ABSTRACT
This paper covers the design, fabrication, testing, and modeling of a family of Froude-scale tiltrotor blades. They are designed with the objective of gaining a fundamental understanding of the impact of a swept tip on tiltrotor whirl flutter. The goal of this paper is to describe the development of the blades needed for this purpose. The rotor is three bladed with a diameter of 4.75 ft. The blades have a VR-7 profile, chord of 3.15 inches, and linear twist of −37◦ per span. The swept-tip blades have a sweep of 20◦ starting at 80%R. The blade properties are loosely based on the XV-15 design. A CATIA and Cubit-based high-fidelity three-dimensional (3D) finite element model is developed. It accurately represents the fabricated blade and is analyzed with X3D. Experiments in a vacuum chamber were carried out to demonstrate the structural integrity of the blades. Measured frequencies and strains were validated with X3D predictions proving the fidelity of the 3D model. Thus, even though the wind tunnel facilities were closed due to COVID-19, hover and forward flight calculations for the blade stress could be performed using the high-fidelity 3D structural model. The results prove the blades have sufficient structural integrity and stress margins to allow for wind tunnel testing. © 2023 Vertical Flight Society.
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Life for settlers in the outback lands of Australia was isolated and far away from cities. For being connected to nearby settlements and to cities they heavily relied on migrant Indian hawkers! Hawkers toured different settlements with their wares during the late nineteenth century offering a convenient connection between urban markets and the distant outback settlements. This is their story. Hawkers were primarily Punjabi men who migrated to Australia from British India to earn a living as travelling traders in the outback. Yet despite the valuable service they provided, hawkers were not always well received. During the 1884 smallpox outbreak, Indian hawkers were falsely accused of bringing the disease to Australia, leading to reactions of fear and hostility. The combination of racism and "false news” which characterized the reaction of some Australians to the smallpox epidemic has parallels with the treatment of Asian minorities globally during the coronavirus epidemic, which is ongoing as I write. © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Ajaya K. Sahoo;individual chapters, the contributors.
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Purpose: The study aims to work on two objectives, first to provide a theoretical foundation along with ongoing trend in the field of green human resource management (GHRM) and employee green creativity (EGC) in the hospitality and tourism industry. Second, the study also proposes a conceptual research model to understand the dynamics of the relationship between GHRM and EGC for future studies. Design/methodology/approach: The study uses multi-method approach, systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis is performed on published work on GHRM and EGC. This study initially shortlisted 52 publications from multiple databases, which was refined to 11 Scopus-indexed papers, which discussed both GHRM and EGC attributes in a hospitality context. VOSviewer and advance excel software's are being used to perform the analysis. Findings: The systematic literature review concluded that very limited studies have been conducted on GHRM and EGC in the hospitality context and it has recently gained prominence during the covid pandemic. While bibliometric analysis also identified h-index authors with their co-authorship network, citations and keywords matrix and the changing trends in the domain of GHRM and EGC in hospitality and tourism industry. The analysis also highlights the individual and organisational factors influencing the relation between GHRM and EGC. Originality/value: This study is the first to conduct a systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis on GHRM and EGC in hospitality and tourism sector. Moreover the paper also provides researchers with an in-depth summary of the available literature and a blue print for future studies on GHRM and EGC. © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited.
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Abstract The novel SARS-CoV-2 virus has infected millions of people around the world, and will become endemic, resulting in an urgent need to discover and validate inexpensive and accessible treatments that can reduce morbidity and persistent post-infectious symptoms. Noninvasive brain stimulation methods, such as transcranial electrical stimulation (tES), may have a potential role in the treatment of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) related symptoms. This potential is theorized based on the known mechanisms of biological action and demonstrated benefits in non-COVID-19 patients for various known sequelae of COVID-19 illness and recovery (e.g., fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, central sensitization, and emotional dysregulation), with now several initiatives of its application in the context of COVID-19 clinical course. Here, we will summarize the technological advantages, the rationale, and mechanism of action of using tES techniques to manage COVID-19 infection through four pathways: (1) Acute intervention, (2) Add-on treatment to augment rehabilitation following critical illness, (3) Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2, and (4) Treatment of outbreak related mental distress exacerbated by surrounding psychosocial stressors related to COVID-19 pandemic. Research Category and Technology and Methods Clinical Research: 9. Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) Keywords: tES, PASC, SARS-CoV-2 InfectionCopyright © 2023
