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I recently finished reading Station Eleven. I had heard so many good things about this book.

I wasn’t disappointed by the writing and the characters. But I have to admit, this book had me at flu pandemic.

I love a pandemic.

Pandemics in novels are not a new premise. It’s been done thousands of times, which proves that there are no new stories under the sun; however, it all depends upon what the writer brings to the story — the plot, the characters, the setting.

So then I started thinking of other pandemic novels that I loved — each of them very different. Here’s a few from my list:

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Love is the Drug by Alaya Dawn Johnson
A Matter of Days by Amber Kizer
Orleans by Sherri L. Smith
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
The Stand by Stephen King

Do you also love pandemic, end-of-the-world novels as much as I do? Let me know your favorites — I’m always on the lookout.

Are you worried about catching the flu, or perhaps even Ebola? Just how worried should you be? Well, that depends on how fast a disease will spread over social and transportation networks, so it’s obviously important to obtain good estimates of the speed of disease transmission and to figure out good containment strategies to combat disease spread.

Diseases, rumors, memes, and other information all spread over networks. A lot of research has explored the effects of network structure on such spreading. Unfortunately, most of this research has a major issue: it considers networks that are not realistic enough, and this can lead to incorrect predictions of transmission speeds, which people are most important in a network, and so on. So how does one address this problem?

Traditionally, most studies of propagation on networks assume a very simple network structure that is static and only includes one type of connection between people. By contrast, real networks change in time — one contacts different people during weekdays and on weekends, one (hopefully) stays home when one is sick, new University students arrive from all parts of the world every autumn to settle into new cities. They also include multiple types of social ties (Facebook, Twitter, and – gasp – even face-to-face friendships), multiple modes of transportation, and so on. That is, we consume and communicate information through all sorts of channels. To consider a network with only one type of social tie ignores these facts and can potentially lead to incorrect predictions of which memes go viral and how fast information spreads. It also fails to allow differentiation between people who are important in one medium from people who are important in a different medium (or across multiple media). In fact, most real networks include a far richer “multilayer” structure. Collapsing such structures to obtain and then study a simpler network representation can yield incorrect answers for how fast diseases or ideas spread, the robustness level of infrastructures, how long it takes for interaction oscillators to synchronize, and more.

Recently, an increasingly large number of researchers are studying mathematical objects called “multilayer networks”. These generalize ordinary networks and allow one to incorporate time-dependence, multiple modes of connection, and other complexities. Work on multilayer networks dates back many decades in fields like sociology and engineering, and of course it is well-known that networks don’t exist in isolation but rather are coupled to other networks. The last few years have seen a rapid explosion of new theoretical tools to study multilayer networks.

And what types of things do researchers need to figure out? For one thing, it is known that multilayer structures induce correlations that are invisible if one collapses multilayer networks into simpler representations, so it is essential to figure out when and by how much such correlations increase or decrease the propagation of diseases and information, how they change the ability of oscillators to synchronize, and so on. From the standpoint of theory, it is necessary to develop better methods to measure multilayer structures, as a large majority of the tools that have been used thus far to study multilayer networks are mostly just more complicated versions of existing diagnostic and models. We need to do better. It is also necessary to systematically examine the effects of multilayer structures, such as correlations between different layers (e.g., perhaps a person who is important for the social network that is encapsulated in one layer also tends to be important in other layers?), on different types of dynamical processes. In these efforts, it is crucial to consider not only simplistic (“toy”) models — as in most of the work on multilayer networks thus far — but to move the field towards the examination of ever more realistic and diverse models and to estimate the parameters of these models from empirical data. As our review article illustrates, multilayer networks are both exciting and important to study, but the increasingly large community that is studying them still has a long way to go. We hope that our article will help steer these efforts, which promise to be very fruitful.

The post What do rumors, diseases, and memes have in common? appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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I hope to be better by the first of February!

Keep Well everyone, this one was a doozy!

Be kind to the swine. Don’t give them the blame.
Treat all pigs with kindness. Shake a hoof, ask their name!

As a gesture of kindness, consider biscuits and tea.
I’ve heard roast beef and pound cake makes a pig squeal with glee!
Or…
You could take a piggy to market and buy some new shoes…
add some bloomers, some stockings and a handbag or two!

Yes be kind to the pig. Turn his gray skies to blue.
But first wash your hands. Please don’t give him Swine Flu!

Achoo!

_R.Baird

Three more days to vote…. Won’t you please help us win the ABC Children’s Picture Book Competition?  Voting Link:

http://www.abcbookcompetition.org/5th_comp/SorryDoesntCleanItUp.html

Be kind to the swine. Don’t give them the blame.
Treat all pigs with kindness. Shake a hoof, ask their name!

