A number of schemes have been proposed for communication using chaos over the past years. Regardless of the exact modulation method used, the transmitted signal must go through a physical channel which undesirably introduces distortion to the signal and adds noise to it. The problem is particularly serious when coherent-based demodulation is used because the necessary process of chaos synchronization is difficult to implement in practice. This paper addresses the channel distortion problem and proposes a technique for channel equalization in chaos-based communication systems. The proposed equalization is realized by a modified recurrent neural network (RNN) incorporating a specific training (equalizing) algorithm. Computer simulations are used to demonstrate the performance of the proposed equalizer in chaos-based communication systems. The Henon map and Chua's circuit are used to generate chaotic signals. It is shown that the proposed RNN-based equalizer outperforms conventional equalizers.

Using daily infection data for Hong Kong we explore the validity of a variety of models of disease propagation when applied to the SARS epidemic. Surrogate data methods show that simple random models are insufficient and that the standard epidemic susceptible-infected-removed model does not fully account for the underlying variability in the observed data. As an alternative, we consider a more complex small world network model and show that such a structure can be applied to reliably produce simulations quantitative similar to the true data. The small world network model not only captures the apparently random fluctuation in the reported data, but can also reproduce mini-outbreaks such as those caused by so-called "super-spreaders" and in the Hong Kong housing estate of Amoy Gardens.