Recently in the Health Category

Zombie math. Yay! (PDF. Boo!)

Zombies are a popular figure in pop culture/entertainment and they are usually portrayed as being brought about through an outbreak or epidemic. Consequently, we model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular, impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which eradication can occur. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all. --  Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress

Mike points out the professor named "Robert Smith?" ("the question mark is part of his surname and not a typographical mistake," according to the BBC).

Teale Fristoe reviews The Great Flu.

In the game, the player acts as the head of the World Pandemic Control during the outbreak of an unknown flu.  As the game progresses, the player must take actions, such as dispatching research teams, dispensing medication and face masks, and closing schools and airports, in an attempt to control and ultimately defeat the virus.  As the pandemic intensifies, the player is given information about the history and science of epidemics through a series of newspaper articles and videos.  Eventually, if the player is successful, the game ends with a count of the number of people infected and killed over the pandemic's life span, and the money spent containing the virus.

I think the game succeeds in presenting players with a lot of information through the multimedia featured in the game, and by including hints in it, giving players incentive to absorb it.  Furthermore, it nicely illustrates the dangers of our highly connected world: there's nothing more jarring than fighting a virus raging in Central and North America only to glance at Europe and find the epidemic exploding half way across the globe.  However, the game does suffer from a few common pitfalls, and going over them might shed some light on some of the challenges with using games for education.

Sore throat. Sinus pressure. Upset stomach. Exhaustion.

I'm sitting at home recovering from the flu, which I started to come down with during the Computers & Writing Conference this weekend. 

I had planned to attend Digital Humanities 2009 in Maryland, where I'm part of a group that's presenting tomorrow.  The group will survive without me as I try to recover.  If I feel well enough to drive tomorrow, I might try to catch the middle of the conference.

The week before, I took a train from Greensburg (near Pittsburgh) to Philadelphia, then a commuter train to a town in New Jersey for my nephew's baptism.  I was proud to learn I still have the touch -- the baby went to sleep in my arms.

During the same Mass, there was another family there for their own baptism.  Someone from that family was strutting all over the place with his video camera, completely oblivious to the fact that a religious service was going on (he could have been a bit more respectful), and that another family was also trying to take pictures of the same event.   I didn't feel like disrupting the service further by joining a media scrum, so I missed some shots, but I did discretely move so that I could get some (unobstructed) video clips during the actual sprinkling of water.

I've been thinking a lot about babies.

My own kids (Peter is 11 and Carolyn is 7) are talkative and rambunctious.  Our parenting philosophy has never equated "good child" with "quiet child."  So I'm probably immune to a certain level of squawking that might upset the average person.

On the ride up, we sat in the row behind a baby who looked about 12-14 months.

This is not a story about how annoying it is to travel near a cranky baby.  I didn't mind at all that the baby in the row in front of me drooled happily in my face and threw toys into my lap.  And, in fact, when an older couple (who could have chosen a seat elsewhere on the train) started complaining very loudly about the baby, I turned around and said "Do you know what really bothers me on trains?  Traveling near adults who complain too loudly." (I resisted the urge to say "old people who complain too loudly."  But they moved seats shortly after that.)

Anyone who's been around a baby knows that the noises a happy baby makes are far preferable to the noises an unhappy baby makes, so I was very happy when my own kids started playing with the baby.  My kids delighted in sending the toys back over the divider and singing songs for the baby.  (They did their fair share of whining over the course of 6 or 8 hours, too, but the baby kept them well occupied.)

What was really, really sad is that for hours at a time, this baby's mother sat with her laptop open, chatting in some kind of RPG, checking Facebook, and later putting in a movie for herself.. 

Near the beginning of the ride, we exchanged perfunctory greetings with all our neighbors, which established the creation of a temporary community.  At one point, a young man across the aisle helped my kids count to 20 in Spanish.  Later, when this same fellow started swearing casually into his cell phone, I tapped him on the shoulder and avuncularly reminded him of the presence of children on the train.  (His face registered dismay, and as he got off the train later, he put his hand on my shoulder and apologized sincerely.)