As a gesture of kindness, consider biscuits and tea.
I’ve heard roast beef and pound cake makes a pig squeal with glee!
Or…
You could take a piggy to market and buy some new shoes…
add some bloomers, some stockings and a handbag or two!

Yes be kind to the pig. Turn his gray skies to blue.
But first wash your hands. Please don’t give him Swine Flu!

Achoo!

_R.Baird

Three more days to vote…. Won’t you please help us win the ABC Children’s Picture Book Competition?  Voting Link:

http://www.abcbookcompetition.org/5th_comp/SorryDoesntCleanItUp.html

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at “swine flue”. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

“Swine flu” or a strand of influenza A subtype “H1N1?” Try as federal officials might, the media continues to resist their call to term the “swine flu” the new strain of “H1N1″ virus.

At a press conference last Tuesday, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack was at pains to say, “This really isn’t swine [flu], it’s H1N1 virus.” He also explained why: “and it is significant because there are a lot of hard-working families whose livelihood depends on us conveying this message.” (At least ten countries have placed bans on the import of pork even though the World Health Organization has attested that H1N1 is an air-borne and not a food-borne virus.)

The hegemony of “swine flu” over “H1N1″ is even more peculiar given that the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) reports that the particular strand of H1N1 virus (which typically infect pigs) that is causing the current epidemic has not previously been reported in pigs and actually contains avian and human components. It was only on May 2, long after “swine flu” had gained rhetorical currency that the strain was found in pigs at a farm in Alberta, Canada. Even there the story has a twist - the pigs had gotten infected because of their contact with a farm worker who had recently returned from Mexico, and not the other way around - prompting some to suggest that the proper nomenclature ought to be “human flu” or “Mexican flu.”

But the media’s job is to transmit the news in the best way that rolls of one’s tongue, not deal with the fallout of their infelicitous use of words. To be fair, administration officials were slow to catch on. As late as April 26, two days before Vilsack’s press conference, the White House and Richard Besser of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) were still referring to the “swine flu.” Clearly, the pork lobbyists aren’t going to win this battle and the malapropistic epidemic will continue. Administration officials should know that if they really wanted a working alternative to “swine flu,” they would have to do a lot better than a robotic scientific abbreviation.

Our current malapropism has an ancient pedigree. The 1918-1920 H1N1 pandemic called the “Spanish Flu” didn’t start in Spain (and probably started in Kansas). This is ironic, because the “Spanish Flu” acquired its name only because Spain was a neutral country in WW1 and with no state censorship of news of the disease, was offering the most reliable information about it. This ended up generating the impression that the disease originated and was particularly widespread in Spain. Even when the media is not trying, it defines and shapes our reality.

Why does any of this matter? Because words characterize an issue in such a way as to insinuate a cause and to frame our reactions. Sometimes, words can even drive mass hysteria. Consider the “swine flu” outbreak in 1976, which claimed a single life at Fort Dix, NJ. Because this particular strain of virus looked a lot like the one that caused the “Spanish Flu” of 1918-1920 (also misleadingly named), public health officials convinced President Gerald Ford to commence a mass immunization program for all Americans. The use of a sledgehammer to crack a nut was not without consequences. Of the 40 million Americans immunized, about 500 developed Guillain-Barré syndrome, a paralyzing neuromuscular disorder.

So let us pick our words carefully, lest our slovenly words presage our slovenly deeds.

For those of you who have managed to escape the flu so far this year, keep reading to improve your odds of staying healthy for the rest of this flu season.

By the way, I am proud to say this rhyme has found a home on the Breathe California of Sacramento-Emigrant Trails web site as part of their Lung Health page (http://sacbreathe.org/lunghealth.htm) and is shared here to increase the "exposure" to flu prevention....

Flu, Flu, Kerchoo!
By Bill Kirk
Sacramento, CA

Five A.M.? That’s my alarm—
Like a rooster on a farm.
Ten more minutes? What’s the harm?
Need my latte wake-up charm.

Now I’m up, but in a haze.
Eyelids struggle with each raise.
Can’t quite focus—eyes ablaze.
Must have slept at least three days.

What’s with all these aches I’ve got?
Head is feeling really hot.
Common cold? I guess it’s not.
S’ppose I should’ve had my shot.

First, I cough and then, “Kerchoo!”
Sneeze until my face turns blue.
Mouth feels like it’s filled with glue.
Sure does sound a lot like flu.

This stuff’s thrown me for a loop.
Brain feels like it’s flown the coop.
Wheezing sounds a bit like croup.
Think I need some chicken soup.

What’s that ringing?! It’s the phone.
Doctor says my culture’s grown.
Head feels like a ten-pound stone.
“Can’t be sick, just tired,” I moan.

