Wayfinding is the process of finding your way to a destination in a familiar or unfamiliar setting using any cues given by the environment. Due to its ubiquity in everyday life, wayfinding appears on the surface to be a simply characterized and understood process; however, this very ubiquity and the resulting need to refine and optimize wayfinding has led to a great number of studies that have revealed that it is in fact a deeply complex exercise. In this article, we examine the motivations for investigating wayfinding, with particular attention being paid to the unique challenges faced in transportation hubs, and discuss the associated principles and factors involved as they have been perceived from different research perspectives. We also review the approaches used to date in the modelling of wayfinding in various contexts. We attempt to draw together the different perspectives applied to wayfinding and postulate the importance of wayfinding and the need to understand this seemingly simple, but concurrently complex, process.

Background: The state of the HIV epidemic in the Philippines has been described as “low and slow”, which is in stark contrast to many other countries in the region. A review of the conditions for HIV spread in the Philippines is necessary.Methods: We evaluated the current epidemiology, trends in behaviour and public health response in the Philippines to identify factors that could account for the current HIV epidemic, as well as to review conditions that may be of concern for facilitating an emerging epidemic.Results: The past control of HIV in the Philippines cannot be attributed to any single factor, nor is it necessarily a result of the actions of the Filipino government or other stakeholders. Likely reasons for the epidemic's slow development include: the country's geography is complicated; injecting drug use is relatively uncommon; a culture of sexual conservatism exists; sex workers tend to have few clients; anal sex is relatively uncommon; and circumcision rates are relatively high.In contrast, there are numerous factors suggesting that HIV is increasing and ready to emerge at high rates, including: the lowest documented rates of condom use in Asia; increasing casual sexual activity; returning overseas Filipino workers from high‐prevalence settings; widespread misconceptions about HIV/AIDS; and high needle‐sharing rates among injecting drug users.There was a three‐fold increase in the rate of HIV diagnoses in the Philippines between 2003 and 2008, and this has continued over the past year. HIV diagnoses rates have noticeably increased among men, particularly among bisexual and homosexual men (114% and 214% respective increases over 2003‐2008). The average age of diagnosis has also significantly decreased, from approximately 36 to 29 years.Conclusions: Young adults, men who have sex with men, commercial sex workers, injecting drug users, overseas Filipino workers, and the sexual partners of people in these groups are particularly vulnerable to HIV infection. There is no guarantee that a large HIV epidemic will be avoided in the near future. Indeed, an expanding HIV epidemic is likely to be only a matter of time as the components for such an epidemic are already present in the Philippines.

Effective wayfinding is the successful interplay of human and environmental factors resulting in a person successfully moving from their current position to a desired location in a timely manner. To date this process has not been modelled to reflect this interplay. This paper proposes a complex modelling system approach of wayfinding by using Bayesian Networks to model this process, and applies the model to airports. The model suggests that human factors have a greater impact on effective wayfinding in airports than environmental factors. The greatest influences on human factors are found to be the level of spatial anxiety experienced by travellers and their cognitive and spatial skills. The model also predicted that the navigation pathway that a traveller must traverse has a larger impact on the effectiveness of an airport’s environment in promoting effective wayfinding than the terminal design.

The use of expert knowledge to quantify a Bayesian Network (BN) is necessary when data is not available. This however raises questions regarding how opinions from multiple experts can be used in a BN. Linear pooling is a popular method for combining probability assessments from multiple experts. In particular, Prior Linear Pooling (PrLP), which pools opinions and then places them into the BN, is a common method. This paper considers this approach and an alternative pooling method, Posterior Linear Pooling (PoLP). The PoLP method constructs a BN for each expert, and then pools the resulting probabilities at the nodes of interest. The advantages and disadvantages of these two methods are identified and compared and the methods are applied to an existing BN, the Wayfinding Bayesian Network Model, to investigate the behavior of different groups of people and how these different methods may be able to capture such differences. The paper focusses on six nodes Human Factors, Environmental Factors, Wayfinding, Communication, Visual Elements of Communication and Navigation Pathway, and three subgroups Gender (Female, Male), Travel Experience (Experienced, Inexperienced), and Travel Purpose (Business, Personal), and finds that different behaviors can indeed be captured by the different methods.

We present a spatiotemporal mathematical model of chlamydial infection, host immune response, and movement of infectious particles. The resulting partial differential equations model both the dynamics of the infection and changes in infection profile observed spatially along the length of the host genital tract. This model advances previous Chlamydia modelling by incorporating spatial change. Numerical solutions and model analysis are carried out, and we present a hypothesis regarding the potential for treatment and prevention of infection by increasing chlamydial particle motility.