Not once during this train ride did the mother engage with my kids, despite the fact that my kids were amusing her kid for hours. She didn't take the baby away from them (to signal she wanted them to back off), or teach my kids games that the baby likes, or ask me about my kids, or join in the fun.  She seemed perfectly content to leave the baby-minding task to my kids, so that she could concentrate on her computer.

While I didn't like the feeling that I had become the moral enforcer of our corner of the train, I know that my own kids needed some boundaries.. Let the baby touch you, I told them, but don't grab the baby.  Don't startle the baby with loud noises.  Don't let the baby give you his bottle or snacks -- tell him to put them in his own mouth, and praise him for it. 

At one point, I had to take a hard toy away from the baby and give him a soft toy because he was swinging it around near my face.

At another point, the baby had clambered up onto the arm of his seat, pounding against the window, his center of gravity up pretty close to the seat back.  We went over a bump, the baby wobbled, and I lurched forward to catch him. The mother thanked me, and said something like "I was just getting something from my bag," as if to explain her inattentiveness.  But in truth, she had been just as preoccupied by her computer for hours.
 
Every so often the baby would let out a shriek.  Another passenger must have scowled at the mother, because I heard her say, rather helplessly, "I don't know why he's doing that."

I knew why her baby was doing that.  It was because my own kids were making faces at him, making his toys dance for him, and playing peek-a-boo with him. For hours. 

What could she have been writing on her Facebook page, that was more important than turning her head to see why her baby was shrieking for joy?

One of my first dates with my wife was interrupted when I got a piece of beef stuck in my throat. I could breathe, but not swallow. When the paramedics arrived, I asked them to wait in the lobby while I walked out to my date, handed her my keys, and explained that I was about to go for a little ride in an ambulance.

I took some pills, switched my favorite summer beverage from lemonade to unsweetened ice tea, and my throat has been fine ever since.

Recently I was with my wife in an examination room, when she asked me to pick up this booklet from a rack. 

Here, a bespectacled doctor listens attentively, his pen hovering over a clipboard, while the patient describes the discomfort in her throat. I noted with approval that the models on the cover are ethnic and realistic, rather than photoshopped, technology-enhanced simulacra. 



Then I noticed something odd about another booklet on the same rack:


We see another side of the doctor, mid-snore, looking rather less professional and confident.  Lying next to him in bed, her head propped up on one elbow, is the acid reflux patient, now suffering from sleep deprivation, and apparently having second thoughts about their relationship.

My wife pointed out that the cover on the left *could* represent the doctor examining his own wife, but that's just a different kind of conflict of interest.

The son of the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath has taken his own life, 46 years after his mother gassed herself while he slept.-- Times Online

I'm teaching Plath in my American Lit class tomorrow.

Great piece from Ben Kuchera at Ars Technica.

 

Today I decided to conduct an experiment. I started calling people I knew, and I asked if they had one or more video games in the house. Then I asked if they breast-fed their children. To my great shock, most answered "yes" to both. One couple I contacted switched to formula after their child's birth, and told me that they didn't play video games. The data, based on my first round of calls, was conclusive: if you play video games, you are much more likely to breast-feed your children.

Blogging this to show to my kids later.

Because the children were rarely bored - at least, when a television was nearby - they never learned how to use their own imagination as a form of entertainment. "The capacity to daydream enables a person to fill empty time with an enjoyable activity that can be carried on anywhere," Belton says. "But that's a skill that requires real practice. Too many kids never get the practice."

[...]

"The point is that it's not enough to just daydream," Schooler says. "Letting your mind drift off is the easy part. The hard part is maintaining enough awareness so that even when you start to daydream you can interrupt yourself and notice a creative insight." -- Jonah Lehrer, The Boston Globe

Science Journal (WSJ):

"We think our decisions are conscious," said neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, who is pioneering this research. "But these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. This doesn't rule out free will, but it does make it implausible."

