Ross River virus is a common mosquito-borne arbovirus responsible for outbreaks of polyarthritic disease throughout Australia. To better understand climatic factors preceding outbreaks, we compared seasonal and monthly rainfall and temperature trends in outbreak and nonoutbreak years at four epidemic-prone locations. Our analyses showed that rainfall in outbreak years tended to be above average...

Mekong River runs from Hengduan Mountains in central-west China to Vietnam covering 805,604 sq km of land by its basin. The Lower Mekong Basin (LMB), the region mapped in this study, covers nearly 3/4 of the entire basin. About 90% of the population and agricultural activities of the Mekong River basin is located in this fertile LMB which faces disastrous floods almost annually. Mapping LMB at ...

The title of my paper comes from an essay by Václav Havel. In his essay, Havel addressed most evocatively the question of the unique power of words for thinking and to influence, for good or for harm, as well as to inform and to educate. As analysts our medium is the word. I suggest that it is of inestimable importance that we are able to listen deeply to our patients' words and to be aware of ...

In this note we describe the notion of a rectifiable scan and consider some applications [DH1], [DH2] to Plateau-type minimization problems. “Scans” were first introduced in the work [HR1] of Tristan Rivière and the second author to adequately describe certain bubbling phenomena. There, the behavior of certain W 1,3 weakly convergent sequences of smooth maps from 4 dimensional domains into S le...

Conservation attention on charismatic large vertebrates such as dolphins is often supported by the suggestion that these species represent surrogates for wider biodiversity, or act as indicators of ecosystem health. However, their capacity to act as indicators of patterns or trends in regional biodiversity has rarely been tested. An extensive new dataset of >300 last-sighting records for the Ya...

Ross River virus (RRV) infection is a debilitating disease that has a significant impact on population health, economic productivity, and tourism in Australia. This study examined epidemiologic patterns of RRV disease in Queensland, Australia, during January 2001-December 2011 at a statistical local area level. Spatio-temporal analyses were used to identify the patterns of the disease distribut...

Modelling techniques valid for ordinary hydrological conditions are often inadequate for catastrophic runoff conditions, as the majority of the parameters included in the modelling schemes are not necessarily applicable to flood conditions. To overcome this problem, using a stochastic self-training procedure (SSTP) is proposed. The procedure is based on the real water balance equation and the s...

Captain Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III became a source of inspiration and hope for millions after his successful emergency water landing of a disabled airliner in the Hudson River on Jan. 15, 2009, dubbed the “Miracle on the Hudson.” After listening to the cockpit recording from that day, one aviation specialist said of Sullenberger, “That guy has been training for this all his life,” rema...