Neuroscience, Neuroaesthetics, Semiotics and Effective Communication of COVID-19 Warning Information

The need to indicate the significant adverse effects of COVID-19 and the behaviour desired from the population to address this offer an excellent context to consider the varied approaches to providing such information. More specifically, it offers the opportunity to consider the potential utility of neuroscience and what could be usefully added when thinking about the design and presentation of warnings and information. With the understandable wish to neutralise the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic, countries have been displaying miscellaneous messages against the spread of SARS-CoV-2, perhaps some with untested assumptions that those messages would be effective. Despite this, there seems to be highly variable effectiveness in conveying protective messages. Primary causes of poor compliance with various preventive messages might involve a lack of clear vision and direction if the aim is to change citizens' responsibility for their behaviour, consistency of such changes, and people having confidence in the information they are presented with. It would seem beneficial, in terms of effectiveness, for information presentation to be tailored to target community groups and for this to come from the governments or authorities after determining achievable practical interventions, understanding the citizen's perceptions of the messages and how science, and particularly neuroscience, shows that the words in language alter behaviour. Last and not least, this allows suitable stylistic consistency to be applied to aid with messaging efficiency and recognisability. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Hotel Anti-Epidemic Management System Based on UV LED Disinfection

During the period of COVID-19, it is still inevitable for people to contact with each other based on the consideration of economic development. Therefore, the health management measures for staying in the hotel have become an important part of epidemic prevention. As we all know, ultraviolet (UV) light is an effective disinfection and sterilization method, which has been widely used in many applications. In this paper, a hotel anti-epidemic management system is proposed to disinfect the used rooms by using UV LEDs through WiFi communication with the front desk computer, and therefore it can protect quests from virus infection. © 2022 IEEE.

Software Engineers' Response to Public Crisis: Lessons Learnt from Spontaneously Building an Informative COVID-19 Dashboard

The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak quickly spread around the world, resulting in over 240 million infections and 4 million deaths by Oct 2021. While the virus is spreading from person to person silently, fear has also been spreading around the globe. The COVID-19 information from the Australian Government is convincing but not timely or detailed, and there is much information on social networks with both facts and rumors. As software engineers, we have spontaneously and rapidly constructed a COVID-19 information dashboard aggregating reliable information semi-automatically checked from different sources for providing one-stop information sharing site about the latest status in Australia. Inspired by the John Hopkins University COVID-19 Map, our dashboard contains the case statistics, case distribution, government policy, latest news, with interactive visualization. In this paper, we present a participant's in-person observations in which the authors acted as founders of https://covid-19-au.com/serving more than 830K users with 14M page views since March 2020. According to our first-hand experience, we summarize 9 lessons for developers, researchers and instructors. These lessons may inspire the development, research and teaching in software engineer aspects for coping with similar public crises in the future.

The Sustainable Island Tourism Evaluation Model Using the FDM-DEMATEL-ANP Method

The purpose of this study is first to propose a comprehensive evaluation model for sustainable island tourism, and then to provide guidelines and suggestions for the development thereof. Based on the advantages of using fuzzy set theory, this study’s method included the fuzzy Delphi method (FDM), the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL), the analytic network process (ANP), and FDM-DEMATEL-ANP (FDANP). From the literature review results and experts’ surveys, the dimensions of the evaluation criteria for sustainable island tourism are governance, economy and finance, socio-culture, and the environment. Compared with other studies, its major contributions and differences are the governance and finance dimensions, and the evaluation criteria for the marine industry, marine cultures, and marine environments. The findings show that the relative importance of the dimensions from high to low are economy and finance, governance, the environment, and socio-culture. The top five key criteria begin with having an of-ficial administration organization, having a tourism industry, and revenue uncertainties based on public health events. These, along with policies and regulations, and local food and drink, are thought to provide the necessary conditions for sustainable island tourism. The implications for theory and practice and future research directions are discussed. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

CWcollab: Presenting multimedia with web-based context-aware collaboration.

Remote collaboration tools for conferencing and presentation are gaining significant popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic period. Most prior work has drawbacks, such as a) limited support for media types, b) lack of interactivity, for example, an efficient replay mechanism, c) large bandwidth consumption for screen sharing tools. In this paper, we propose a general-purpose multimedia collaboration platform-CWcollab. It supports collaboration on general multimedia by using simple messages to represent media controls with an object-prioritized synchronization approach. Thus, CWcollab can not only support fine-grained accurate collaboration, but also rich functionalities such as replay of these collaboration events. The evaluation shows hundreds of kilobytes can be enough to store the events in a collaboration session for accurate replays, compared with hundreds of megabytes of Google Meet.

