divendres, 25 de maig del 2018

Infographic about statistical studies related to schizophrenia

Here you have an infographic created by me in order to make you aware of some of the most interesting statistical studies on topics related to schizophrenia. I am sure that this statistics will make you reflect on aspects about schizophrenia that you never thought of before. I hope you find it interesting.


Information sourced from Wikipedia | www.wikipedia.org de Adrián Villalba Maillo

dijous, 3 de maig del 2018

Game theory: the occupation of the city of Kent

Lately I've been learning the basics of game theory and I've been interested in finding a special situation in real life that could be solved using game theory. Since I have not found any situation related to the topic of this blog, I have decided to apply what I have learned about game theory in another field, the military field. I hope you find this topic as interesting as I do.

Game theory: the occupation 
of the city of Kent


In the ninth century, the territory of England was divided into the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy, the name given during Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages to the set of Anglo-Saxon petty kingdoms placed in the center, south and east of the island of Great Britain that generally are identified with Essex, Estanglia, Kent, Mercia, Northumbria, Sussex and Wessex, that eventually were united in the Kingdom of England. At this time, the invasion and looting of different cities of the seven kingdoms carried out by the Viking Grand Army was very frequent. The Great Viking Army, known by the Anglo-Saxons as the Great Pagan Army, was a coalition of Nordic warriors, mainly from Denmark, Sweden and Norway.

In this historical context, we imagine the invasion and occupation perpetrated by the Vikings of a certain English city of the time, for example Canterbury (called at that time Cantwareburh), the capital of the medieval kingdom of Kent. During the occupation of the city, the King of Kent manages to escape from Canterbury and flees to the neighboring kingdom of Sussex, one of his allies. Once in Sussex, the King of Kent asks the King of Sussex to help him recover the city of Canterbury by sending his army to defeat the Vikings. As an incentive, the King of Kent promises the King of Sussex that if he recovers the capital of his kingdom, he will give him half the wealth of the kingdom of Kent valued at 50,000 gold coins.


Despite this, the King of Sussex is aware of the large number of soldiers of the Viking army, as well as its ferocity and mastery in combat. Bearing this in mind, the King of Sussex asks for help from another of his allied kingdoms, the kingdom of Essex, another of the neighboring kingdoms of the kingdom of Kent. The King of Sussex asks the King of Essex to combine the strength of their respective armies to conquer Canterbury, since they will only achieve this objective if the two armies attack together. As an incentive, the King of Sussex agrees to pay the King of Essex half of the reward offered by the King of Kent, 25,000 gold coins, provided the King of Essex helps him. The king of Essex agrees to help the king of Sussex and the two kings agree that their respective armies will meet at the gates of Canterbury within a week in order to fight against the Vikings. In this case, for strategical reasons, their armies will have to give a surprise attack from different positions and this will require that the two armies head to Canterbury separately.
Once the two kings come back to their respective kingdoms with the excuse of preparing their armies for battle, the two kings reflect on the obvious alternative that they both have. The two kings know that if one of them sends his army within a week to Canterbury, the other king has the option of not sending his army, which would imply the sure annihilation of the army that went to Canterbury. The reason why one of the kings may decide not to send his army is obvious: if the King of Essex sent his army to Canterbury and the King of Sussex decided not to, the Essex army would be destroyed and the King of Sussex would have free run for the military occupation of the kingdom of Essex, which would bring him benefits of 50,000 gold coins, the total wealth of the kingdom of Essex. Likewise, the king of Essex may decide to do the same and take possession of the kingdom of Sussex, whose wealth is equal to the wealth of the kingdom of Essex, that is to say, 50,000 gold coins. The two  kings know for sure three things:


- If only one of the two armies approaches to Canterbury, this army will be annihilated by the Vikings and the king who has not sent his soldiers will be able to occupy the defeated kingdom.

- If the two armies go to Canterbury, they will defeat the Vikings and each victorious king will be granted half the reward of the King of Kent.

- If no army goes to Canterbury, neither of the two kings will get benefits.


Payoff matrix

In this payoff matrix, the results are not expressed in earnings, but in the opportunity cost of each alternative, that is to say, the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen.


