escaping zombification by committing suicide. It also shows how close these zombies have come to winning. The research isn't entirely frivolous. The researchers say exactly the same process of model-building, data gathering and simulation works equally well on real diseases such as influenza. So their approach is a useful teaching tool for budding epidemiologists of the future."
...can someone explain to me this (american) obsession with zombies?
I can't explain it, for me it was just a weird cult film from the 1970's, pure 'safe' entertainment. Why do people pay to go on rollercoasters, but wouldn't want to get on on a commuter train if they knew it would crash? I did some googling and found these explanations. the first from LiveScience ...
The reason for this popularity may trace back to an unexpected source, according to a new analysis: In fact, zombies may be helping us cope with the aftermath of World War II.
"We use fictional narratives not only to emotionally cope with the possibility of impending doom, but even more importantly perhaps to work through the ethical and philosophical frameworks that were in many ways left shattered in the wake of WWII," Stanford literary scholar Angela Becerra Vidergar said in a statement.
Vidergar, a doctoral student in comparative literature, analyzed mass disaster stories in pop culture for her dissertation. She found that mass disasters such as the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki opened up new realizations about the human capacity for violence, casting doubt about the upsides of modernized society.
"Instead," Vidergar said, "we are left with this cultural fixation on fictionalizing our own death, very specifically mass-scale destruction."
Predictions about the end times are nothing new, of course. Doomsday believers have been promising that the end is near for centuries, with the December 2012 "Mayan apocalypse" just one in a long line of failed predictions.
In the aftermath of traumatic events like World War II and the Sept. 11, 2011, terrorist attacks, interest seems to spike, Vidergar said. Shows like the National Geographic Channel's "Doomsday Preppers" profile people who go beyond pondering the end and start planning for it.
Though few real-world preppers worry about zombies, fantasies about the zombie apocalypse make up a large chunk of post-apocalyptic pop culture, Vidergar found.
Shows like AMC's "The Walking Dead" and movies like 2007's "28 Weeks Later" help people work through how they'd act in a survivalist situation, she said.
"Zombies are important as a reflection of ourselves," Vidergar said. "The ethical decisions that the survivors have to make under duress and the actions that follow those choices are very unlike anything they would have done in their normal state of life."
What's more, Vidergar said, zombie apocalypse tales actually invoke hope amidst destruction and death, as survivors battle for their lives.
"Even if as a society we have lost a lot of our belief in a positive future and instead have more of an idea of a disaster to come, we still think that we are survivors, we still want to believe that we would survive," Vidergar said. http://www.livescience.com/27287-zombie-apocalypse-world-war-ii.html
And from http://www.policymic.com/articles/29334/the-walking-dead-why-are-americans-so-obsessed-with-zombies
In order to understand the connection between zombie movies and American unhappiness, we have to start at the beginning. The first popular zombie movie was in 1968, a tumultuous year in American politics with the Vietnam War, the unrest at the Democratic Convention, and the general malaise of the 1960s. The film, (which, incidentally, was one of the first movies to have a black man play a lead character), “terrified” audiences around the country with its portrayal of huge mobs eating all they come into contact with and destroying society in a blithering mass. The film’s iconic images of the dead, staring blankly into the eyes of horrified survivors, are not hard to tie to the growing disconnect between the youth and the more established generations, th