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There is a critical need for therapeutic interventions for Post-Acute Sequelae (PASC) of SARS-CoV-2 infection patients worldwide. tDCS has the potential for therapeutic targeting of these PASC symptoms, with devices that can be portable and wearable for home-based access. At-home tDCS access is highly relevant to complete the necessary clinical trials for PASC and has the potential to provide patients with an immediate treatment option. We have led the field in rigorous, reliable, and standardized home-based brain stimulation with the development of the remotely supervised or RS-tDCS platform. Participants are provided with remotely-controlled devices, trained in safe and effective operation, and then supervised for daily use through live videoconference. Extensively tested over >8 years (>12,000 at-home tDCS sessions in >500 patients to date), the feasibility of our RS-tDCS procedures has been verified for use across all ages (18-80 years), including those with advanced cognitive or motor disabilities and/or limited technical experience, and also reaching those at socioeconomic healthcare disadvantage for inclusion in RCTs. The RS-tDCS platform has allowed for the continued enrollment in ongoing RCTs during the COVID-19 onsite clinical research pause (with >100 participants by completing all study procedures from home). The telehealth delivery of the intervention results in rapid enrollment and high retention and adherence for repeated and extended sessions (e.g., >97% completion rates across RCTs to date). While tDCS remains under investigational status in the U.S., in 2019, we also launched tDCS as a clinical telehealth service as innovative care. In this at-home service, tDCS is delivered to patients at home and stimulation parameters can be individualized to be paired with interventions such as physical exercise, online adaptive computerized cognitive training, and guided mindfulness meditation. Patients with PASC, seen through our tDCS program, will be presented as examples of the at-home tDCS treatment approach. Research Category and Technology and Methods Clinical Research: 9. Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) Keywords: tDCS, Telehealth Intervention, PASC, SARS-CoV-2Copyright © 2023
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Chaotic states of abnormal vasospasms in blood vessels make heart patients more prone to severe infections of COVID-19, eventually leading to high fatalities. To understand the inherent dynamics of such abrupt vasospasms, an N-type blood vessel model (NBVM) subjected to uncertainties is derived in this paper and investigated both in integer order (IO) as well as fractional-order (FO) dynamics. Active-adaptive controllers are designed to synchronize the chaotic turbulence responsible for undesirable fluctuations in diameter and pressure variations of the blood vessel. The FO-NBVM reveals insightful rich dynamics and faster adaptive synchronization compared to its IO model. The practical implications of this work will be useful in analysing chaotic dysfunctionalities of the blood vessel such as vasoconstriction, ischaemia, necrosis, etc. and help in developing control strategies and modular responses for COVID-19 triggered heart diseases. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
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In this work, we collect a moderate-sized representative corpus of tweets (over 200 000) pertaining to COVID-19 vaccination spanning for a period of seven months (September 2020-March 2021). Following a transfer learning approach, we utilize a pretrained transformer-based XLNet model to classify tweets as misleading or nonmisleading and manually validate the results with random subsets of samples. We leverage this to study and contrast the characteristics of tweets in the corpus that are misleading in nature against non-misleading ones. This exploratory analysis enables us to design features such as sentiments, hashtags, nouns, and pronouns which can, in turn, be exploited for classifying tweets as (non-)misleading using various machine learning (ML) models in an explainable manner. Specifically, several ML models are employed for prediction, with up to 90% accuracy, with the importance of each feature is explained using SHAP Explainable AI (XAI) tool. While the thrust of this work is principally exploratory in nature to obtain insight on the online discourse on COVID-19 vaccination, we conclude the article by outlining how these insights provide the foundations for a more actionable approach to mitigate misinformation. We have made the curated data as well as the accompanying code available so that the research community at large can reproduce, compare against, or build upon this work.
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Introduction: Incarcerated populations with HCV are at high risk of contracting COVID-19 disease and COVID-19-induced liver injury, causing significant morbidity and mortality. Despite the availability of vaccines, vaccine hesitancy among these populations remains a problem. Unfortunately, few studies discussed COVID-19 vaccination rates among HCV-positive prisoners. To identify subgroups that will require more interventions to prevent COVID-19, this study will assess the association between COVID-19 vaccination rates and the degree of hepatic impairment among HCV-positive prisoners. Research Question or Hypothesis: HCV-positive prisoners are more likely to receive COVID-19 vaccine if they have advanced liver disease compared to HCV-positive prisoners without hepatic impairment. Study Design: Retrospective chart review at the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) HCV Clinic. Method(s): Patients seen between 12/11/2020 to 1/10/2022 were evaluated. Eligible IDOC patients included if >18 years old, had a documented COVID-19 vaccination status, and were eligible for HCV treatment. Vaccination status, FibroScan scores, abdominal ultrasound, and APRI were collected to determine if there is an association between COVID-19 vaccination rates and degree of hepatic impairment. Estimates and odds ratios were assessed using continuous and categorical variables, respectively. P-values determined statistical significance. Result(s): This IRB approved study including 336 patients showed no significant associations between the degree of hepatic impairment and COVID-19 vaccination rates using the regression model for analysis. The odds of one receiving the COVID-19 vaccine are 1.24 times more likely for someone with ultrasound evidence of cirrhosis compared to one without a documented ultrasound, and 1.01 times more likely for someone with advanced fibrosis compared to one with mild fibrosis. Conclusion(s): There was a trend showing that HCV-positive prisoners with advanced liver disease were more likely to be vaccinated against COVID-19. While an association cannot be made given statistically non-significant results, education about the importance of COVID-19 vaccination among all HCV-positive prisoners, including those with minor hepatic impairment, is imperative.