Me? Have flu? There is no way!
Sick leave? Not a single day.
Gotta get to work and stay,
Or it’s good-bye to my pay.

Called my boss—was that a sneeze?
Then I heard his distant wheeze,
“Stay at home, now, if you please!
Stay at home ‘til your flu flees!”

Next year, when I have a chance,
I’ll not cop a stubborn stance.
Flu shots surely will enhance,
Odds against a flu-like trance.

Think the flu shot’s not for you?
Miss the shot and here’s a clue.
Though most days you’ll run, it’s true,
You can’t hide from Mister Flu.

It’s been a rough winter in terms of illness in our house but I’m hoping all that will change in the next few days as we move into the spring season! CLIP 36 will be out later this week so please keep an eye out for it! In the meantime have you had a chance to check [...]

Lots of nice messages from people letting me know about today's New York Times, of which this is an example:

Hi Neil,
Just in case no-one has made you aware of this or you haven't seen it yourself, your son is quoted in an article about Google's bus service. You can find it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/technology/10google.html?ex=1331182800&en=272d04d67d29e1f4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
Sounds like he's found himself an awesome place to work! Christopher

It does, doesn't it? (And the people at Google fixed the gmail bug for me, and did stuff to make up for it.) I have rather wonderful children.

Maddy, mind you, while still wonderful, has gone down with influenza, something that we've sort of been waiting for since her two best friends went down with it earlier this week. So we're watching Howl's Moving Castle on the sofa together right now, which is a sensible sort of thing to do when someone is sick and feverish.

Not really a question - I just saw your cuecat/readerware comment. I find for the older books that using the library of congress number works very well. You have to change from just the default amazon service, and you often have to muck with the edition more, but it's a great shortcut for getting author names and titles and whatnot in.Failing an LC number, Amazon also has a surprising number of old editions through their bookseller associates, as does ABE. I find trolling those sites a lot more productive (not to mention interesting) than hand-cataloging.

Good suggestion, and I was thrilled to discover it worked.

I'm finding entering books curiously addictive. I'll pick up a few books and nip into the library to scan them between doing other things.

I've got a sort of a theory about the library -- there are so many books downstairs and scattered around the house that the upstairs library won't really make much of a dent in them. So I've decided that the books I want in the upstairs library are simply ones that I (or someone else a lot like me) might want on shelves if I was just going to pick something up from the shelves and sit down somwhere comfortable and read for an hour. So right now I'm very aware that half the books we've brought up and scanned or entered will go back downstairs again.


Hello Neil, I was wondering if you knew the for sure, official release dates for "Interworld" and "M is for Magic". Amazon is showing July 1st, while Barnes & Noble's website is showing last week of June. Both are listed in the current Diamond Previews which would suggest more like May.Thanks, Cal

I had no idea, but I asked Clarissa Hutton at HarperChildrens, and she said,

The PUBLICATION date for both is 7/1, while the on-sale date is 6/26. So both Amazon & B&N are sort of right, they're just using different bases. Our official pub dates are always the beginning of the month, while release (when the books ship from the warehouse) and on-sale (when the stores need to have the books on-shelf) vary depending on print dates.

Hope this helps.

And this came in recently too:

Hi Neil,

Hope all's well with you. You might be interested to know that The House Called Hadlows will be out next month and that we've added an excerpt from the first chapter to the website - there's a link on this page: http://www.fidrabooks.com/forthcoming.html. I know this is cheeky, but we have had lots of interest via your support for the books and if you were to mention it on your blog that would be fantastic. And you never know - if we sell enough I might be able to wrestle the unpublished third book from Victoria's grasp!!

Best wishes

Vanessa
www.fidrabooks.com

Consider it posted. (I talked about The House Called Hadlows at http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2002/10/i-finished-reading-house-called.asp)

Several people wrote to alert me to this -- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6430489.stm , and its consequences for various internet radio stations.

Hello, Mr. Neil Gaiman sir.
There are some rumors that on the 17th of March you will be at the 7th Warszawskie Spotkania Komiksowe (which translates to Warsaw Comics Festival or something similar) in, lo and behold, Warsaw. It's not listed in the "Where's Neil" section but it's been reported by some Polish comic book news portals. Any luck it's true? Izydor Ingwar I.

It's true -- and it should be up on Where's Neil soon -- I'll be there from 5-7 pm, I believe.

Hi Neil, I've seen you mention the new third-floor library in several posts. As someone who is slowly infiltrating every corner of his house with books, I'm always interested in seeing other people's libraries, bookcases and the like. Any chance we'll get a peek at the new library? Blu

Good idea. I'll take some pictures when I get a spare minute.