I’ll admit the name of this program itself intrigued me enough to have to take a look. The Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeler (STEM) tool “is designed to help scientists and public health officials create and use spatial and temporal models of emerging infectious diseases. These models could aid in understanding, and potentially preventing, the spread of such diseases… The STEM application has built in Geographical Information System (GIS) data for every county in the United States. It comes with data about county borders, populations, shared borders (neighbors), interstate highways, state highways, and airports. This data comes from the public U.S. census TIGER files. STEM is designed to make it easy for developers and researchers to plug in their own models. It comes with spatiotemporal Susceptible/Infectious/Recovered (SIR) and Susceptible/Exposed/Infectious/Recovered (SEIR) models pre-coded with both deterministic and stochastic engines. The parameters in any model are specified in XML configuration files. Users can easily change the weight or significance of various disease vectors (such as the weights of highways, shared borders, airports, etc). Users can also create their own unique vectors for disease.” How fun is that?
Published by Michael Sauers
Michael Sauers is currently the Director of Technology for Do Space in Omaha, NE. Michael has been training librarians in technology for the past twenty years and has also been a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, serials cataloger, technology consultant, and bookseller since earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy. Michael has also written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and his fourteenth book, Emerging Technologies: A Primer for Librarians (w/ Jennifer Koerber) was published in May 2015 and more books are on the way. In his spare time he blogs at travelinlibrarian.info, runs The Collector’s Guide to Dean Koontz Web site, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
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