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As cruise ships call at many ports and passengers come from all over the world, it is very easy to carry viruses on cruise ships. Under the control of the epidemic situation on board, the solid waste generated by them should be scientifically treated to prevent the spread of infectious diseases such as COVID-19 pneumonia. Therefore, Reasonable selection of waste disposal ports and formulation of unloading plans are directly related to the resumption of cruise operations. This study considers the cost and risk of waste disposal, uses robust optimization to deal with waste volume, increases the scenarios of port service interruption due to epidemics and other reasons, and proposes a variety of emergency strategies. Finally, the relevant strategies are selected according to the decision-maker's preference for cost and risk;By solving the relevant examples, the optimal choice of the cruise ship waste disposal port under the epidemic situation is given, which verifies the validity and feasibility of the model. The research helps to improve the management of cruise waste during the post-epidemic period, and has practical value and guiding significance for the normal operation and development of the global cruise market. © 2023 SPIE.
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We report a single-step, room-temperature, 5-10 minute SARS-CoV-2 saliva self-monitoring method that overcomes the limitations of existing approaches through the use of fluorophore-releasing Designer DNA Nanostructures (DDNs) that bind with the multivalent pattern of spike proteins on the exterior intact virions and an inexpensive smartphone-linked, pocket-size fluorimeter, called a "V-Pod” for its resemblance to an Apple AirPod™ headphone case. We characterize the V-Pod fluorimeter performance and the DDN-based assay to demonstrate a clinically relevant detection limit of 104 virus particles/mL for pseudo-typed WT SARS-CoV-2 and 105 virus particles/mL for real pathogenic variants, including Delta, Omicron, and D614g. © 2023 SPIE.
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The economic downturn caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented uncertainty to the global banking system. Banks are facing critical market challenges driven by uncertain monetary policies, deterioration in credit quality, and regulation and compliance pressures. These challenges highlight the importance of better understanding the new role of financial intermediations in facilitating efficient capital allocations and economic development. This article reviews the related literature on monetary policy uncertainty, bank performance, digital finance, and introduces articles on these themes. Finally, we propose potential areas for future research. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
ABSTRACT
As cruise ships call at many ports and passengers come from all over the world, it is very easy to carry viruses on cruise ships. Under the control of the epidemic situation on board, the solid waste generated by them should be scientifically treated to prevent the spread of infectious diseases such as COVID-19 pneumonia. Therefore, Reasonable selection of waste disposal ports and formulation of unloading plans are directly related to the resumption of cruise operations. This study considers the cost and risk of waste disposal, uses robust optimization to deal with waste volume, increases the scenarios of port service interruption due to epidemics and other reasons, and proposes a variety of emergency strategies. Finally, the relevant strategies are selected according to the decision-maker's preference for cost and risk;By solving the relevant examples, the optimal choice of the cruise ship waste disposal port under the epidemic situation is given, which verifies the validity and feasibility of the model. The research helps to improve the management of cruise waste during the post-epidemic period, and has practical value and guiding significance for the normal operation and development of the global cruise market. © 2023 SPIE.
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This article reviews the major advances in acupuncture research in 2022, including clinical reports, basic research, and reviews. In terms of the type of literature, most of them are systematic reviews and clinical trials, while high-quality basic studies can also be found. The innovative inventions and researches in this field are of increasing quality and in a wide range of fields, acupuncture is attracting more and more attention in the international arena. In particular, some acupuncture combined sensors such as H2 -EC/SD co-therapy, precise positioning, and vivo monitoring of neurotransmitter has been used for oncological diseases and neuropathic pain. Acupuncture has been shown to be beneficial in the treatment of pain, stroke, psychiatric disorders, cancer, COVID-19 and others. Most of the studies show that acupuncture can play a positive role in various diseases and provide evidence for clinical applications and mechanism research.Copyright © 2023 By Author(s). Published by TMR Publishing Group Limited.
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Against the backdrop of the rapid development of e-commerce and the severe blow to fresh food e-commerce shopping caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic, this paper discusses consumers' perceptions of fresh food in the e-commerce live streaming mode using data mining in conjunction with a literature review and a questionnaire survey before presenting research findings that analyze influencing factors and product purchase behaviours. The total consumption and frequency of live-streaming consumption(FLSC) are closely examined in consumer behaviours. We investigate product's cost-performance cognitions(PCC), influencers cognitions(IC), logistics cognitions(LC),discounts cognitions(DC), live-streaming platforms cognitions(LPC), on-line interaction cognitions (OIC), live-streaming disadvantage cognitions(LDC), and impulsive consumption cognitions(ICC) as influencing factors. According to the data model fitting results, merchants can refer to research suggestions and optimize their marketing strategies, improve the problems in the fresh food live streaming marketing strategy, and improve consumer satisfaction, thereby promoting the development of fresh food e-commerce. © 2022 IEEE.
