"This work is devoted to communication approaches, which spread information in robot swarms. These mechanisms are useful for large-scale systems and also for such cases when a limited communication equipment does not allow routing of information packages. We focus on two approaches such as virtual fields and epidemic algorithms, discuss several aspects of hardware implementation and demonstrate experiments performed with microrobots "Jasmine"."

"Disease awareness in infection dynamics can be modeled with adaptive contact networks whose rewiring rules reflect the attempt by susceptibles to avoid infectious contacts. Simulations of this type of models show an active phase with constant infected node density in which the interplay of disease dynamics and link rewiring prompts the convergence towards a well defined degree distribution, irrespective of the initial network topology. We develop a method to study this dynamic equilibrium and give an analytic description of the structure of the characteristic degree distributions and other network measures. The method applies to a broad class of systems and can be used to determine the steady-state topology of many other adaptive networks."

"It turns out that although we know that washing our hands prevents a range of illnesses and are incredibly eager to buy products marketed to kill germs, we don't actually take the simpler measure of washing hands in the first place. A study of nearly eight thousand individuals in five U.S. cities found almost half of the participants failed to wash their hands after going to the bathroom. In this light, no mystery salve is necessary, no miracle cure, special wipe, or magic. We need to wash our hands, because soap does the body good, at least in all the ways studied so far. It is not fancy. It is not expensive or heavily marketed and yet it works, as it long has, even though as of yet, no one can conclusively, unambiguously, tell you why."

"We analyze over 500 million Twitter messages from an eight month period and find that tracking a small number of flu-related keywords allows us to forecast future influenza rates with high accuracy, obtaining a 95% correlation with national health statistics. We then analyze the robustness of this approach to spurious keyword matches, and we propose a document classification component to filter these misleading messages. We find that this document classifier can reduce error rates by over half in simulated false alarm experiments, though more research is needed to develop methods that are robust in cases of extremely high noise."

"… Using wireless sensor network technology, we obtained high-resolution data of CPIs during a typical day at an American high school, permitting the reconstruction of the social network relevant for infectious disease transmission. At a 94% coverage, we collected 762,868 CPIs at a maximal distance of 3 meters among 788 individuals. The data revealed a high density network with typical small world properties and a relatively homogenous distribution of both interaction time and interaction partners among subjects.…"

"Adaptive networks have been recently introduced in the context of disease propagation on complex networks. They account for the mutual interaction between the network topology and the states of the nodes. Until now, existing models have been analyzed using low-complexity analytic formalisms, revealing nevertheless some novel dynamical features. However, current methods have failed to reproduce with accuracy the simultaneous time evolution of the disease and the underlying network topology. In the framework of the adaptive SIS model of Gross et al. [Gross et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 208701 (2006)], we introduce an improved compartmental formalism able to handle this coevolutionary task successfully. With this approach, we analyze the interplay and outcomes of both dynamical elements, process and structure, on adaptive networks featuring different degree distributions at the initial stage."

"We originally wrote this article in Word, but then we converted it to Latex to make it look more like science."

"First, note the non-negative aspects of the study. Stereotypes take another hit as gamers have an average age of 35, and are implicitly equally divided by gender. (Yes, I still get academics telling me gamers are only teen males) Will these get media attention?

Second, the technological determinism. Gaming drives depression and bad BMI, it seems, less than games being chosen as art or entertainment by those with such conditions. One wonders if the social ostracism attached to depression and obesity points one towards a cultural artifact with a bad cultural reputation."

"I'm working a serious publication now and so I'm going to try to avoid words like "barbaric" to describe policy decisions I don't like. But this is certainly unnecessary. CEPR ends with the economic argument: "Each year millions of American workers go to work sick, lowering their own productivity and that of their coworkers and potentially spreading illness to their coworkers and customers." I'm willing to cut employers some slack: Many don't offer paid sick days because they don't think doing so will make them money."

"in the world of science, being first means a great deal and can be the determining factor in whether a study gets published. The truth is, although the efforts were independent, ours was published first — and Clinical Infectious Diseases scooped Nature — a decent consolation prize amid the go-google din."

But does HDTV cause high-resolution autism?