I just read the Excel model that you can download as part of the article:
- It uses the parameters of previous Ebola outbreaks as a base.
These outbreaks happened in remote and sparsely populated regions. In contrast, the outbreak in Monrovia has hit slum like neighborhoods. This is a completely different base.
- The Excel model uses a "flat" model of population that doesn't take into account geographical distribution.
Infectiousness in slums will be a lot higher than in previous outbreaks because of the density of population.
- The model talks about keeping 70% of the infected population at home or in hospitals in order to reduce the infection rate. This way, the epidemic will slowly decrease.
However, there is widespread fear of hospitalization and the mortality rate of Ebola (80%) basically means that people will distrust any doctors, hospital etc. So I can't see how this should happen.
- In the history of Ebola there was no outbreak of this size.
In the past there were plenty (relatively) of workers per case. But now patients will outnumber the helpers.
Summary: I can't see why the exponential development could be slowed down as indicated in the model...
The death toll of the disease is 80% of all persons infected. While the disease increases exponentially, the ratio of infected / dead is around 55% currently. But that still means that 80% will be dead three weeks later. Source: http://healthmap.org/site/dise...
There are only 4M inhabitants in Liberia, so 1.5M means half of them dead. There will be "unusual effects" of such a situation, namely that everybody will run for their life to get out of the country (and into the neighbor countries). I'd be interested if this is included in the simulation.
Reading the last publications about the spreading of Ebola, I've got the idea that WHO tries to hide information, in particular about the different types of spreading. So I'm making this up from common sense, maybe somebody with access to privileged information might add details:
Spreading in slums: That seems to be the case in Monrovia ultimately. Inhabitants don't trust the public health system (with certain reason...) and believe in which doctors or conspiracy theories. Once >500 persons are infected, it becomes practically impossible to research the infection tree and to isolate contacts. In the last 3 weeks Ebola spread exponentially. Please tell me if I'm wrong, but I got the impression that Monrovia is probably "lost".
Spreading across the "pepper coast" via land connections: The area from Guinea to Ghana seems to be relatively sparsely populated with exception of a few cities. And these cities are now basically disconnected from international air traffic. Part of the borders are closed. The villagers along the land connections will become increasingly suspicious of travelers from the cities, so I would predict increasingly violent confrontations. Maybe this might lead to slower spreading (apart from disastrous consequences for the economy, obviously).
Spreading to Nigeria: Nigeria has 170M population, as opposed to 4M for Liberia, and Nigeria is well connected internationally. The recent cases seem to have been contained and tertiary and quartiary contacts have been followed-up. So apparently things work out better in Nigeria compared to Liberia.
So my understanding is: A Pandemic will start once Ebola reaches the slums of Nigeria and starts spreading to more cases than the MSF or others can contain (maybe some 200-500 cases). The pandemic will end once a vaccine becomes available in large quantities, which is supposed to happen in 3-9 months.
It's an all in one ticket tracker, CRM, timesheet, project management (including GanttCharts), WIKI, form, full-text-search, etc. and it includes financial management. So you can create invoices directly from the time you spent on tickets and projects.
The downside: It uses TCL and AOLServer instead of PHP and Apache.
There is: - An integrated employee file with all available information - Basic employee information and hiring workflow - Portrait component & "Employee of the day" option - (Very) basic payroll information, specially protected. - A skill database (non-FOSS extension module) - A forum associated with each employee for comments etc. - A file storage associated with each user to store CV etc.
No idea if that suits your needs, but it might be a good starting point for further development. The only inconvenience: The system is written in TCL and based on PostgreSQL, which might require a few hours of training for PHP developers...
Both "tags" and "labels" may actually compete "concepts" from the ontology-based Artificial Intelligence world, as represented by the W3C RDF (Resource Description Framework) for example.
Basicly, the RDF stuff doesn't work because it requires everybody to agree on the very same ontology in order to allow conclusions beyond a single web site. Tags seem to be easier, they might be similar across sites with a bit of good luck.
The guys from Google have probably the highest AI budget in the world, so perhaps they could apply some of their statistical/ stochastical/ whatever AI algorithms with labels and interpret labels in a "context" in order to implement this famous "show me what I mean" feature. That would be a good reason not to call it a stupid "tag"...
I'm really interested in this stuff because we're planning to implementing something similar in our project management system. Please let me (http://www.project-open.com/) know if you've got an opinion or hints for us...
In one sentence: The answer depends on your market size.
