INTRODUCTION Provision for the safety and health care of persons attending mass-gathering events presents unique challenges to organizers. This study was designed to determine the factors that contribute to patients seeking medical care during these events. METHODS We performed a retrospective review of patient care records for visits that occurred during race weekends at the Kansas Speedway ...

This paper reports experiments in which pCRU — a generation framework that combines probabilistic generation methodology with a comprehensive model of the generation space — is used to semi-automatically create several versions of a weather forecast text generator. The generators are evaluated in terms of output quality, development time and computational efficiency against (i) human forecaster...

We are all familiar with the fact that cities are generally warmer than the surrounding, more rural areas. We see it referenced most nights in our television weather reports. It is especially significant on nights with clear skies and light winds which favor radiational cooling. This is most significant in the rural areas but in the city, the excess heat absorbed during the day and the local he...

In this paper, we introduce an NLG application for the automatic creation of ready-to-publish texts from big data. The resulting fully automatic generated news stories have a high resemblance to the style in which the human writer would draw up such a story. Topics include soccer games, stock exchange market reports, and weather forecasts. Each generated text is unique. Readyto-publish stories ...

People have a large amount of information that they wish to maintain awareness of, but yet forget to check or are too busy to check it on a regular basis. Examples of this information include weather forecasts, stock quotes, traffic reports, and financial accounts. This information can be quite important, but monitoring it is not properly supported by existing tools which focus only on the user...

The temperature difference between adjacent 0000 and 1200 UTC weather balloon (radiosonde) reports shows a pervasive tendency toward cooler daytime compared to nighttime observations since the 1970s, especially at tropical stations. Several characteristics of this trend indicate that it is an artifact of systematic reductions over time in the uncorrected error due to daytime solar heating of th...

The local abundance of Culex mosquitoes is a central factor adding to the risk of West Nile virus transmission, and vector abundance data influence public health decisions. This study evaluated differences in abundance estimates from mosquitoes trapped using two common methods: CO2-baited CDC light traps and infusion-baited gravid traps in suburban, Chicago, Illinois. On a weekly basis, the two...

In China, 260 million people migrate to cities to realize their urban dreams. Despite that these migrants play an important role in the rapid urbanization process, many of them fail to settle down and eventually leave the city. The integration process of migrants thus raises an important issue for scholars and policymakers. In this paper, we use Shanghai as an example to investigate migrants’ b...

The purpose of this paper is to develop a general framework for the prediction of complex multiscale phenomena and to illustrate this framework through comparison to two examples of current interest to the authors. Prediction involves a two step process of inverse prediction to describe the system, given observations of its behavior, and forward prediction, to specify system behavior, given its...