An Approach of Holographic Technology for the Practical Distance Education

In order to face the requirement of distant education after covid-19, this paper has presented a cyber-physical co-existence environment for practical distance learning events, we called it as a “Co-existing Practical Environment, CPE”. CPE includes: “Holographic Wearable Device, HWD” for behavior sensing and vision sharing mechanism, cloud “Digital Twin Model, DTM” database for expert correcting variables real time, and collaborative fabrication discussion interface. We built an immersive HoloLens interface to help distance learning participators, understanding the concept of structural mechanics form morphs with mix-reality sensing, communicating the augmented information of parts of models for collaborative fabrication, and sharing the views of operation process for lecturers to solve the technical problems instantly. Furthermore, users are able to make their own custom digital twin project in CPE and optimize their fabricating process by adding more realistic material factors, operation callbacks, or analyzing their practice results in parameters relationships. This paper revised an application of holographic technology with a practical distance learning workshop as example, and discover CPE as a new kind of co-creation, cross-field, and remotely prepared cooperation mechanism. While the epidemic is still ragging, we are looking further researchers of more immersive methods for distance education. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Pandemic Software Development: The Student Experiences from Developing a COVID-19 Information Dashboard

The COVID-19 pandemic has birthed a wealth of information through many publicly accessible sources, such as news outlets and social media. However, gathering and understanding the content can be difficult due to inaccuracies or inconsistencies between the different sources. To alleviate this challenge in Australia, a team of 48 student volunteers developed an opensource COVID-19 information dashboard to provide accurate, reliable, and real-time COVID-19 information for Australians. The students developed this software while working under legislative restrictions that required social isolation. The goal of this study is to characterize the experiences of the students throughout the project. We conducted an online survey completed by 39 of the volunteering students contributing to the COVID-19 dashboard project. Our results indicate that playing a positive role in the COVID-19 crisis and learning new skills and technologies were the most cited motivating factors for the students to participate in the project. While working on the project, some students struggled to maintain a work-life balance due to working from home. However, the students generally did not express strong sentiment towards general project challenges. The students expressed more strongly that data collection was a significant challenge as it was difficult to collect reliable, accurate, and upto-date data from various government sources. The students have been able to mitigate these challenges by establishing a systematic data collection process in the team, leveraging frequent and clear communication through text, and appreciating and encouraging each other's efforts. By participating in the project, the students boosted their technical (e.g., front-end development) and nontechnical (e.g., task prioritization) skills. Our study discusses several implications for students, educators, and policymakers.

New Insights from Chemical Biology: Molecular Basis of Transmission, Diagnosis, and Therapy of SARS-CoV-2

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is caused by a novel strain of coronavirus, designated as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). It has caused a global pandemic rapidly sweeping across all countries, bringing social and economic hardship to millions. Most countries have implemented early warning measures to detect, isolate, and treat patients infected with SARS-CoV-2. This minireview summarizes some of those steps, in particular, testing methods and drug development in the context of chemical biology, and discusses the molecular basis of COVID-19's virulent transmissibility.

Ex Vivo and In Vivo CD46 Receptor Utilization by Species D Human Adenovirus Serotype 26 (HAdV26)

Human adenovirus serotype 26 (Ad26) is used as a gene-based vaccine against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and HIV-1. However, its primary receptor portfolio remains controversial, potentially including sialic acid, coxsackie and adenovirus receptor (CAR), integrins, and CD46. We and others have shown that Ad26 can use CD46, but these observations were questioned on the basis of the inability to cocrystallize Ad26 fiber with CD46. Recent work demonstrated that Ad26 binds CD46 with its hexon protein rather than its fiber. We examined the functional consequences of Ad26 for infection in vitro and in vivo. Ectopic expression of human CD46 on Chinese hamster ovary cells increased Ad26 infection significantly. Deletion of the complement control protein domain CCP1 or CCP2 or the serine-threonine-proline (STP) region of CD46 reduced infection. Comparing wild-type and sialic acid-deficient CHO cells, we show that the usage of CD46 is independent of its sialylation status. Ad26 transduction was increased in CD46 transgenic mice after intramuscular (i.m.) injection but not after intranasal (i.n.) administration. Ad26 transduction was 10-fold lower than Ad5 transduction after intratumoral (i.t.) injection of CD46expressing tumors. Ad26 transduction of liver was 1,000-fold lower than that ofAd5 after intravenous (i.v.) injection. These data demonstrate the use of CD46 by Ad26 in certain situations but also show that the receptor has little consequence by other routes of administration. Finally, i.v. injection of high doses of Ad26 into CD46 mice induced release of liver enzymes into the bloodstream and reduced white blood cell counts but did not induce thrombocytopenia. This suggests that Ad26 virions do not induce direct clotting side effects seen during coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccination with this serotype of adenovirus. IMPORTANCE The human species D Ad26 is being investigated as a low-seroprevalence vector for oncolytic virotherapy and gene-based vaccination against HIV-1 and SARS-CoV-2. However, there is debate in the literature about its tropism and receptor utilization, which directly influence its efficiency for certain applications. This work was aimed at determining which receptor(s) this virus uses for infection and its role in virus biology, vaccine efficacy, and, importantly, vaccine safety.