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This paper intends to move beyond the common knowledge of how pandemic restricts mobility at large and provokes us to think about those for whom mobility restriction was a way of life much before the coronavirus arrived. Looking at shadow pandemic of gender-based mobility restrictions of women and non-male actors in conservative societies in South Asia, in this paper I argue that social deconstruction of "immobility” is embedded in the process of gendering the pandemic. Drawing from interviews conducted on the Indian immigrants in Germany over a year during and after the global lock down, this paper explores how covid-induced immobility mimics an already established framework of coerced immobility based on gender that acts as a motivation of migration for women and non-male actors at some level. Referring to Ayelet Shachar's idea of shifting borders, I locate the moral borders at home as a crucial competitor of physical borders of the barbed wire, that often provokes women and non-male actors to take the leap of faith for survival and better livelihood. © 2022 Transnational Press London Ltd. All rights reserved.
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The coronavirus pandemic has caused one of the biggest global crises. With an inevitable need for fast screening of the disease, deep learning-based segmentation of Covid-19 infected lung regions in computed tomography (CT) scans gained significant attention. The automated screening procedure generated results significantly faster than the manual screening techniques and directly helped provide a wider outreach to patients. Therefore, to aid in computer-aided diagnoses, this paper presents AUTCD-Net (AUTomated framework for efficient Covid-19 Diagnosis-Network), based on hierarchical resolution steps, to efficiently segment Covid-19 infected lung regions in CT scans. The approach results in a 0.71 dice score and rivals all previous state-of-the-art approaches. The overall evaluation combined with our in-depth model analysis, and critical inferences can be further extended for developing a computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) tool to assist the CT image reading process for detecting Covid-19 infected regions in the near future. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
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The objective of this proposal was to design, fabricate, and characterize, highly twisted (-30 degrees to -45 degrees) and swept (20 degrees back) composite tilt rotor blades. The swept tip is the novel and new basic research component. Comprehensive analysis performed by the US Government and Academia in the last decade have shown the potential of swept tip blades in extending whirl flutter boundary. Swept tip blades can be also contribute positively to DoDs vision of 2X speed of Future Vertical Lift (FVL). The intent is to follow-up this seed program with wind-tunnel testing of the blades at Maryland Tiltrotor Rig (MTR) at the Glenn L Martin wind tunnel. The project tracked all its milestones and completed all deliverables. The blades were designed, fabricated, characterized, integrated on the MTR, and spun-up for loads check-out on Sep-Oct 2019 a few months before the campus and the facilities shut down due to covid-19.
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The emergence of several SARS-CoV-2 variants, especially, the new variant strains B.1.1.7 lineage and 20C/501Y.V2 have highly accelerated the COVID-19 pandemic. A large number of COVID-19 patients are not getting the chance of admitting to the hospitals. Therefore, this pandemic situation accelerates the method of non-contact evaluation of patients along with prediction system of COVID-19 suspects. To feed this interest, a non-contact vital signs monitoring and COVID-19 suspect prediction system is developed. The study can measure heart rate, respiratory rate, and blood oxygen saturation simultaneously using low-cost RGB camera. A predictive model is developed using supervised learning algorithms for predicting the COVID suspect. Among the implemented algorithms, Support Vector Machine ensures a high accuracy of 97.92%. The accuracy of the non-contact vital signs monitoring system is also compared with commercial sensors. Among seven participants, the absolute error (AE) of heart rate was 2.11 for two participants and AE ≤ 4.06 for the other five participants. AE for oxygen saturation was 0.0 for four participants and AE ≤ 1.0 for three participants. Commercially, mean bias for heart rate varies from 2.08 to 8.06 and mean bias for SpO2 is ± 2. The mean bias of the heart rate for this research varies from 2.11 to 4.06 and for SpO2 varies from 0 to 1. Both of them are in a commercially acceptable range. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
ABSTRACT
This paper covers the design, fabrication, testing, and modeling of a family of Froude-scale tiltrotor blades. They are designed with the objective of gaining a fundamental understanding of the impact of a swept-tip on tiltrotor whirl flutter. The goal of this paper is to describe the development the blades needed for this purpose. The rotor is three bladed with a diameter of 4.75 feet. The blades have a VR-7 profile, chord of 3.15 inches, and linear twist of -37° per span. The swept-tip blades have a sweep of 20° starting at 80% R. The blade properties are loosely based on the XV-15 design. A CATIA and Cubit based high-fidelity 3-D finite element model is developed. It accurately represents the fabricated blade and is analyzed with X3D. Experiments in a vacuum chamber were carried out to prove the structural integrity of the blades. Measured frequencies and strains were validated with X3D predictions proving the fidelity of the 3-D model. Thus, even though the wind tunnel facilities were closed due to COVID-19, hover and forward flight calculations for the blade stress could be performed numerically, using the high-fidelity 3-D structural model. The results prove the blades have sufficient structural integrity and stress margins to allow for wind tunnel testing. Copyright © 2021 by the Vertical Flight Society. All rights reserved.
