149,309 research outputs found
What's unusual in online disease outbreak news?
Background: Accurate and timely detection of public health events of
international concern is necessary to help support risk assessment and response
and save lives. Novel event-based methods that use the World Wide Web as a
signal source offer potential to extend health surveillance into areas where
traditional indicator networks are lacking. In this paper we address the issue
of systematically evaluating online health news to support automatic alerting
using daily disease-country counts text mined from real world data using
BioCaster. For 18 data sets produced by BioCaster, we compare 5 aberration
detection algorithms (EARS C2, C3, W2, F-statistic and EWMA) for performance
against expert moderated ProMED-mail postings. Results: We report sensitivity,
specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV),
mean alerts/100 days and F1, at 95% confidence interval (CI) for 287
ProMED-mail postings on 18 outbreaks across 14 countries over a 366 day period.
Results indicate that W2 had the best F1 with a slight benefit for day of week
effect over C2. In drill down analysis we indicate issues arising from the
granular choice of country-level modeling, sudden drops in reporting due to day
of week effects and reporting bias. Automatic alerting has been implemented in
BioCaster available from http://born.nii.ac.jp. Conclusions: Online health news
alerts have the potential to enhance manual analytical methods by increasing
throughput, timeliness and detection rates. Systematic evaluation of health
news aberrations is necessary to push forward our understanding of the complex
relationship between news report volumes and case numbers and to select the
best performing features and algorithms
Ethics of e-voting: an essay on requirements and values in Internet elections
In this paper, we investigate ethical issues involved in the development and implementation of
Internet voting technology. From a phenomenological perspective, we describe how voting via the
Internet mediates the relation between people and democracy. In this relation, trust plays a major
role. The dynamics of trust in the relation between people and their world forms the basis for our
analysis of the ethical issues involved. First, we consider established principles of voting,
confirming the identity of our democracy, which function as expectations in current experiments
with online voting in the Netherlands. We investigate whether and how Internet voting can meet
these expectations and thereby earn trust, based on the experiments in the Netherlands. We identify
major challenges, and provide a basis for ethical and political discussion on these issues, especially
the changed relation between public and private. If we decide that we want to vote via the Internet,
more practical matters come into play in the implementation of the technology. The choices
involved here are discussed in relation to the mediating role of concrete voting technologies in the
relation between citizen and state
The Continuing Search for a Meaningful Model of Judicial Rankings and Why It (Unfortunately) Matters
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