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The purpose of this article is to discuss the purchasing behavior (PB), influencing factors, and personal factors of Chinese consumers through literature review, questionnaire survey, and research results. The frequency and amount of purchasing behavior (FPB and APB) are studied in the consumption behavior. In the influencing factors, channel cognitions (CC), product cognitions (PC), and the influence of personal factors on consumer consumption behavior of fresh agricultural products. The FPB and APB are significantly and positively correlated with the CC, PC, and advantage cognition (AC). The FPB and APB are significantly and negatively correlated with disadvantage cognitions (DC). People's CC, PC, and DC significantly affect their FPB and APB. © 2022 IEEE.
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Critical cross-border issues have emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially pertaining to security, supply chain, and education, which has led to several new challenges for management. The balance between potential risks and economic benefits has attracted the attention of both industry and academia. Hence, we invited three panelists to participate in the 2021 Association for Information Systems (AIS) Special Interest Group (SIG) on Information Systems in Asia Pacific (ISAP) workshop. The suggested solutions include the right Internet approach, multi-national cooperation to develop flexible global operations, and people's education (especially refugees) to mitigate risks. These solutions encompass three levels, i.e., technology, management, and society. © 2023 Xi'an Jiaotong University
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Recently, accurate segmentation of COVID-19 infection from computed tomography (CT) scans is critical for the diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19. However, infection segmentation is a challenging task due to various textures, sizes and locations of infections, low contrast, and blurred boundaries. To address these problems, we propose a novel Multi-scale Wavelet Guidance Network (MWG-Net) for COVID-19 lung infection by integrating the multi-scale information of wavelet domain into the encoder and decoder of the convolutional neural network (CNN). In particular, we propose the Wavelet Guidance Module (WGM) and Wavelet &Edge Guidance Module (WEGM). Among them, the WGM guides the encoder to extract infection details through the multi-scale spatial and frequency features in the wavelet domain, while the WEGM guides the decoder to recover infection details through the multi-scale wavelet representations and multi-scale infection edge information. Besides, a Progressive Fusion Module (PFM) is further developed to aggregate and explore multi-scale features of the encoder and decoder. Notably, we establish a COVID-19 segmentation dataset (named COVID-Seg-100) containing 5800+ annotated slices for performance evaluation. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments to compare our method with other state-of-the-art approaches on our COVID-19-Seg-100 and two publicly available datasets, i.e., MosMedData and COVID-SemiSeg. The results show that our MWG-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods on different datasets and can achieve more accurate and promising COVID-19 lung infection segmentation. IEEE
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The continuing COVID-19 pandemic around the world has raised concerns about public health security and posed a serious threat to the international shipping industry. Considering the fact that current epidemic may exist for a long time, it is necessary to set up independent epidemic prevention function zones on ships to deal with possible outbreaks. Due to the characteristics of high precision and low fault tolerance of medical devices and related equipment in epidemic prevention functional zones, they require more strict power supply quality and reliability, and may cause the deterioration of the power quality of the system. To solve this problem, the paper introduced a novel power management strategy for the shipboard medical system by power generation equipment switching process optimization, partitioning and grading of different types of loads to solve the power supply and distribution problems of the introduced ship epidemic prevention zone, and ensure a stable and reliable power supply of high-power medical equipment on the ship. © 2022 IEEE.
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Crowdedness sensing of buses is playing an important role in the disease control of COVID-19 and bus resource scheduling. This research analyzes the relationship between carbon dioxide concentration, bus environment and the number of passengers by linear regression. Our prototype system collects the data of bus environment and carbon dioxide concentration to estimate the number of passengers in real time. By collecting the sensing data from a shuttle bus of university campus, we experimentally evaluate the feasibility and sensing performance of the crowdedness estimation model. © 2022 Owner/Author.
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Purpose: This paper aims to provide a critical reflection on the Great Resignation in the hospitality and tourism industry in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, this paper reviews the causes and effects of the Great Resignation, addresses the labor shortage in this industry and proposes strategies that can help manage the challenges. Design/methodology/approach: This paper is based on a critical analysis of emerging phenomena, related literature and researchers' experiences and insights. Findings: The Great Resignation has presented unprecedented challenges for the hospitality and tourism industry. A closer examination reveals that the pandemic has served as a catalyst rather than a leading cause of this trend. Workforce issues are becoming increasingly complex under contemporary influences, including internal elements such as new explications at work and external factors like the gig economy and technology implementation. Practical implications: This study provides practical implications on how Hospitality and Tourism practitioners can respond to the Great Resignation on micro, meso and macro levels. The practical implications revolve around employees' changing needs and preferences in the wave of Great Resignation, as well as the necessity for employers' reflection and improvement. Originality/value: This study marks an initial attempt to provide a critical assessment of a contemporary issue involving the Great Resignation. This paper extends its discussion through an advanced analysis of the issue, offers suggestions to manage current obstacles related to labor issues in hospitality and tourism, and illuminates future research directions. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.