COVID-19 as an Occupational Illness: An International Comparison of Recognition Regulation in Selected Countries

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the practices of occupational health in many aspects. Due to heavy caseloads, the traditional approach of contact tracing may not be implemented comprehensively, impeding the determination of causality of workplace exposure on COVID-19. The current study examines measures adopted by selected countries for recognizing work-related COVID-19. Material and Methods: Regulation and rules of recognition of work-related COVID-19 in various countries were obtained through a systematic review of published literature and official government websites. The US, France, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan were among the fifty countries included in the comparative analysis. Data on approved and total claims cases were obtained through open data of national Workers’ Compensation systems and analyzed by types of regulation. Results: Some countries stuck to the case-by-case investigation of causality, while others introduced unique measures, including the rebuttable presumption of compensability. In the latter cases, the work-relatedness of patients from certain high-risk occupations was automatically recognized unless the dominant evidence proved the contrary. As with traditional understandings, health care professionals and first responders were defined as high-risk in most presumption rules. However, in the context of substantial community transmission, occupations with frequent public contact, like aircrews, customs personnel, and store clerks, were also included in some countries. Conclusions: The presumption rules had an active role in facilitating the compensation of work-related COVID-19.

An Efficient Cost Performance Placement of Macro Sites and Small Cells Under Restricted Topology

The global COVID-19 pandemic leads people to intermittent quarantines and lockdowns. Many large and crowded gatherings were postponed or even cancelled to prevent social distance violation. The paper aims to tackle the placement problem of macro sites, microcells and picocells under a restricted network topology. The cell placement problem is defined based on linear programming. The algorithm named Cost Efficiency algorithm is proposed to construct a network with higher performance and lower cost. Simulation results showed that the proposed algorithm yields higher SINR value and more number of served users over construction cost compared with other planning algorithms. The result of this work is expected to help users have better network service quality when they are isolated in hospital or self-health monitoring at home. © 2021, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.

CWcollab: A Context-Aware Web-Based Collaborative Multimedia System

Remote collaboration tools for conferencing and presentation are gaining significant popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic period. Most prior work has issues, such as a) limited support for media types, b) lack of interactivity, for example, an efficient replay mechanism, c) large bandwidth consumption for screen sharing tools. In this paper, we propose a general-purpose multimedia collaboration platform-CWcollab. It supports collaboration on general multimedia by using simple messages to represent media controls with an object-prioritized synchronization approach. Thus, CWcollab can not only support fine-grained accurate collaboration, but also rich functionalities such as replay of these collaboration events. The evaluation shows hundreds of kilobytes can be enough to store the events in a collaboration session for accurate replays, compared with hundreds of megabytes of Google Hangouts.

Predicting Next Call Duration: A Future Direction to Promote Mental Health in the Age of Lockdown

When high school students leave their homes for a college education, they often face enormous changes and challenges in life, such as meeting new people, more responsibilities in life, and being away from family and their comfort zones. These sudden changes often lead to an elevation of stress and anxiety, affecting a student's health and well-being. Situations can even get worse in the age of global pandemics, such as COVID-19, when regular life and social activities are significantly disrupted due to lockdown or stay-at-home orders. Therefore, predicting phone call patterns (a measure of social engagement) based on various factors and activities of a person can be helpful to foster social engagement and promote health and well-being during sudden lifestyle changes. In this work, we investigate a cohort of 370 on-campus college students over three consecutive semesters and breaks between them to find various geo-temporal factors and activities that affect students' phone call behaviors and develop models that can predict the next call duration with a correlation of up to 0.89 between the actual and predicted duration using individual-level generalized linear models. Findings from this work can further be extended to other populations, and thereby, our findings will enable the design and delivery of new smartphone-based health interventions (guided feedback) to help people to adapt and cope up with situations that affect their lifestyle and social activities.