Our situation is similar. We're going for open/closed-source mix now. Let me explain:
We've started as a 100% open-source company in a very small specialized market (translation agencies, ~5,000 companies worldwide), and found that it didn't work out. We didn't just earn enough money with services because few customers were willing to pay for services, and those who paid were small & cheap. So we had to develop some closed-source "extension modules" that we sell on top of the open-source stuff. This license/service mix provides us with the money that we need for the small market. I firmly believe that you can't survive with "pure" open-source in a vertial market.
However, we're now going for a more "horizontal" market, with considerably more and bigger customers. Here dynamics are different. Basicly, we see that the big guys are sponsoring the development for the smaller (cheap) guys, while the mass of the small companies provide us with the credibility (and bug reports...) to sell to the big guys. So here it pays for us to be more open-source. We'll still keep some large-corp modules closed-source in areas such as compliance, accounting etc. The small guys don't need that stuff, and it would be stupid not to take the money...
Alex Waibel was one of the leading scientists in the Verbmobil project in 1995. The technology was pretty interesting (maintaining probability "graphs" from the Markov speech analysis through the syntactic and semantic analysis).
However, results were pretty poor due to the structure of the project (just too many people) and because many institutions really weren't interested in the project and went for their favourite research topic with a new name (that's how research in Germany works...). Perfectly possible that Mr. Waibel advanced with the topic, now 10 years after the first major trial...
Personally, I actually gave up AI completely after the ESSLLI (European Summer School on Logic, Language and Information) and promised not to touch the subject again until there were a "unified" formalism incorporating the old "symbolic" approach (predicate logic etc.) and the new statistical methods (Bayes, Markov,...). Such a combination would be suitable both to deal with large amounts of data (statistical) and to deal with negation (only available in the symbolic appoach).
Maybe they've got it this time? It's a pitty they don't talk more about the underlying formalism.
Btw., the electrodes are probably just an enhancement of the normal speech recognition software to get a better "signal".
uServ is not for the Internet because its underyling architecture doesn't provide neither encryption nor authentication. But it is a great solution to the Knowledge Management problem of many companies: Employees can can post documents without overhead.
I found the most interesting part of the paper in the underyling Vinci component infrastructure. It focuses on speed and protocol extendability for distributed applications in a (trusted) Intranet environment.
Ive been working several years in knowledge representation for NLP (Verbmobil), and our main problem was "Semantics".
Its: "how do you draw conclusions from some given facts?". Unfortunately there are two bad ways:
Either you do it right (using formal logic calculus), and its extremly slow (exponential...).
Or you do it informally, and it doesn't give you the right results.
And basicly everything is an exception or has an exception. I've become so desperate that I left the field and went into Dot-Com. Here its much better. Sometimes you advance...
Try to distinguish between communication and collaboration: Netmeeting doesnt seem to be a
bad choice for online communication, while
the structuration of information takes the main
role in collaboration.
There are quite some companies around offering
collaboration tools, such as
http://www.eroom.com/ (commercial) and
http://www.arsdigita.com/ (free, Linux).
All of these tools provide searchable blackboards,
handling of large numbers of users etc.
In my company were using a combination of the
two: Netmeeeting and ArsDigita.
From the "I also know a programming language" section:
I mean, the discussion basicly is about software productivity, which is minimizing:
(func - lib) / (people * efficiency)
So go for libraries, people and efficient programming languages. Depending on the job, even SAP might work... (lots of functionality, good people...)
I think LISP falls short on the people part. The same unfortunately happens to Smalltalk and Prolog. Prolog is my personal favourite, and even more powerful than Lisp. See http://www.fraber.de/sitec for a full fledged content management system in 5000 lines. Checkout http://www.swi.psy.uva.nl/projects/SWI-Prolog/ .
But there are some golden combinations. Checkout ArsDigita, http://www.arsdigita.com/ . These folks are using a ridiculous language (TCL, no argument passing by reference!!!) together with a huge library, lots of working examples and a solid infrastructure to build incredible online communities. And the language is so easy to learn.
And (Im sorry, but..) Java is really getting better in the library and working examples part. Checkout Yahoo for open source Content Management Systems in Java (great source of working examples to build your app on) and get IBM Visual Age for Java for quiche eaters integrated IDE and collaborative version management.
Were using ArsDigita in my company, were still in business, and our competitors just dont get it how fast were shelling out new modules.
Slashdot Mirror
I just read the Excel model that you can download as part of the article:
- It uses the parameters of previous Ebola outbreaks as a base.
These outbreaks happened in remote and sparsely populated regions. In contrast, the outbreak in Monrovia has hit slum like neighborhoods. This is a completely different base.
