Twitter tsunami early warning network : a social network analysis of Twitter information flows

In the aftermath of earthquakes, tsunamis, such as the 2011 Great East Japan Tsunami, caused enormous damage around the world. With the extreme disaster events of the past, nations improved disaster preparedness and response through sensors and tsunami early warning systems. Even with system usage, however, governments still need to warn the targeted citizens – who may be anywhere within the vulnerable areas – of predicted tsunami and ordered mass evacuations within a very limited lead time. While social media research is on the rise outside the domain of social networking, very little is written about Twitter use for tsunami early warning. In this research, therefore, we examined the utility of Twitter as a tsunami early warning network, which engages citizens and disaster management agencies in diffusing disaster information. We conducted a social network analysis of Twitter information flows among the central disaster warning agency’s Twitter followers during the 2012 Indonesia Earthquake.

Abnormal behavior detection for early warning of terrorist attack

Many terrorist attacks are accomplished by bringing explosive devices hidden in ordinary-looking objects to public places. In such case, it is almost impossible to distinguish a terrorist from ordinary people just from the isolated appearance. However, valuable clues might be discovered through analyzing a series of actions of the same person. Abnormal behaviors of object fetching, deposit, or exchange in public places might indicate potential attacks. Based on the widely equipped CCTV surveillance systems at the entrance of many public places, this paper proposes an algorithm to detect such abnormal behaviors for early warning of terrorist attack.

The uptake of an early warning system in an Australian emergency department : a pilot study

Objectives: To evaluate the uptake of an emergency department early warning system (ED EWS) for recognition of, and response to, clinical deterioration.

Design, setting and participants: A descriptive exploratory study conducted in an urban district hospital in Melbourne, Australia. Systematic sampling was used to identify every 10th patient for whom the ED EWS was activated from May 2009 to May 2011.

Main outcome measures: Patient characteristics, ED system data and ED EWS activation characteristics.

Results: ED EWS activation occurred in 1.5% of ED patients; 204 patients were included in this pilot study. The median age was 65.1 years (interquartile range [IQR], 47.8-77.5 years), 89.2% of patients were classified as triage category 2 or 3, and 82.4% of patients were seen by medical staff before ED EWS activation. Hypotension (27.7%) and tachycardia (23.7%) were the most common reasons for ED EWS activation. Median duration of clinical instability was 39 minutes (IQR, 5- 129 minutes). Nurses made 93.1% of ED EWS activations. Median time between documenting physiological abnormalities and ED EWS activation was 5 minutes (IQR, 0- 20). Most patients (57.8%) required hospital admission: 4.4% of patients required intensive care unit admission.

Conclusions: The ED EWS resulted in at least two formal reports of clinical deterioration in ED patients per day, indicating reasonable uptake by clinicians. A greater understanding of clinical deterioration in ED patients is warranted to inform an evidence-based approach to recognition of, and response to, clinical deterioration in ED patients.

Bridging the gap: early warning, gender and the responsibility to protect

Women, Peace and Security (WPS) scholars and practitioners have expressed reservations about the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle because of its popular use as a synonym for armed humanitarian intervention. On the other hand, R2P’s early failure to engage with and advance WPS efforts such as United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution 1325 (2000) has seen the perpetuation of limited roles ascribed to women in implementing the R2P principle. As a result, there has been a knowledge and practice gap between the R2P and WPS agendas, despite the fact that their advocates share common goals in relation to the prevention of atrocities and protection of populations. In this article we propose to examine just one of the potential avenues for aligning the WPS agenda and R2P principle in a way that is beneficial to both and strengthens the pursuit of a shared goal – prevention. We argue that the development and inclusion of gender-specific indicators – particularly economic, social and political discriminatory practices against women – has the potential to improve the capacity of early warning frameworks to forecast future mass atrocities.

