About a hundred years ago, public health took a visual turn. In an era of devastating epidemic and endemic infectious disease, health professionals began to organize coordinated campaigns that sought to mobilize public action through eye-catching wall posters, illustrated pamphlets, motion pictures, and glass slide projections. An Iconography of Contagion.
posted by Fuzzy Monster on Feb 28, 2010 - 18 comments

"In the limit of an infinite economy, the number of initial downgrades is Poisson distributed. This captures the idea that the shock initially affects only a small number of firms. Nonetheless, the distribution of the total number of defaults has slowly decaying tails ... A firm might well be able to absorb its shock, but it might not be able to absorb both the shock and the resulting deterioration in the average rating. The initial downgrades may thus trigger additional defaults that, in turn, further deteriorate the average rating, and so on. In a large economy, this cascade can be described by a branching process." Ulrich Horst, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2007. (Internet supplement!) [more inside]
posted by geoff. on Sep 30, 2008 - 8 comments

This isn't 1998. There's no model for what's happening now in the housing and mortgage industries. 116 mortgage lenders have imploded since 2006. 11 hedge funds have imploded in just the last couple months. Time to warm up the helicopters?
posted by wallstreet1929 on Aug 11, 2007 - 126 comments

A New Way to Catch Hepatitis
"Israeli doctors have discovered a gruesome new way to catch hepatitis and possibly other blood-borne diseases - from the flying bone fragments of suicide bombers." (empahasis added)
posted by Irontom on Jul 25, 2002 - 9 comments