To respect the alliance
To break the alliance
To respect the alliance
- 25,000 / - 25,000
- 100,000 / 0
To break the alliance
0 / - 100,000
-50,000 / -50,000

Nash equilibrium

In this case, the Nash equilibrium or best response for both of them would be to break their alliance, since no player has anything to gain by changing only their own strategy. Bearing this in mind, the two kings seem to have two viable options:

- To violate their agreement, since they cannot trust in each other (as often happens in real world politics), or refuse to collaborate from the beginning, it depends on how long it takes them to realize all the alternatives they have and their costs.

- To modify the terms and conditions of the agreement. For instance, they could arrange for their respective armies to meet at an agreed location away from Canterbury from where they could head together to Canterbury. In this way none of them would run the risk of being annihilated by the Vikings, but they would have to develop another military strategy that would allow them to win the battle.

dijous, 18 de gener del 2018

Digital Humanities and some examples of projects related to this field

At its core, the Digital Humanities is the use of digital tools to gather, organize, analyze, and
present scholarly research in the humanities. Humanists seek to understand the world and
cultures in which people live and have lived through a variety of disciplines including literature,
English and other modern languages, philosophy, art, art history, and history. While many of the
questions humanists seek to answer have not changed, new technology, like text mining,
dynamic visualizations, and spatial analysis, provide humanists ways to ask new questions and
view old questions differently.



- Examples of successful DH projects

Cultural analytics
Cultural Analytics is an open-access journal dedicated to the computational study of culture. Its aim is to promote high quality scholarship that applies computational and quantitative methods to the study of cultural artifacts (text, image, sound) at significantly larger scales than traditional methods. It combines the very best of the humanities and the social and computational sciences. All these characteristics make this project a DH project. Cultural Analytics aims to challenge disciplinary boundaries and serve as the foundational publishing venue of a major new intellectual movement.
http://culturalanalytics.org

The Republic of Letters
The Republic of Letters seeks to visualize the social network of Enlightenment writers through an interactive map and visualization tools. Network analysis and data visualization is also used for reflections on the field itself – researchers may produce network maps of social media interactions or infographics from data on digital humanities scholars and projects.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
This DH project is called Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). From its inception, the SEP was designed so that each entry is maintained and kept up-to-date by an expert or group of experts in the field. All entries and substantive updates are refereed by the members of a distinguished Editorial Board before they are made public. Consequently, its dynamic reference work maintains academic standards while evolving and adapting in response to new research. This project has been promoted by the Stanford University and has been given several grants in order to make sure this project keeps working and the SEP team make this project evolve and improve. We can say this is a Digital Humanities project because it tries to make a humanities field like philosophy easier to access and study with the help of digital tools.

dimecres, 29 de novembre del 2017

About

My name is Victor and I am the author of this blog. In this new blog, my intention is to provide information about one of the most complex and mysterious mental illnesses that ever existed, schizophrenia. This blog is part of a school project from a subject called Digital Humanities and what I am supposed to do is to research on this topic and translate the results of my research in this blog.

We will see its different symptoms, an overview of its history, its different subtypes, its possible treatments, maybe we will even see different testimonies of their victims that will help us to understand this disease in a deeper way ...

But this is not the main goal of this blog, what I really want to do is convince the readers of this blog that if they had a patient with schizophrenia in their life, they would have no reason to fear or isolate that person, because if he / she receives an adequate treatment, there is no reason to think that he / she could hurt us or something like that, in fact, we could even build a good relationship with that person. But we will see more details in the following publications.

dilluns, 27 de novembre del 2017

Graphic of Google Books Ngram Viewer

I have made this graph in order to observe the evolution of knowledge and interest in the topics related to schizophrenia over the last two centuries. As we can see in the graph, the knowledge and interest in the symptoms of schizophrenia such as social isolation and hallucinations, besides madness, mental illnesses and mental hospitals has existed and increased for a long time, what is strange is that despite this, it seems that the writing about schizophrenia has just existed since the 20s, however, according to the sources I have consulted, schizophrenia has existed for many centuries, which means that schizophrenic patients did not receive the most suitable diagnosis or treatment for their disease until the 1920s, this is likely due to the lack of medical knowledge until the end of the 19th century.

Source: https://books.google.com/ngrams


Glossary with the keywords

- Schizophrenia: schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by abnormal social behavior and failure to understand what is real. - M...