Through a series of intriguing experiments, scientists in Germany, Norway and the U.S. have analyzed the distinctive cerebral activity that foreshadows our choices. They have tracked telltale waves of change through the cells that orchestrate our memory, language, reason and self-awareness.

In ways we are only beginning to understand, the synapses and neurons in the human nervous system work in concert to perceive the world around them, to learn from their perceptions, to remember important experiences, to plan ahead, and to decide and act on incomplete information. In a rudimentary way, they predetermine our choices.

Great series from The Globe and Mail. I seem to recall that articles from this paper disappear behind a pay-per-view firewall after a few weeks, so print these out now if you think you'll ever get old.

Part one

Fast times at Senior High

The cliques, the gossip, the hot guy with a car: A retirement home is Grade 10 all over again, but here the new kids are pushing 90. 26/05/08 12:00 AM

 

Part two

Mean Girls, but with walkers

Being the newbie is never easy, even when the cool kids snubbing you are in their 80s. Your clothes, your finances, your romances - they're all grist for the gossip mill 27/05/08 12:00 AM

 

Part three

Looking for love, or ...

The equipment may be rusty, but you can still get lusty. And the desire for companionship never fades. 28/05/08 12:00 AM

 

Part four

The fuss over food

Keeping control over body and mind is tough when you live in a retirement home, right down to having to eat whatever's put in front of you 29/05/08 12:00 AM

 

Part Five

Amid loss, striving for life

Only survivors make it this far, and they are determined to keep going. They share their strength and hope with reporter Rebecca Dube and photographer Kevin Van Paassen 30/05/08 12:00 AM

Wired just loves technology. Here's an article about a technological solution to forgetting.

As a science fiction fan, I had always assumed that when computers supplemented our intelligence, it would be because we outsourced some of our memory to them. We would ask questions, and our machines would give oracular -- or supremely practical -- replies. Wozniak has discovered a different route. When he entrusts his mental life to a machine, it is not to throw off the burden of thought but to make his mind more swift. Extreme knowledge is not something for which he programs a computer but for which his computer is programming him.

The opening of this story uses the sudden deaths of two bloggers over a three-month span (and the  non-fatal heart attack of a third) in order to suggest that bloggers are blogging themselves into their graves. How many reporters, kindergarten teachers, retirees, people named "Joe" and left-handed people died in the last three months?   OMG -- a trend!

Once you get past that tabloid silliness, you find a thoughtful exploration of the world of bloggers who are paid by the post.

New York Times:

"Wouldn't it be great if we said no blogger or journalist could write a story between 8 p.m. Pacific time and dawn? Then we could all take a break," he added. "But that's never going to happen."

All that competition puts a premium on staying awake. Matt Buchanan, 22, is the right man for the job. He works for clicks for Gizmodo, a popular Gawker Media site that publishes news about gadgets. Mr. Buchanan lives in a small apartment in Brooklyn, where his bedroom doubles as his office.

He says he sleeps about five hours a night and often does not have time to eat proper meals. But he does stay fueled -- by regularly consuming a protein supplement mixed into coffee.

But make no mistake: Mr. Buchanan, a recent graduate of New York University, loves his job. He said he gets paid to write (he will not say how much) while interacting with readers in a global conversation about the latest and greatest products.

On Jan 14, Ian Bogost of Persuasive Games rolled out Fatworld -- a digital work that illustrates the complex connections between health, class, economics, and politics, via the rhetoric of the sandbox game. 

A sandbox game features open-ended play, with no single predetermined "winning" outcome.  A target-shooting game such as Space Invaders forces the player to shoot waves of attacking enemies, because the game ends when the enemies encroach upon the player's position.  By contrast, an open-ended game such as Sim City permits the player to decide whether the goal of the game is to create a thriving gridlocked metropolis, a road-free utopia. a network of hamlets insulated by forests, or an urban wasteland.