Exploring the climate change concerns of striped catfish producers in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam

This study investigated the perceptions on and adaptations to climate change impacts of 235 pangasius farmers in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. Data were collected using semi-structured household surveys in six provinces, from three regions along the Mekong river branches. A Chi-Square test was used to determine the association between variables, and a logit regression model was employed to identify factors correlated with farmer’s perception and adaptation. Less than half of respondents were concerned about climate change and sought suitable adaptation measures to alleviate its impacts. Improving information on climate change and introducing early warning systems could improve the adaptive capacity of pangasius farmers, in particularly for those farmers, who were not concerned yet. Farmers relied strongly on technical support from government agencies, but farmers in the coastal provinces did not express the need for training by these institutions. This contrasting result requires further assessment of the effectiveness of adaptation measures such as breeding salinity tolerant pangasius.

Patient physiological status at the emergency department-ward interface and emergency calls for clinical deterioration during early hospital admission

AIMS: To examine the relationship between physiological status at the emergency department-ward interface and emergency calls (medical emergency team or cardiac arrest team activation) during the first 72 hours of hospital admission. BACKGROUND: Ward adverse events are related to abnormal physiology in emergency department however the relationship between physiology at the emergency department-ward interface and ward adverse events is unknown. DESIGN: Descriptive and exploratory design. METHODS: The study involved 1980 patients at three hospitals in Melbourne Australia: i) 660 randomly selected adults admitted via the emergency department to medical or surgical wards during 2012 and who had an emergency call; and ii) 1320 adults without emergency calls matched for gender, triage category, usual residence, admitting unit and age. RESULTS/FINDINGS: The median age was 78 years and 48·8% were males. The median time to the first emergency call was 18·8 hours and ≥1 abnormal parameters were documented in 34·9% of patients during the last hour of ED care and 47·1% of patients during first hour of ward care. Emergency calls were significantly more common in patients with heart rate and conscious state abnormalities during the last hour of emergency care and abnormal oxygen saturation, heart rate or respiratory rate during the first hour of ward care. Medical emergency team afferent limb failure occurred in 55·3% patients with medical emergency team activation criteria during first hour of ward care. CONCLUSION: The use of physiological status at the emergency department-ward interface to guide care planning and reasons for and outcomes of medical emergency team afferent limb failure are important areas for future research.

The effects of time pressure and experience on nurses' risk assessment decisions : a signal detection analysis

Background: Time pressure and, occasionally, suboptimal assessment decisions are features of nursing in acute care.

Objectives: To explore the effect of generic and specialist clinical experience on the ability to detect the need to take action in acute care and the impact of time pressure on nurses' decision-making performance.

Methods: Experienced acute care registered nurses (n = 241) were presented with 50 vignettes of real clinical risk assessments. Each vignette contained seven information cues. In response to these vignettes, nurses had to decide whether to intervene or not. The 26 vignettes were time limited and mixed randomly into the 50 cases. Signal detection analysis was used to establish nurses' performance, personal decision thresholds ([beta]), and their abilities (d') to distinguish a signal of clinical risk from the clinical noise of noncontributory information.

Results: Nurses had significantly lower d' and were significantly less likely to indicate intervening under time pressure. For ability-but not threshold-there was a significant interaction of time pressure and years of experience in acute care. With no time pressure, d' increased in line with years of experience. Under time pressure, there was no effect.

Discussion: Time pressure reduced nurses' ability to detect the need and the tendency to report intervening. Thus, there were more failures to report appropriate intervention under time pressure, and the positive effects of clinical experience were negated under time pressure. More and larger scale research on the effect on clinical outcomes of time pressured nursing choices is required.

Entropy-based collaborative detection of DDOS attacks on community networks

A community network often operates with the same Internet service provider domain or the virtual network of different entities who are cooperating with each other. In such a federated network environment, routers can work closely to raise early warning of DDoS attacks to void catastrophic damages. However, the attackers simulate the normal network behaviors, e.g. pumping the attack packages as poisson distribution, to disable detection algorithms. It is an open question: how to discriminate DDoS attacks from surge legitimate accessing. We noticed that the attackers use the same mathematical functions to control the speed of attack package pumping to the victim. Based on this observation, the different attack flows of a DDoS attack share the same regularities, which is different from the real surging accessing in a short time period. We apply information theory parameter, entropy rate, to discriminate the DDoS attack from the surge legitimate accessing. We proved the effectiveness of our method in theory, and the simulations are the work in the near future. We also point out the future directions that worth to explore in the future.

