The availability of detailed mobility traces and mobile phone communication data for large populations has already had a significant impact on research in behavioral science. Some researchers consider such datasets as an opportunity to refine the analysis of human behavior [5], while others question the usefulness of such datasets to draw conclusions on collective human behavior [1,2,5].Digital traces left by mobile phone users often reveal sensitive private individual information. It is therefore natural to limit access to such data. Limited access to data of scientific interest is however a potential source of a "new digital divide" in the scientific community, as described in [2]. In order to improve the availability of large mobile phone datasets and to foster research in this area, the Orange Group decided to provide anonymized datasets from Ivory Coast for the purpose of scientific research. With around five million customers, Orange has a significant market share in Ivory Coast, whose total population is estimated to be 20 million individuals. In addition to the scientific benefit, the project intends to foster development in Ivory Coast by establishing new collaborations with African scientists and by providing behavioral data that has not yet been collected by the national statistics agency [3].2. Other datasets on Ivory Coast. Researchers participating in the D4D challenge are encouraged to combine the D4D mobile phone datasets with other datasets and source of information. These sources include the following.African Development Bank Group. The African Development Bank (AfDB) Groups mission is to help reduce poverty, improve living conditions for Africans and mobilize resources for the continents economic and social development. With this objective in mind, the institution aims at assisting African countries in their efforts to achieve sustainable economic development and social progress. http://www.afdb.org/en/ African Economic Outlook. Economic, social and political developments of African countries, with the expertise of the African Development Bank, the OECD Development Centre, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, the United Nations Development Programme and a network of African think tanks and research centres. http://www.africaneconomicoutlook.org/en/ Africa and Middle East Telecom News. Africa and Middle East Telecom-Week' tracks the fixed, broadband and mobile phone markets in Africa and Middle East. http://www.africantelecomsnews.com/ Africa Renewal on Line. The Africa Renewal magazine is produced by the United Nations organism and provides up-to-date information and analysis of the major economic and development challenges facing Africa today. It works with the media in Africa and beyond to promote the work of the United Nations, Africa and the international community to bring peace and development to Africa.
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a difficult-to-treat infection. Increasing efforts have been taken to mitigate the epidemics and to avoid potential outbreaks in low endemic settings. Understanding the population dynamics of MRSA is essential to identify the causal mechanisms driving the epidemics and to generalise conclusions to different contexts. Previous studies neglected the temporal structure of contacts between patients and assumed homogeneous behaviour. We developed a high-resolution data-driven contact network model of interactions between 743,182 patients in 485 hospitals during 3,059 days to reproduce the exact contact sequences of the hospital population. Our model captures the exact spatial and temporal human contact behaviour and the dynamics of referrals within and between wards and hospitals at a large scale, revealing highly heterogeneous contact and mobility patterns of individual patients. A simulation exercise of epidemic spread shows that heterogeneous contacts cause the emergence of super-spreader patients, slower than exponential polynomial growth of the prevalence, and fast epidemic spread between wards and hospitals. In our simulated scenarios, screening upon hospital admittance is potentially more effective than reducing infection probability to reduce the final outbreak size. Our findings are useful to understand not only MRSA spread but also other hospital-acquired infections.
The vision of a "3D Web" as a combination of massive online virtual environments and today's WWW currently attracts a lot of attention. While it provides a multitude of opportunities, the realization of this vision on a global scale poses severe technical challenges. This work-in-progress paper intends to point out some of the major challenges and highlights key concepts of an infrastructure that is being developed in order to meet them. Among these concepts, special emphasis is put on the usage of a two-tier Peer-to-Peer approach, the implementation of Torrent-based data distribution and the development of a graded consistency notion. The paper also briefly presents the current state of a prototype implementation that is being developed in order to validate these concepts and evaluate alternative approaches.
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