Fatworld presents a series of interconnected systems, such as a socio-economic model, a political model, and (the most complex in the game) a nutrition and health model.  Playing Fatworld is a matter of figuring out how the game depicts connections between these systems.

The release of Fatworld seems perfectly timed, after McDonalds UK CEO Steve Easterbrook, ruminating on the causes of childhood obesity, noted last week that "there's fewer green spaces and kids are sat home playing computer games on the TV when in the past they'd have been burning off energy outside."  

Bogost is an accomplished games scholar and proponent of what the field in general calls "serious games."  His studio produced the Howard Dean for Iowa game, and has provided editorial material to the New York Times in the form of "newsgames" (a cross between a game and a political cartoon) such as Food Import Folly.

His book Unit Operations introduces a universal method for analyzing texts from literary works to video games, and this week students in my Video Game Theory and Culture class are reading his book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.

Knowing Ian was behind Fatworld, I had high hopes. I really, really wanted to like it much better than I do.

I wanted to write a review that discusses the game's educational potential, its elegance, and its rhetorical effectiveness at using the game format to communicate a message about health (and politics, economics, and lifestyle). 

I wanted to say I loved the isometric cuteness of the game world, and that the puffy menu bars and the bloated cartoon hand that serves as the mouse pointer fit wonderfully with the theme of the game. I wanted to praise the Govern O Mat, where you can select food-related legislation and click the "Bribe" button to influence a politician. I wanted to try to work restaurant review clichés into my review.

I did not want to do what I'm about to do instead -- bellyache about a confusing interface that violates basic UI principles; puzzle over displays with unexplained readouts that never change and clocks that count up by increments of four and down by increments of two (why?); grumble about design flaws that make mini-games unnecessarily confusing; and grouse about bugs that make minigames cut off abruptly for no reason.

FATWORLD is a video game about the politics of nutrition. It explores the relationships between obesity, nutrition, and socioeconomics in the contemporary U.S. The game's goal is not to tell people what to eat or how to exercise, but to demonstrate the complex, interwoven relationships between nutrition and factors like budgets, the physical world, subsidies, and regulations. Existing approaches to nutrition advocacy fail to communicate the aggregate effect of everyday health practices. It's one thing to explain that daily exercise and nutrition are important, but people, young and old, have a very hard time wrapping their heads around outcomes five, 10, 50 years away. You can choose starting weights and health conditions, including predispositions towards ailments like diabetes, heart disease, or food allergies. You'll have to construct menus and recipes, decide what to eat and what to avoid, exercise (or not), and run a restaurant business to serve the members of your community. FATWORLD comes with numerous foods, recipes, and meal plans, or players can create their own from the foods in their pantry or their imaginations.

I'm assigning this as tomorrow's discussion question for my Video Game Culture and Theory course. The in-game tutorial is long, and it's not immediately clear how to exit out of some windows (the circle with the X in it is not close enough to where the information is listed), and when the message "enter" appears on the screen, I keep wanting to push the "enter" button (rather than space, which is what the game expects). So I'm still exploring at this stage.

One hundred different people hitting a drum, from age 1 to 100. A short film by Lenka Clayton and James Price.

Jay Dixit, in Psychology Today, surveys research that considers dreams to be the brain's training grounds for real-world emergencies.

The idea that dreams are a dojo for perfecting waking activities fits well with what is already known about practice. Mental rehearsal through visualization improves skills, enhances learning, and changes the brain, polishing performance in almost any domain, from sports to piano playing.

The single most pervasive theme in dreaming is that of being chased or attacked. Just as athletes in training repeat parts of their performance, we may, in our nightmares, be attacked and chased over and over again, not to solve a particular problem but to actually practice efficient escape behavior.