Nurses' critical event risk assessments : a judgement analysis

Aims. To explore and explain nurses' use of readily available clinical information when deciding whether a patient is at risk of a critical event.

Background. Half of inpatients who suffer a cardiac arrest have documented but unacted upon clinical signs of deterioration in the 24 hours prior to the event. Nurses appear to be both misinterpreting and mismanaging the nursing-knowledge 'basics' such as heart rate, respiratory rate and oxygenation. Whilst many medical interventions originate from nurses, up to 26% of nurses' responses to abnormal signs result in delays of between one and three hours.

Methods. A double system judgement analysis using Brunswik's lens model of cognition was undertaken with 245 Dutch, UK, Canadian and Australian acute care nurses. Nurses were asked to judge the likelihood of a critical event, 'at-risk' status, and whether they would intervene in response to 50 computer-presented clinical scenarios in which data on heart rate, systolic blood pressure, urine output, oxygen saturation, conscious level and oxygenation support were varied. Nurses were also presented with a protocol recommendation and also placed under time pressure for some of the scenarios. The ecological criterion was the predicted level of risk from the Modified Early Warning Score assessments of 232 UK acute care inpatients.

Results. Despite receiving identical information, nurses varied considerably in their risk assessments. The differences can be partly explained by variability in weightings given to information. Time and protocol recommendations were given more weighting than clinical information for key dichotomous choices such as classifying a patient as 'at risk' and deciding to intervene. Nurses' weighting of cues did not mirror the same information's contribution to risk in real patients. Nurses synthesized information in non-linear ways that contributed little to decisional accuracy. The low-moderate achievement (Ra) statistics suggests that nurses' assessments of risk were largely inaccurate; these assessments were applied consistently among 'patients' (scenarios). Critical care experience was statistically associated with estimates of risk, but not with the decision to intervene.

Conclusion. Nurses overestimated the risk and the need to intervene in simulated paper patients at risk of a critical event. This average response masked considerable variation in risk predictions, the need for action and the weighting afforded to the information they had available to them. Nurses did not make use of the linear reasoning required for accurate risk predictions in this task. They also failed to employ any unique knowledge that could be shown to make them more accurate. The influence of time pressure and protocol recommendations depended on the kind of judgement faced suggesting then that knowing more about the types of decisions nurses face may influence information use.

Relevance to clinical practice. Practice developers and educators need to pay attention to the quality of nurses' clinical experience as well as the quantity when developing judgement expertise in nurses. Intuitive unaided decision making in the assessment of risk may not be as accurate as supported decision making. Practice developers and educators should consider teaching nurses normative rules for revising probabilities (even subjective ones) such as Bayes' rule for diagnostic or assessment judgements and also that linear ways of thinking, in which decision support may help, may be useful for many choices that nurses face. Nursing needs to separate the rhetoric of 'holism' and 'expertise' from the science of predictive validity, accuracy and competence in judgement and decision making.

Fighting with fire : how bushfire suppression can impact on fire fighters' health

Background: Each year bushfire threatens Australia’s rural, forest, and urban-rural areas. Australia’s rural fire fighters work to curtail this threat in hot, smoky conditions, often at risk to their physical health. General practitioners, especially in rural areas, can help preserve the health of fire fighters during the fire season by understanding the stressors they face on the fireground.

Objective: This article outlines how the key fireground stressors of work intensity and duration, heat (from the weather, the fire, and the fire fighter’s own exertion) and smoke impact on the health of fire fighters. Practical advice for GPs treating Australia’s rural fire fighters is also included.

Discussion: General practitioners can help preserve fire fighters' health during bushfire suppression in a number of ways, including: identifying fire fighters at risk of cardiac distress during physical labour and educating them about the early warning signs; advocating regular exercise; discouraging smoking; and promoting the benefits of maintaining fluid, carbohydrate, and electrolyte levels during a shift.

