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Friday, March 21. 2008

Brookings Models All of Us

What if you wanted to model the spread of say a disease across the current world population of 6.7 billion people? Think it can be done? It can, by the Large-Scale Agent Model, which resides at the Brookings Institution's Center on Social and Economic Dynamics. It was developed with guidance of the Homeland Security Department's National Center for the Study of Preparedness and Catastrophic Event Response at Johns Hopkins University.

The cool part: the model includes factors like age and gender and how individuals are dispersed geographically. It even models the daily commute! Check out video of it in action in a GovExec article. They show the spread of a disease and a toxic release. (Those seem to be favorites these days).

Posted by Adena Schutzberg at 06:00 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

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Interesting.

The first video apparently illustrates the general assumption that someone in every zip code (or is that everyone in every zipcode?) is susceptible and comes down with the disease.

Impressive...and it would also lead an uneducated senior executive into a tailspin of panic. Lies, dang lies and statistics are at play here.

The second video is interesting for its granularity and the persistence of the cloud. Neat stuff.

Just as an FYI - the official Dept. of Homeland Security atmospheric modeling resource is NOT the Brookings modeling team. Official results that model dispersion plumes are obtained elsewhere.

Is Brookings looking for subsidy dollars by holding a press conference and making a capabilities announcement through an article? Will there be conflicting model results from more than one center in the event of an event? To whom will the respondents turn for the correct answer? More is no doubt better if their efforts are coordinated...but what do you suppose the chances of coordination are between two Federally-Funded Research & Development Centers?

Nevertheless, cool stuff
#1 Archie Belaney on 2008-03-21 10:39 (Reply)

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