policymaking20

This research note provides a general introduction to REsCape: an agent-based computational framework for studying the relationship between natural resources, ethnicity, and civil war. By permitting the user to specify: (i) different resource profiles ranging from a purely agrarian economy to one based on the artisanal or industrial extraction of alluvial or kimberlite diamonds; (ii) different patterns of ethnic domination, ethnic polarization, and varying degrees of ethnic salience; as well as (iii) specific modes of play for key agents, the framework can be used to assess the effects of key variables - whether taken in isolation or in various combinations - on the onset and duration of civil war. Our objective is to make REsCape available as an open source toolkit in the future, one that can be used, modified, and refined by students and scholars of civil war.

Catastrophic events have raised numerous issues concerning how effectively the built environment accommodates the evacuation needs of individuals with disabilities. Individuals with disabilities represent a significant, yet often overlooked, portion of the population disproportionately affected in emergency situations. Incorporating disability considerations into emergency evacuation planning, preparation, and other activities is critical. The most widely applied method used to evaluate how effectively the built environment accommodates emergency evacuations is agent-based or microsimulation modeling. However, current evacuation models do not adequately address individuals with disabilities in their simulated populations. This manuscript describes the BUMMPEE model, an agent-based simulation capable of classifying the built environment according to environmental characteristics and simulating a heterogeneous population according to variation in individual criteria. The method allows for simulated behaviors which more aptly represent the diversity and prevalence of disabilities in the population and their interaction with the built environment. Comparison of the results of an evacuation simulated using the BUMMPEE model is comparable to a physical evacuation with a similar population and setting. The results of the comparison indicate that the BUMMPEE model is a reasonable approach for simulating evacuations representing the diversity and prevalence of disability in the population.

Abstract: Bangladesh exemplifies the complex challenges facing densely populated coastal regions. The pressures on the country are immense: around 145 million people live within an area of just 145,000 sq-km at the confluence of three major river systems: the Ganges, the Brahmaputra and the Meghna. While progress has been made, poverty remains widespread, with around 39% of children under five malnourished. Most of its land-mass lies below 10m above sea level with considerable areas at sea level, leading to frequent and prolonged flooding during the monsoons. Sea level rise is leading to more flooding as storm surges rise off higher sea levels, pushing further inland. Higher sea levels also result in salt-water intrusion into freshwater coastal aquifers and estuaries, contaminating drinking water and farmland. Warmer ocean waters are also expected to lead to an increase in the intensity of tropical storms.

Example of big data analysis.

A case study of the impact of public participation on technology policy: xenotransplantation. In a nutshell: no impact detectable, the field was dominated by civil servants and experts.

The HYDRA integration architecture is an effort to develop a service-oriented architecture for integrated Web-based access of LANL agent-modeling capabilities. The work here includes both semantic and syntactic interoperability issues, optimization, computing performance, human machine interface design, and multi-scale, multi-model simulation and analysis software integration.

The HCSim model is used to gauge the impact of mass-casualty incidents on hospital capacity.

EpiSimS is a stochastic, agent-based simulation engine that models the spread of disease in regions, allowing for the assessment of disease prevention, intervention, and response strategies. EpiSimS explicitly represents the daily movements and interactions of synthetic individuals in a city or region, including their interactions with others. It is used as an experimental test bed for analyzing the consequences, feasibility, and effectiveness of response options to disease outbreaks.

Last night the ARG:dundee team conducted close argument analysis on a live 45 minute broadcast of an episode of the BBC Radio 4 programme, The Moral Maze, using our Argument AnalysisWall. We aimed to make debates available on the Argument Web for all the different compatible online tools to access.

Six Rules That Should Govern Your Big Data Existence. Here are some rules from my experience in the small data world that I've come to believe also apply to the big data world, perhaps even more so. As you go about your big data journey you'll meet with even more immense success if you consider these valuable life lessons:

core technology consists of: real-time content aggregation a four-step spam filtering process an accurate sentiment engine robust geo-demographic information sophisticated text analytics and language processing algorithms

Clarabridge provides individual departments, Global 1000 enterprises and technology and service providers with an universal view of their customers through transforming of text-based verbatim into customer experience insight. Clarabridge collects all sources of customer feedback, transforms it using Natural Language Processing (NLP), categorizes the content, performs sentiment scoring and delivers customer insights enterprise-wide though a variety of interfaces.

Founded in 2006, Radian6 was created with the idea that companies need to actively engage in Social Media Monitoring. Intelligence about online conversations is critical: companies need to know what's being said about their brand, industry, and competitors online. So we built a listening platform designed to help companies do just that. But listening is just the beginning. Businesses need to measure, analyze, and report on their social media efforts. They need to discover insights from their information. They need to engage. And they need the best tools to reach these targets. Radian6 provides the ability to do it all, and to incorporate all the areas that social media touches across the enterprise, including customer service, sales and lead generation, public relations, marketing, and more. Learn more about how we can help here.

this focusses on social media analytics

HDI Forum III: The Health Datapalooza promises to bring together a diverse group of data experts, technology developers, entrepreneurs, policy makers, health care system leaders, CIOs, CTOs, and community advocates to support innovative applications of health and health care data. The Health Data Initiative (HDI), originally launched in 2010 by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as the Community Health Data Initiative, is a public-private collaboration that encourages innovators to utilize health data to develop applications to raise awareness of health and health system performance and spark community action to improve health. The Forum will feature keynote addresses, an Apps Expo, demonstrations of new, cutting-edge apps, and thought-provoking panel discussions. There will also be plenty of time for networking and one-on-one interaction. It is a great opportunity to be in on the vanguard of data applications to improve health and health care. This year's event promises to be one you do not want to miss!

interesting case of data-intensive policy-making

The CyberEmotions consortium began in February 2009 for a period of four years. The project focuses on the role of collective emotions in creating, forming and breaking-up e-communities.

SentiStrength estimates the strength of positive and negative sentiment in short texts, even for informal language. It has human-level accuracy for short social web texts in English, except political texts. SentiStrength reports two sentiment strengths: -1 (not negative) to -5 (extremely negative) 1 (not positive) to 5 (extremely positive) It can also report binary (positive/negative), trinary (positive/negative/neutral) and single scale (-4 to +4) results. SentiStrength was originally developed for English and optimised for general short social web texts but can be easily configured for other languages and contexts by changing its input files - some variants are demonstrated below.

Double Document Shared Word Diagrams compare and contrast two documents by showing both the unique and shared vocabulary and its' distribution across the two documents of interest. The two columns of squares represent the two documents. The leftmost column of word circles shows the highest frequency non-trivial words found in document 1 but not document 2. The rightmost column of word circles shows those words unique to 2 and the central column shows the words that are common to both.

"The Web is about IDEAS+PEOPLE. Cohere is a visual tool to create, connect and share Ideas. Back them up with websites. Support or challenge them. Embed them to spread virally. Discover who - literally - connects with your thinking."