Saber-toothed tigers no longer stalk our villages, but Stone Age themes still rule our dreams. "Nowadays, the evolutionary footprint is clearest in the dreams of children, who often dream about being chased by monsters, much the same way we were once chased by predators," says Revonsuo. As life has evolved, so have the threats we rehearse. "You insert a modern danger into that ancestral key and get a bizarre combination," says Revonsuo. "We dream of being chased, shot, or robbed, getting into traffic accidents, a burglar in our house, or perhaps smaller mishaps such as losing our wallets--and that prepares us for our waking life."

CNN/AP

The function of the appendix seems related to the massive amount of bacteria populating the human digestive system, according to the study in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. There are more bacteria than human cells in the typical body. Most are good and help digest food.

But sometimes the flora of bacteria in the intestines die or are purged. Diseases such as cholera or amoebic dysentery would clear the gut of useful bacteria. The appendix's job is to reboot the digestive system in that case.

The appendix "acts as a good safe house for bacteria," said Duke surgery professor Bill Parker, a study co-author. Its location _ just below the normal one-way flow of food and germs in the large intestine in a sort of gut cul-de-sac -- helps support the theory, he said.

I've been laid up in sick all weekend, mostly drifting in and out of sleep.

I started getting chills Friday afternoon at work. I zipped up my jacket and put the heater on in the car to keep the chills under control, went to the couch in the basement (where my wife banished me) and just tried to keep sane.

All Saturday was a blur. I tried to sleep as much as I could, and I watched some random YouTube nonsense and listened to some Dodge Intrepid podcasts (a mock 40s-style radio adventure serial; recent SHU graduate Mike Rubino is a cast member). I could barely prop my head up with one hand and tap keys one at a time with the other. I took me about 15 minutes to type a two-sentence comment on a student blog.

Then at about 3 this morning, I woke up with sweat dripping off my hair and soaking the pillow, and as I lay there I realized -- I can think! I can think!

Today my wife gave me exactly what I need. She's taking the kids out all day, so I can try to recover a bit.
I can sit up now and type two-handed for brief periods of time now. I also did some light reading.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, via Miki Louch.

When he was a boy, Dr. Pausch said, he had a concrete set of dreams: He wanted to experience the weightlessness of zero gravity; he wanted to play football in the NFL; he wanted to write an article for the World Book Encyclopedia ("You can tell the nerds early on," he joked); he wanted to be Captain Kirk from "Star Trek"; and he wanted to work for the Disney Co.

I interviewed Paush once for a newsletter published by the engineering school at the University of Virginia. Hearing about the occasion of his speech was a bit of a surprise.

Nick Yee (The Daedalus Project) writes an 8-part post (this quote is from part 2) responding to media reports about "internet addiction."

High school and college students on football teams regularly die during practice (1, 2, 3), but their deaths are dealt with by the media with a very holistic perspective. The media questions whether the coach set an unreasonably exhausting regimen. The media questions whether the parents saw warning signs. They ask whether the school reviewed the coach's history thoroughly when the hiring was made. They wonder why the school mandates year-round practice that necessitates training in the hot summers. They ask whether the team physicians condoned the exhausting practices despite the individual's particular health idiosyncrasies. And in no time during all this does anyone suggest that football is addictive and caused the deaths. This is because that statement would be naïve and simplistic. When people die during or after playing an MMO however, it is typically "caused by an online gaming addiction". The wikipedia entry on "game addiction" lists several of these "notable cases". Even in cases where the person suffered from depression and other mood disorders, an "addiction" to the game itself is primarily blamed for the deaths. As another example, Kimberley Young's discussion of Internet Addiction Disorder implies that marital affairs that occur online are primarily the fault of the Internet, rather than having to do with personal choices. Why is it that explanations are complicated and holistic when it comes to football, and so simplistic when we talk about online games? Part of the reason is that football is too mainstream and too low-tech to be a tool for the media to instill paranoia with. No one is afraid of a leather ball.

