The collapse of geographical space over the last 200 years has had profound effects on the circulation of human populations and on the transfer of infectious diseases. Three examples are used to illustrate the process: (a) the impact of the switch from sail to steamships in importing measles into Fiji over a 40-year period; (b) changes in measles epidemic behaviour in Iceland over a 150-year pe...

The application domain of intelligent transportation is plagued by a shortage of data sources that adequately assess traffic situations. Currently, to provide routing and navigation solutions an unreliable travel time database that consists of static weights as derived from road categories and speed limits is used for road networks. With the advent of Floating Car Data (FCD) and specifically th...

At its core, genetics is a historical discipline. Mutations are passed on from generation to generation and accumulate as a result of chance as well as of selection within and between populations and species. However, until recently, geneticists were confined to the study of present-day genetic variation and could only indirectly make inferences about the historical processes that resulted in t...

For example, if someone is in the central business district of a large city, it might be cheapest to walk to a given destination. However, if the traveler has a particularly high value of travel time, the person might elect to pay for a ride to get to his or her destination faster. Similarly, a person driving a car might be faced with the choice between sitting in congestion or electing to pay ...

We describe a system called Olive that freezes and precisely reproduces the environment necessary to execute software long after its creation. It uses virtual machine (VM) technology to encapsulate legacy software, complete with all its software dependencies. This legacy world can be completely closed-source: there is no requirement for availability of source code, nor a requirement for recompi...

The quantum teleportation protocol can be used to probabilistically simulate a quantum circuit with backward-in-time connections. This allows us to analyze some conceptual problems of time travel in the context of physically realizable situations, to realize encrypted measurements of future states for which the decryption key becomes available only after the state is created, and to probabilist...