- The Excel model uses a "flat" model of population that doesn't take into account geographical distribution.
Infectiousness in slums will be a lot higher than in previous outbreaks because of the density of population.
- The model talks about keeping 70% of the infected population at home or in hospitals in order to reduce the infection rate. This way, the epidemic will slowly decrease.
However, there is widespread fear of hospitalization and the mortality rate of Ebola (80%) basically means that people will distrust any doctors, hospital etc. So I can't see how this should happen.
- In the history of Ebola there was no outbreak of this size.
In the past there were plenty (relatively) of workers per case. But now patients will outnumber the helpers.
Summary: I can't see why the exponential development could be slowed down as indicated in the model...
The death toll of the disease is 80% of all persons infected.
While the disease increases exponentially, the ratio of infected / dead is around 55% currently. But that still means that 80% will be dead three weeks later.
Source: http://healthmap.org/site/dise...
There are only 4M inhabitants in Liberia, so 1.5M means half of them dead. There will be "unusual effects" of such a situation, namely that everybody will run for their life to get out of the country (and into the neighbor countries). I'd be interested if this is included in the simulation.
Reading the last publications about the spreading of Ebola, I've got the idea that WHO tries to hide information, in particular about the different types of spreading. So I'm making this up from common sense, maybe somebody with access to privileged information might add details:
Spreading in slums: That seems to be the case in Monrovia ultimately. Inhabitants don't trust the public health system (with certain reason...) and believe in which doctors or conspiracy theories. Once >500 persons are infected, it becomes practically impossible to research the infection tree and to isolate contacts. In the last 3 weeks Ebola spread exponentially. Please tell me if I'm wrong, but I got the impression that Monrovia is probably "lost".
Spreading across the "pepper coast" via land connections: The area from Guinea to Ghana seems to be relatively sparsely populated with exception of a few cities. And these cities are now basically disconnected from international air traffic. Part of the borders are closed. The villagers along the land connections will become increasingly suspicious of travelers from the cities, so I would predict increasingly violent confrontations. Maybe this might lead to slower spreading (apart from disastrous consequences for the economy, obviously).
Spreading to Nigeria: Nigeria has 170M population, as opposed to 4M for Liberia, and Nigeria is well connected internationally. The recent cases seem to have been contained and tertiary and quartiary contacts have been followed-up. So apparently things work out better in Nigeria compared to Liberia.
So my understanding is: A Pandemic will start once Ebola reaches the slums of Nigeria and starts spreading to more cases than the MSF or others can contain (maybe some 200-500 cases). The pandemic will end once a vaccine becomes available in large quantities, which is supposed to happen in 3-9 months.
Don't be a victim. Learn the rule. Read "MBA for Dummies" :-)
http://www.project-open.com/
It's an all in one ticket tracker, CRM, timesheet, project management (including GanttCharts), WIKI, form, full-text-search, etc. and it includes financial management. So you can create invoices directly from the time you spent on tickets and projects.
The downside: It uses TCL and AOLServer instead of PHP and Apache.
Sorry, forgot:
- Absences/vacation/travel
- Travel Expenses and
- Timesheet Management
Hi,
]project-open[ is a project management system with several HR components. Links: http://www.project-open.com/ and http://www.project-open.org/
There is:
- An integrated employee file with all available information
- Basic employee information and hiring workflow
- Portrait component & "Employee of the day" option
- (Very) basic payroll information, specially protected.
- A skill database (non-FOSS extension module)
- A forum associated with each employee for comments etc.
- A file storage associated with each user to store CV etc.
No idea if that suits your needs, but it might be a good starting point for further development. The only inconvenience: The system is written in TCL and based on PostgreSQL, which might require a few hours of training for PHP developers...
Cheers,
Frank
Hi,
Both "tags" and "labels" may actually compete "concepts" from the ontology-based Artificial Intelligence world, as represented by the W3C RDF (Resource Description Framework) for example.
Basicly, the RDF stuff doesn't work because it requires everybody to agree on the very same ontology in order to allow conclusions beyond a single web site. Tags seem to be easier, they might be similar across sites with a bit of good luck.
The guys from Google have probably the highest AI budget in the world, so perhaps they could apply some of their statistical/ stochastical/ whatever AI algorithms with labels and interpret labels in a "context" in order to implement this famous "show me what I mean" feature. That would be a good reason not to call it a stupid "tag"...