Effects of an Online Community Intervention on Taiwanese Sugar Intake Behavior

Sugar intake has increasingly been a threat because of its association with chronic diseases such as diabetes. During the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, people have stayed indoors with minimal activities, leading to unhealthy eating habits and weight gain. However, through health-promotion education, these threats could be managed. This study focused on an online heath nutrition program for sugar reduction, with an aim of developing an online training program for reducing sugar intake. Data were collected from 100 participants belonging to a Facebook community in Taiwan. They performed activities guided by research's daily lesson plans for a maximum of 10 minutes per day for three weeks. Online questionnaires were used for the pretest and posttest. Findings revealed significant differences in health knowledge (t(99) = -8.27, p < .001), attitude (t(99) = -8.98, p < .001), self-efficacy (t(99) = -10.14, p < .001), and perceived healthy behavior (t(99) = -12.40, p < .001), with their posttest scores being higher than their pretest scores. These findings imply that online training on Facebook is an effective educational tool during the Covid-19 pandemic. Therefore, this study contributes to behavioral science knowledge by revealing Facebook as a facilitating and training platform for promoting healthy behavior, and access to information on reduction of sugar intake during pandemic. Furthermore, these findings could be used as empirical evidence of the possibility of implementing online nutrition programs for the teaching and training of online communities.

Research on the Influencing Factors and Management Countermeasures of College Students' Sense of Security under the Environment of Big Data-an Empirical Analysis based on the Event of COVID-19

Exposed in environment of big data, college students come easily into contact with massive data presentation. When crisis events occur, college students will be affected not only by crisis events but also by human psychological crisis. The greater psychological threat, faced by college students in the crisis environment, is the loss of sense of security. Through literature review, the hypotheses in crisis events are as followed: crisis events, government and media response, university coping measures, group coping behavior are the four main factors that affect college students' sense of security in crisis events. The outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, Hubei affecting all the people, all colleges and universities across the country delayed the opening time. Among the affected universities, take the University of Electronic Science and Technology as an example, 600 samples were randomly selected to collect data. Through the exploratory factor analysis test, the influence hypotheses are verified. Through the structural equation model test, the four kinds of factors can explain the loss of college students' sense of security in the crisis, but show differences in explanatory power. Based on the elements of college students' sense of security, this paper puts forward an further explanation on the action path of the four factors on the public sense of security. According to the conclusion, we come to the conclusion that improving the coping ability of colleges and universities, enhancing the sense of crisis determination and the efficiency of control are the key to improve college students' sense of security and ensure the effectiveness of crisis management in colleges and universities.

The impacts on bystander and dispatcher-assisted cardiopulmonary resuscitation during COVID-19 pandemic

Purpose: The impact of emerging infections disease pandemic such as COVID-19 on bystander CPR performance is not well known. Materials-and-methods: This was an observational database prospectively collected from National Registry for DACPR (dispatcher-assisted CPR), a continuous quality control for OHCA by audio records analyses of EMS calls. The performance of DACPR before and after the COVID-19 epidemic was compared among four individual EMS systems (three metropolitan and one suburban). The bystander chest compressions (BCC) rate prior to the call, successful delivery of BCC after dispatcher-assisted, and the continuity of CC until hand-over by the paramedics after arrival (HCC) as the categorical indicators, and the operational time interval corresponding to call-to-compression were evaluated and analyzed using Pearson's chi-squared test, Independent t-test, and Kruskal–Wallis test with SPSS Version 22. Results: In a total of 3263 eligible patients from four EMS systems, for patients already receiving BCC prior to the call, though showing a tendency of decrease, there were no significant differences after the epidemics (A: 3.6% vs. 5.7%, p = 0.13;B: 4.5% vs. 6.1%, p = 0.46;C: 6.0% vs. 6.6%, p = 0.71;D: 6.8% vs. 10.7%, p = 0.59;Total: 4.9% vs. 6.4%, p = 0.11). For dispatcher-assisted BCC delivery, a metropolitan (B) significantly decreased and the suburban (D) significantly increased (A: 55.0% vs. 56.1%, p = 0.72;B: 41.8% vs. 52.3%, p = 0.03;C: 60.6% vs. 56.5%, p = 0.19;D: 83.0% vs. 60.2%, p < 0.01;Total: 56.8% vs. 55.6%, p = 0.53). For continuity of HCC, a metropolitan(C) and the suburban (D) both significantly increased as well as the total cases (A: 43.9% vs. 46.4%, p = 0.43;B: 28.5% vs. 31.0%, p = 0.56;C: 54.0% vs. 40.0%, p < 0.01;D: 77.4% vs. 59.3%, p = 0.02;Total: 47.4%vs.41.3%, p < 0.01). For call-to-compression interval, all regions showed a tendency to be faster without significance (A: 185 vs. 189 s, p = 0.8;B: 141 vs. 156 s, p = 0.19;C: 173 vs. 182 s, p = 0.12;D: 156 vs. 171 s, p = 0.27;Total: 164 vs. 172 s, p = 0.19). Conclusions: The impacts of COVID-19 pandemic showed a tendency to decrease BCC prior to dispatcher-assisted, and were significantly varied for dispatcher-assisted BCC among different EMS systems, however the timely BCC would not be delayed. Continuity of BCC even significantly increased under the national continuous auditing.