CS_2009_DEATH_MAP.TEX
Dr John Snow
A Model of Disease Transmission

I gave a "farewell address" to the last meeting of the directed study class in Computational Science at Virginia Tech, 05 May 2009. The talk was titled

Dr John Snow - A Model of Disease Transmission

A PDF version is available as ../../presentations/cs_2009_death_map.pdf

Reference:

1. The John Snow web site maintained by the UCLA School of Public Health at http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow.html.
2. Sandra Hempel,
   The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump,
   University of California, 2007,
   ISBN13: 978-0520250499,
   LC: RA644.C3.H46.
3. Steven Johnson,
   The Ghost Map,
   Riverhead, 2006,
   ISBN-13: 978-1594489259,
   LC: RC133.G6.J64.
4. Peter Vinten-Johansen, Howard Brody, Nigel Paneth, Stephen Rachman, Michael Rip,
   Cholera, Chloroform, and the Science of Medicine: A Life of John Snow,
   Oxford University Press, 2003,
   ISBN: 019513544X,
   LC: RA649.5.S66.S647.

TeX "Source Code"

The LaTeX file used to create the presentation employs the Beamer class.

• cs_2009_death_map.tex, the LaTeX source;
• multimedia.sty, a LaTeX style file;
• icam_logo.pdf, a PDF image of a logo for Virginia Tech's Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Mathematics (ICAM).

Graphics Files

• cholera_art.png, an imaginative piece of artwork showing the spread of cholera, which also illustrates the belief that it was spread through "bad air";
• cholera_spread.png, a map of the world, showing the spread of cholera during the seventh pandemic.
• cube.png, an image of a 3D cube, to illustrate Euler's Formula for bounded polyhedrons.
• diamond_mountains.png, a "mountain" plot of the diamond points shows the generators as peaks, and the diagram lines as straight valleys, generated by VORONOI_MOUNTAINS.
• diamond_pixel_plot_l1.png, a pixel plot of the Delaunay triangulation of the diamond points, generated by VORONOI_PLOT, using the L1 distance. Some "mistakes" in the plot are actually caused by the fact that for the L1 distance, the boundary can consist of an area, rather than a line, that is, for certain generators, a relatively huge (and area filling) number of points can be equidistant from two generators. The plotting routine doesn't spot this, but its results suggest what is happening.
• different_maps.png, shows that, without the correct organizing principle, the explanation for the cholera death data can be invisible.
• golden_square.png, a map of the Golden Square area, where a highly localized outbreak of cholera occurred in 1854, from the John Snow archive and research companion site at http://www.epi.msu.edu/johnsnow/index.html.
• golden_square_detail.png, a detail of the Golden Square map, showing the suspected pump, and a dotted line around its "neighborhood", from the John Snow archive and research companion site at http://www.epi.msu.edu/johnsnow/index.html.
• john_snow.png, an image of Dr John Snow.
• pump_memorial.png, a photograph of the John Snow memorial in Broad Street, which is a replica of the pump he identified as the source of the epidemic.
• pumps_map.png, a map of the locations of pumps and deaths in the Golden Square cholera epidemic.
• pumpwomen.png, a drawing of the Broad Street Pump, suggesting how local women collected water in pumps for use at home.