I'm really interested in this stuff because we're planning to implementing something similar in our project management system. Please let me (http://www.project-open.com/) know if you've got an opinion or hints for us...
Cheers,
Frank
In one sentence: The answer depends on your market size.
Our situation is similar. We're going for open/closed-source mix now. Let me explain:
We've started as a 100% open-source company in a very small specialized market (translation agencies, ~5,000 companies worldwide), and found that it didn't work out. We didn't just earn enough money with services because few customers were willing to pay for services, and those who paid were small & cheap. So we had to develop some closed-source "extension modules" that we sell on top of the open-source stuff. This license/service mix provides us with the money that we need for the small market. I firmly believe that you can't survive with "pure" open-source in a vertial market.
However, we're now going for a more "horizontal" market, with considerably more and bigger customers. Here dynamics are different. Basicly, we see that the big guys are sponsoring the development for the smaller (cheap) guys, while the mass of the small companies provide us with the credibility (and bug reports...) to sell to the big guys. So here it pays for us to be more open-source. We'll still keep some large-corp modules closed-source in areas such as compliance, accounting etc. The small guys don't need that stuff, and it would be stupid not to take the money...
Cheers,
Frank
http://www.project-open.org/
http://www.project-open.org/, http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/project-open/
Allows you to create and track invoices, based on timesheet information.
Hey,
...). Such a combination would be suitable both to deal with large amounts of data (statistical) and to deal with negation (only available in the symbolic appoach).
Alex Waibel was one of the leading scientists in the Verbmobil project in 1995. The technology was pretty interesting (maintaining probability "graphs" from the Markov speech analysis through the syntactic and semantic analysis).
However, results were pretty poor due to the structure of the project (just too many people) and because many institutions really weren't interested in the project and went for their favourite research topic with a new name (that's how research in Germany works...). Perfectly possible that Mr. Waibel advanced with the topic, now 10 years after the first major trial...
Personally, I actually gave up AI completely after the ESSLLI (European Summer School on Logic, Language and Information) and promised not to touch the subject again until there were a "unified" formalism incorporating the old "symbolic" approach (predicate logic etc.) and the new statistical methods (Bayes, Markov,
Maybe they've got it this time? It's a pitty they don't talk more about the underlying formalism.
Btw., the electrodes are probably just an enhancement of the normal speech recognition software to get a better "signal".
Bests,
Frank
http://www.project-open.com/
I found the most interesting part of the paper in the underyling Vinci component infrastructure. It focuses on speed and protocol extendability for distributed applications in a (trusted) Intranet environment.
mailto:frank@fraber.de, www.fraber.de
- Either you do it right (using formal logic calculus), and its extremly slow (exponential...).
- Or you do it informally, and it doesn't give you the right results.
And basicly everything is an exception or has an exception. I've become so desperate that I left the field and went into Dot-Com.Here its much better. Sometimes you advance...
Frank (http://www.fraber.de/ )
Try to distinguish between communication and collaboration: Netmeeting doesnt seem to be a
bad choice for online communication, while
the structuration of information takes the main
role in collaboration.
There are quite some companies around offering
collaboration tools, such as
http://www.eroom.com/ (commercial) and
http://www.arsdigita.com/ (free, Linux).
All of these tools provide searchable blackboards,
handling of large numbers of users etc.
In my company were using a combination of the
two: Netmeeeting and ArsDigita.
Frank
From the "I also know a programming language" section:
..) Java is really getting better in the library and working examples part. Checkout Yahoo for open source Content Management Systems in Java (great source of working examples to build your app on) and get IBM Visual Age for Java for quiche eaters integrated IDE and collaborative version management.
I mean, the discussion basicly is about software productivity, which is minimizing:
(func - lib) / (people * efficiency)
So go for libraries, people and efficient programming languages. Depending on the job, even SAP might work... (lots of functionality, good people...)
I think LISP falls short on the people part. The same unfortunately happens to Smalltalk and Prolog. Prolog is my personal favourite, and even more powerful than Lisp. See http://www.fraber.de/sitec for a full fledged content management system in 5000 lines. Checkout http://www.swi.psy.uva.nl/projects/SWI-Prolog/ .
But there are some golden combinations. Checkout ArsDigita, http://www.arsdigita.com/ . These folks are using a ridiculous language (TCL, no argument passing by reference!!!) together with a huge library, lots of working examples and a solid infrastructure to build incredible online communities. And the language is so easy to learn.
And (Im sorry, but
Were using ArsDigita in my company, were still in business, and our competitors just dont get it how fast were shelling out new modules.
Good luck!
Frank