Zombie Studies Finally Gets the Scholarly Respect It Deserves

Posted by John Farrier in Paranormal on August 14, 2009 at 2:49 pm


Four statisticians at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University have published an article in the peer-reviewed journal Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress on the subject of zombie epidemiology. It’s entitled “When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection.” It’s a very math-heavy article, but their conclusion is straight-forward and dire:

An outbreak of zombies infecting humans is likely to be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead. While aggressive quarantine may eradicate the infection, this is unlikely to happen in practice. A cure would only result in some humans surviving the outbreak, although they will still coexist with zombies. Only sufficiently frequent attacks, with increasing force, will result in eradication, assuming the available resources can be mustered in time.

Well, that was fairly obvious. But now there’s hard science to back up common sense, and the academic community is starting to take the undead threat seriously.

Link via io9

Image by flickr user ingridjee used under creative commons license


Previous post
this post? Please Email this               
Next post

Tags: , ,


FUN PRODUCTS FROM THE NEATORAMA SHOP:


COMMENT

12 comments to "Zombie Studies Finally Gets the Scholarly Respect It Deserves"

  1. sc0tty
    August 14th, 2009 at 6:20 pm

    My B.A. is in Zombie Studies.

  2. Stephanie
    August 14th, 2009 at 7:52 pm

    It's Ottawa, not Ottowa. Thanks.

  3. John
    August 14th, 2009 at 8:39 pm

    Thanks, Stephanie. Fixed now.

  4. Bill
    August 14th, 2009 at 10:48 pm

    OMG! The topic name deserves a trophy

  5. abdulhamid
    August 15th, 2009 at 5:01 am

    Whenever I see an extravagant amount effort wasted on such a pointless intellectual exercises I think about the true knowledge that was lost to humanity forever in the flames at Alexandria.

  6. edc2
    August 15th, 2009 at 7:12 am

    is there a study on jumping the shark?

  7. Ledger
    August 15th, 2009 at 9:06 am

    Why so serious?

  8. Brad
    August 15th, 2009 at 11:18 am

    I agree with Barbie, when she said: "Math is Hard!"

  9. Scooter
    August 17th, 2009 at 10:50 am

    So the plot of WWZ could (mathematically) happen?

  10. Edward ott
    August 18th, 2009 at 11:10 am

    explains now why world war Z was so brutal

  11. Li' Poppet
    August 18th, 2009 at 2:35 pm

    I'm putting all my money in to canned foods and shotguns!

  12. Travis
    October 25th, 2009 at 2:21 am

    Doesn't the government have something better to do than fund such research, like pay some AIG exec's Christmas bon..... never mind.


PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT

Neatorama Comment Policy
You don't have to register or login to comment, but it's easier if you do so. Comments aren't censored, but those that are abusive or off-topic may be edited or deleted.


Stay updated on the comments with Comment RSS