Exploring the Spread of Zika

Vector-borne diseases pose a major public health threat. Combined, these diseases contribute significantly to illness and mortality worldwide and have an adverse impact on development and economic growth of nations. Public health stakeholders seeking to control and prevent these diseases are confronted with a myriad of challenges. Some of these difficulties are related to the nature of the data, the uncertainty of disease dynamics, and volatility of human-environment interactions. Visualization tools are capable of ameliorating some of these challenges. In this paper, the authors demonstrate how interactive visualizations can support stakeholders' decision-making tasks. In particular, they present a visualization tool they created that can support control efforts related to the recent Zika outbreak in Brazil.

Impact of Climate Change on Agriculture and Food Security

Many studies have demonstrated the sensitivities of crop yield to a changing climate, a major challenge for the agricultural research community is to relate these findings to the wider societal concern with food security. Apart from few exceptions, the likely impacts of climate change on agricultural sector in the future are not understood in any great depth. There are many concerns as to how changes in temperature, rainfall and atmospheric Carbon Dioxide concentrations will interact in relation to agricultural productivity. The present article is an attempt to distil about the likely effects of climate change on food security and nutrition in coming decades. The consequences of climate change on various important aspects of agriculture are discussed and summarized. The article also discusses the analysis on the possible mitigation measures and adaptations for agriculture production in the future climate change scenarios.

Five Drivers of Eco-Innovation

Today, firms are faced with a number of environmental challenges such as pollution, scarcity of natural resources, global warming a growing demand for environmentally friendly products. Complexity of sustainability issues in operations management leads this study to determine a parsimonious model of eco-innovation. Most of the research findings have emphasized the effect of innovation on company's economic benefits. However, there are inadequate studies in respect to eco-innovation and its impact to business and environmental sustainability. This paper focuses on determinants of drivers of eco-innovation and its outcome on sustainable business performance. Content analysis is used in order to explain the phenomena of eco-innovation in operations management and categorize the determinants of drivers. The unit of analysis of this study is driver or factor of eco-innovation which are commonly found in entire articles reviewed. The scope of review encompassed articles published between the years 1994 to 2012. Results indicate that a parsimonious model of eco-innovation consists of five drivers. More comprehensive and robust findings could be obtained by testing this model and broadening the scope of study.

A Non Invasive Heart Rate Measurement System for Multiple People in the Presence of Motion and Varying Illumination

A real time non-invasive heart rate (HR) measurement system for multiple people in an image has been proposed in this paper. The data has been gathered using a webcam with different distances with the subjects under varying illumination conditions. The effect of motion of the subjects on HR measurement is also observed. The data is gathered from the face and cheeks are selected as the region of interest (ROI). RGB color model is used for processing. Fast Fourier transform is used to detect the peak frequency after band pass filtering. The green channel of RGB color model gives best HR measurement. The minimum percentage error of 3.1% is achieved in the presence of slow movement and multiple persons at the relative distance of 100 cm.