Design With Nature 2.0 – A Geodata Infrastructure Approach to Map Overlay

McHarg's "Design With Nature" was a precursor of the layer model in modern geographic information systems. We are reviewing the layer overlay approach from a geospatial data infrastructure (GDI) perspective and experiment with weighted map overlay using Web map services. A case study for natural hazard risk assessment for Southern Quebec illustrates this visual approach to multi-criteria analysis using online mapping. We conclude with a call for more research on thematic mapping and its use for decision support within GDIs.

Design With Nature 2.0 – A Geodata Infrastructure Approach to Map Overlay

McHarg's "Design With Nature" was a precursor of the layer model in modern geographic information systems. We are reviewing the layer overlay approach from a geospatial data infrastructure (GDI) perspective and experiment with weighted map overlay using Web map services. A case study for natural hazard risk assessment for Southern Quebec illustrates this visual approach to multi-criteria analysis using online mapping. We conclude with a call for more research on thematic mapping and its use for decision support within GDIs.

Brazil Health Care System preparation against COVID-19

Background: The coronavirus disease outbreak from 2019 (COVID-19) is associated with a severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), a highly contagious virus that claimed thousands of lives around the world and disrupted the health system in many countries. The assessment of emergency capacity in every country is a necessary part of the COVID-19 response efforts. Thus, it is extremely recommended to evaluate the health care system to prepare the country to tackle COVID-19 challenges. Methods and Findings: A retrospective and ecological study was performed with data retrieved from the public national healthcare database (DATASUS). Numbers of intensive care unit and infirmary beds, general or intensivists physicians, nurses, nursing technicians, and ventilators from each Regional Health Unity were extracted, and the beds per health professionals and ventilators per population rates were assessed. The accessibility to health services was also performed using a spatial overlay approach to verify regions that lack assistance. It was found that Brazil lacks equity, integrity, and may struggle to assist with high complexity for the COVID-19 patients in many regions of the country. Conclusions: Brazilian health system is insufficient to tackle the COVID-19 in some regions of the country where the coronavirus may be responsible for high rates of morbidity and mortality.

New techniques for pile-up simulation in ATLAS

The high-luminosity data produced by the LHC leads to many proton-proton interactions per beam crossing in ATLAS, known as pile-up. In order to understand the ATLAS data and extract physics results it is important to model these effects accurately in the simulation. As the pile-up rate continues to grow towards an eventual rate of 200 for the HL-LHC, this puts increasing demands on the computing resources required for the simulation and the current approach of simulating the pile-up interactions along with the hard-scatter for each Monte Carlo production is no longer feasible. The new ATLAS “overlay” approach to pile-up simulation is presented. Here a pre-combined set of minimum bias interactions, either from simulation or from real data, is created once and a single event drawn from this set is overlaid with the hard-scatter event being simulated. This leads to significant improvements in CPU time. This contribution will discuss the technical aspects of the implementation in the ATLAS simulation and production infrastructure and compare the performance, both in terms of computing and physics, to the previous approach.