We introduce and analyze several variants of a system of differential equations which model the dynamics of social outbursts, such as riots. The systems involve the coupling of an explicit variable representing the intensity of rioting activity and an underlying (implicit) field of social tension. Our models include the effects of exogenous and endogenous factors as well as various propagation ...

The key to understanding law and authority in late eighteenth-century Ireland lies in extraordinary cases. Some historians have dismissed the political trials of reformers and activists as unrepresentative of the "typical" processes of the Irish judicial system. They argue that the majority of Irishmen in the eighteenth century did not believe that their society was particularly violent and tha...

This study represents the first systematic attempt to assess the relation between gender and the wellbeing of older persons in Cambodia, with reference to health, demographic, social support and economic indicators. The context is one in which the numerical dominance of women among the older age population is unusually pronounced due to a past history of civil unrest and violence. Our results, ...

Big data holds critical importance in the current generation of information technology, with applications ranging from financial, industrial, academic to defense sectors. With the exponential rise of open source data from social media and increasing government monitoring, big data is now also linked with national security, and subsequently to the intelligence community. In this study I review t...

The scale, velocity, and dynamic nature of large scale social media systems like Twitter demand a new set of visual analytics techniques that support near real-time situational awareness. Social media systems are credited with escalating social protest during recent large scale riots. Virtual communities form rapidly in these online systems, and they occasionally foster violence and unrest whic...

On July 25, 2013 Prof. Dr. med. Urs Heim passed away. With him one of the grand personalities of European trauma and orthopedic surgery left us. His work and his aura went far beyond the borders of his native country Switzerland. Urs Heim (Figure 1) was born on April 4, 1924 in Zurich. After attending school in Switzerland and France he started his studies in the field of human medicine in the ...

Since 2009, the Department of Physiology had planned an International Union of Physiological Sciences Physiology Teaching Workshop at Arabian Gulf University. The date was set for March 5-6, 2011; however, due to civil unrest, the workshop was postponed to March 31-April 1, 2012. The workshop was a success, bringing together 92 speakers and participants from 23 countries. Twenty-eight participa...

This paper introduces a new methodology to target direct transfers against poverty. Our method is based on observable correlates and on estimation methods that focus on the poor. Using data from Tunisia, we estimate ‘focused’ transfer schemes that improve anti-poverty targeting performances. Post-transfer poverty can be substantially reduced with the new estimation method. The impact of these s...

The common real-world feature of individuals migrating through a network – either in real space or online – significantly complicates understanding of network processes. Here we show that even though a network may appear static on average, underlying nodal mobility can dramatically distort outbreak profiles. Highly nonlinear dynamical regimes emerge in which increasing mobility either amplifies...