A haptically enabled CAN-based steering wheel controller

As the portable entertainment and mobility technologies migrate into the car, driver distraction has become recognized as a major factor in road crashes around the world. To help alert drivers to their distraction, active safety technologies such as lane departure warning systems and collision avoidance systems are being implemented. One issue with the implementation of yet another technology into the vehicle is how to cut through the competing demands of the mobile phone, navigation systems and other technologies. Haptic alerts present just such a method that may enable the system to short-circuit the normal auditory or visual communication channels. This paper presents a low cost haptic steering wheel controller that has been designed developed and tested and may be used as a communication device by a lane departure, collision avoidance, or other type of safety system.

The role of psychotherapy in bipolar disorder

• Adjunctive psychosocial interventions for bipolar disorder target many of the issues that are not addressed by medication alone, including non-adherence, efficacy–effectiveness gap and functionality.

• Psychosocial interventions have been found to reduce relapse, particularly for the depressive pole, and improve functionality.

• Approaches such as psychoeducation, cognitive behaviour therapy, interpersonal and social rhythm therapy, and family therapy have shown benefits as adjunctive treatments.

• Each of the various psychosocial interventions has a unique emphasis, but they share common elements. These include: providing information and education; developing a personal understanding of the illness, such as triggers and early warning signs; having prepared strategies in place for early intervention, should symptoms of illness develop; and promoting a collaborative approach.

• Evidence to date supports the use of adjunctive psychosocial interventions in the management of bipolar disorder.

When more is less : urban remnants support high bird abundance but diversity varies

Urban remnant vegetation, especially where it occurs in public parks, allows for relatively easy access for ongoing biodiversity monitoring. However, relatively little baseline information on bird species distribution and abundance across a range of identifiable urban remnants appears in the published literature. We surveyed the relative abundance and distribution of birds across urban and suburban remnant vegetation in Melbourne, Australia. One hundred and six species were recorded, of which 98 were indigenous. Red wattlebirds had the highest mean relative abundance with 2.94 birds/ha, followed by rainbow lorikeets (2.51), noisy miners (1.93), brown thornbills (1.75) and spotted doves (0.96). There was no obvious trend between overall relative abundance and the size of the remnant, in contrast to species richness which was positively correlated with remnant size. The data revealed that some species were either totally restricted to, or more abundant in, larger remnants and generally absent from smaller remnants. Some of the more common birds (crimson rosella, superb fairy-wren, spotted pardalote and black-faced cuckoo-shrike) recorded during this study were detected at similar densities to those found in comparable vegetation to the east of Melbourne within a largely forested landscape. Other species occurred at much lower densities (e.g., white-browed scrubwren, brown thornbill, eastern yellow robin and grey fantail) or had habitat requirements or ecological characteristics that could place them at risk of further decline or local extinction in the urban area. We identify a suite of bird species of potential conservation concern within Melbourne’s urban landscape. The establishment of repeatable, fixed-point, and long-term monitoring sites will allow for repeat surveying over time and provide an early warning of population declines, or conversely an indication of population increase for other species.

Defending against large-scale and coordinated attacks in the ubiquitous environments

Ubiquitous computing is an exciting paradigm shift where technology becomes virtually invisible in our lives. In the increasingly interconnected world, threats to our daily lives can come from unexpected sources and universal directions. Criminals and terrorists have recognized the value of leveraging the ubiquitous computing environments to facilitate the commission of crimes. The cyber criminals typically launch different forms of large-scale and coordinated attacks, causing huge financial loss and potential life hazard. In this talk, we report two innovative approaches to defend against large-scale and coordinated attacks in the ubiquitous environments: 1) Inferring the cyber crime's intent through network traffic classification to enable the early warning of potential attacks, and 2) Profiling the large-scale and coordinated cyber attacks through both microscopic and macroscopic modeling to provide better control of such attacks. These approaches are effective in finding weak symptoms caused by the attacks thus can successfully defend against the large-scale and coordinated attacks at their early stages.