Tracking virus outbreaks in the twenty-first century

Emerging viruses have the potential to impose substantial mortality, morbidity and economic burdens on human populations. Tracking the spread of infectious diseases to assist in their control has traditionally relied on the analysis of case data gathered as the outbreak proceeds. Here, we describe how many of the key questions in infectious disease epidemiology, from the initial detection and characterization of outbreak viruses, to transmission chain tracking and outbreak mapping, can now be much more accurately addressed using recent advances in virus sequencing and phylogenetics. We highlight the utility of this approach with the hypothetical outbreak of an unknown pathogen, 'Disease X', suggested by the World Health Organization to be a potential cause of a future major epidemic. We also outline the requirements and challenges, including the need for flexible platforms that generate sequence data in real-time, and for these data to be shared as widely and openly as possible

Disabled lives in deliberative systems

This essay argues that the systemic turn in deliberative democracy has opened up avenues to think about disabled citizenship within discursive processes. I highlight the systemic turn’s recognition of the interdependence of individuals and institutions upon each other in a system as key to this project. This recognition has led to three transformations: (1) a more generous account of deliberative speech acts and behaviors; (2) recognition of the role of enclaves; and (3) incorporating the role of discursive representatives. These changes normalize the participation of cognitively disabled individuals and suggest institutional opportunities for more effective participation

Using CoDeL to Rapidly Prototype Network Processsor Extensions

Abstract. The focus of this work is on techniques that promise to re-duce the message delivery latency in message passing environments, in-cuding clusters of workstations or SMPs. We are introducing Network Processing extensions, and present a preliminary implementation using CoDeL to rapidly design and prototype these extensions.