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There is a current public health issue threatening human health worldwide with the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) or severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2). The infection was reported to first originate in bats and subsequently spread to humans via yet unknown source animals in Wuhan, Hubei, China in December, 2019. Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by extreme acute respiratory coronavirus-2 syndrome (SARS-CoV-2) is an unprecedented healthy global emergency. The outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 has once again revealed the vulnerabilities of global healthcare systems, the capacity of these systems to respond to an infectious threat, as well as the rate of infection and transmission across international borders. The present review article aimed to provide an update of the current knowledge regarding COVID-19 epidemiology, patho- genesis and transmission, as well as public health measures. The present review also emphasises the key learning points related to COVID-19 prevention and identifies the need to invest in healthcare systems, community-led defence systems, as well as the need for resilience and global health security. © 2021 World Academy of Sciences Journal. All rights reserved.
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Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented crisis in the care of non-Covid patients all across the globe and care for lung cancer patients is no exception. Lung Cancer patients are at increased risks of COVID due to increased mortality from dual aggressive pathology in the lungs. Our aim was to examine the impact of COVID-19 on lung cancer therapy and factors responsible delay in optimal care during the pandemic. Methods: This study included all patients with a diagnosis of lung cancer being treated at our Institute, a tertiary level referral hospital in eastern part of India during on going pandemic. Seven developed COVID-19, confirmed by RT-PCR method (Table 1). Results: The mean age of the patients was 49 years. All the patients had metastatic lung cancer. All males had history of smoking. Hypertension was present in only one patient. Four patients (57%) died from concomitant COVID-19 at our institution.Three patients who recovered from COVID were stable. One of them (positive for ROS1) was switched over to Crizotinib and other patient resumed chemotherapy only after he had recovered from COVID-19. Most of the patients acquired COVID-19 infection during the process of evaluatio/chemotherapy and that further delayed the treatment. [Formula presented] Conclusion: The results were disappointing because more than half of lung cancer patients died due to COVID-19. The disease course of COVID-19 has been more severe in patients with lung cancers with Chemotherapy. There have been delay in resuming treatment among survivors by few weeks. Fear of aggressiveness of disease was the key factor for interruption or delay in chemotherapy. Other variable factors like stage of cancer, palliative intent of chemotherapy, ECOG status were key determinants for interruption of treatment. The decision to temporarily suspend chemotherapy while waiting for recovery from SARS-CoV-2 and then restart, was not easy due to the risk of cancer progression. The findings amplify the importance of optimizing of lung cancer care in the context of the COVID-19 prevalence. The decisions need to be taken on the basis of individual cases rather than rely on a generalized approach. In resource limited country like India diverting the existing resources to an emergency leads to compromise of routine outpatient care, especially patients with chronic illness. We need to be flexible in restarting of services guided by local COVID prevalence, while awaiting a definite management plan for COVID-19. Keywords: lung cancer, India, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2
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Introduction: COVID-19 pandemic has led to reconsider the traditional management approach in lung cancer. Oral tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) are being preferred in oncogene addicted advanced non-Small Cell Lung Cancer. Methods: A young never-smoker woman presented with left hilar mass with left pleural effusion in February 2020. There was an incidental detection of thrombus in right main and descending pulmonary artery. She was diagnosed to have ROS1 rearranged advanced NSCLC with pulmonary embolism. She was initiated on conventional chemotherapy with carboplatin and pemetrexed along with anticoagulation. After fourth cycle of chemotherapy, although there was clinical improvement attributed to reduction of amount of effusion and disappearance thrombus, RECIST 1.1 criteria suggested the progression of disease in view of appearance of adrenal metastasis. Meanwhile, she had a history of high risk exposure with a patient of COVID- 19 in July 2020. Although she was asymptomatic, RT- PCR for SARS-COV2 came out to be positive. Results: She remained asymptomatic for next 10 days during hospitalization. Then she was started on Crizotinib and was discharged with advice on further follow up. Conclusion: Although patients on cancer chemotherapy are at high risk of severe COVID-19 diseases, asymptomatic cases can happen. The patients preferably should be shifted to or started on oral TKIs as per available expert recommendations. Keywords: ROS1, COVID-19, TKI