Some acted selflessly, rushing to the aid of other characters even though that meant they risked infection themselves. Others fled infected cities in an attempt to save themselves. And some who were sick made it their mission to deliberately infect others. --BBC

Wikipedia has a good collection of background resources on "corrupted blood," the virtual disease which afflicted avatars in World of Warcraft in 2005.

Doctors backed away on Sunday from a controversial proposal to designate video game addiction as a mental disorder akin to alcoholism, saying psychiatrists should study the issue more. --Experts oppose video game addiction designation (Reuters | C|Net)

The Los Angeles Police Department on Tuesday announced plans to pursue improvements to the city's 911 system, saying callers in the future will be able to use text messages, photos and even video from cellphones to seek emergency assistance. --Richard Winton --LAPD plans to accept 911 text messages (LA Times)

Will future dispatchers have to be screened for the ability to understand txt-spk?

In his blog, Flea had ridiculed the plaintiff's case and the plaintiff's lawyer. He had revealed the defense strategy. He had accused members of the jury of dozing.

With the jury looking on in puzzlement, Lindeman admitted that he was, in fact, Flea.

The next morning, on May 15, he agreed to pay what members of Boston's tight-knit legal community describe as a substantial settlement -- case closed. --Jonathan Saltzman --Blogger unmasked, court case upended (Boston.com)

Lindeman, on trial for medical malpractice, paid a hefty sum for his right to his opinion. He blogged about the trial anonymously while it was going on, and the prosecuting attorney found out about it.

Update: A Wal-Mart cashier who joked about bombing the store on his MySpace page has also been sacked. "If you have a MySpace site, you better act like you're a politician," he says, "Be politically correct and don't try to be funny." That's a bit exaggerated... there was nothing "political" about his comment, and there are other kinds of humor.

Mexican food in the united states is like the bow legged asthmatic cousin of real Mexican food. --Jonathan Stewart --Tacos, toilets and a glass of tap water! (Mexican Civilization)

I have been enjoying the blogging that is currently being posted by students of my division chair, John Spurlock.

There are no lithe leaps, perfect pirouettes or pointed toes here. Most girls cannot walk or stand, much less make a shallow curtsy. Their crutches and walkers lie nearby and their customized ballet slippers are stretched over leg braces. --Corey KilGannon --Given a Chance to Be Little Ballerinas, and Smiling Right Down to Their Toes (NY Times)

Born with a rare syndrome that left him profoundly autistic, seven-year-old Luke was trapped in his own body. But then his dad took him surfing. --Paul Solotaroff --About a boy (Guardian)

I'm sick with a virus, and I can't do much but read. Oh, and try to find out why my division chair can't log into his weblog from Mexico. This was a pleasant diversion.

"When I remained 366 days underground, I had the impression of only spending 219 days," he said. --Man to live three years in cave (BBC)

"(Video games) are a little bit like documentary films were in say the '60s or '70s," says Suzanne Seggerman, co-founder of Games for Change, a support organization in New York for makers of video games dealing with social issues. "Film had been a popular medium for a long, long time, (but) it took quite a while for it to mature enough to sustain real-world content. Games are at the same place now. They're being used for more serious purposes." --Fred Marion --New generation of video games takes on serious subjects (Springfield News-Sun | Cox News Service)

Way Wrong -- Time to Go to Bed (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

A new media researcher asked me to provide him with a few paragraphs on a subject I know well, for a proposal he's planning to submit soon.

I was going to dig out a couple of canned paragraphs this weekend, but one thing led to another, and I started tidying up a few loose ends and looking up a few more leads.

It's now 5am, and I've churned out about 7 new pages, with 2 pages revised from other projects.

I hate being sick, because the pills I take to get me through bathtime and bedtime stories perk me up so much I can't get to sleep. Oh well... at least my insomnia was productive tonight.