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Over the last several years, remote collaboration has been getting more attention in the research community because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In previous studies, researchers have investigated the effect of adding visual communication cues or shared views in collaboration, but there has not been any previous study exploring the influence between them. In this paper, we investigate the influence of view types on the use of visual communication cues. We compared the use of the three visual cues (hand gesture, a pointer with hand gesture, and sketches with hand gesture) across two view types (dependent and independent views), respectively. We conducted a user study, and the results showed that hand gesture and sketches with the hand gesture cues were well matched with the dependent view condition, and using a pointer with the hand gesture cue was suited to the independent view condition. With the dependent view, the hand gesture and sketch cues required less mental effort for collaborative communication, had better usability, provided better message understanding, and increased feeling of co-presence compared to the independent view. Since the dependent view supported the same viewpoint between the remote expert and a local worker, the local worker could easily understand the remote expert's hand gestures. In contrast, in the independent view case, when they had different viewpoints, it was not easy for the local worker to understand the remote expert's hand gestures. The sketch cue had a benefit of showing the final position and orientation of the manipulating objects with the dependent view, but this benefit was less obvious in the independent view case (which provided a further view compared to the dependent view) because precise drawing in the sketches was difficult from a distance. On the contrary, a pointer with the hand gesture cue required less mental effort to collaborate, had better usability, provided better message understanding, and an increased feeling of co-presence in the independent view condition than in the dependent view condition. The pointer cue could be used instead of a hand gesture in the independent view condition because the pointer could still show precise pointing information regardless of the view type. © 2023 Tech Science Press. All rights reserved.
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Background/objective: This paper aimed to summarize the findings of the third (2022) Active Healthy Kids Hong Kong Report Card on Physical Activity for Children and Adolescents and evaluate the secular trends of physical activity related indicators. Methods: Five behavioral indicators (Overall Physical Activity, Organized Sport and Physical Activity, Active Play, Active Transportation, and Sedentary Behavior), three outcome indicators (Physical Fitness, Sleep, and Obesity) and four sources of influence indicators (Family and Peers, School, Community and Environment, and Government) were assigned a letter grade (ranging from A+ to F or incomplete) based on the best available evidence following a harmonized approach developed by the Active Healthy Kids Global Alliance. Data sources included published journal articles, government reports, manual searches, and personal contacts;and consisted of both pre-COVID-19 and after-COVID-19 evidence. Results: Grades for Overall Physical Activity (D−∗∗) and Sedentary Behavior (D) deteriorated compared to the 2018 Report Card. The other three behavioral indicators, Organized Sport and Physical Activity, Active Play, and Active Transportation, were assigned B−, D, and B+, respectively. Physical Fitness (D), Sleep (C−), and Obesity (D−) obtained the same grades as in the 2018 Report Card. School (B) and Government (C+) grades slightly improved, while Community and Environment grade (B) was stable. Family and Peers was not graded due to insufficient evidence. Conclusions: Despite slight improvements in influence indicators, physical activity and sedentary behavior have changed unfavorably for children and adolescents in Hong Kong. Strategic investments are needed to improve adoption and implementation of effective interventions. © 2022 The Society of Chinese Scholars on Exercise Physiology and Fitness
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COVID-19 has caused a large number of online public opinion incidents. How to timely and effectively guide the resulting network public opinion has become an urgent problem to be solved. This paper collects more than 130,000 original Weibo posts during the Wuhan "city closure” incident, and analyses the topic characteristics of the incident on the basis of user classification through topic models and community detection algorithms. It was found that during this period, the government responded quickly to the epidemic and gained public support. For different Weibo users, officially certified users mainly publish information about the epidemic and epidemic prevention measures. Personally certified users mainly forwarded and transmitted official information actively, and they also expressed their opinions and made suggestions. Non-certified users actively expressed their emotions and opinions, so they were important users that reflect public opinion. © 2022 SPIE.
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Purpose: The Taiwan Central Epidemic Command Center raised the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic alert to level 3 throughout the nation since May 19, 2021, and asked hospitals to reduce patient intake. Surgical departments were the worst affected. The aim of this study is to share experiences of urological practice adjustment in a tertiary medical center during the pandemic and to evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the urological service in Taiwan under a level 3 epidemic alert. Materials and Methods: This observational study was conducted from June 1, 2021, to June 31, 2021, when a level 3 pandemic alert was declared. Data of patients visiting the urology department at the Taipei Veterans General Hospital were recorded and compared with data 1 year before the COVID-19 outbreak in Taiwan (June 1, 2020, to June 31, 2020). Data included outpatient visits, elective surgeries, emergent surgeries, functional urological examinations, and diagnostic procedures in outpatient settings. Results: There was no significant decrease in all types of uro-oncological surgeries, except bladder urothelial carcinoma (UCB)-related procedures. The total number of UCB-related procedures showed 66.67% reduction. Stone-related surgeries were reduced by 45.7%. Only 12% of all transurethral prostate resections were performed in the pandemic. There was a significant decrease in all types of functional urology and andrology procedures. More than 30% reduction was noted in the number of patients visiting the urology department in June 2021 compared to that in June 2020. Conclusion: Our data provide a reference of how the urological service was affected during the level 3 pandemic alert in Taiwan. We postponed most elective surgeries and outpatient visits or diagnostic outpatient examinations procedures according to prioritization guidelines. Uro-oncology-related service was less affected because oncology patients have a stronger motivation for treatment. Benign urological condition-related procedures were significantly influenced. After the epidemic slowdown, the backlog should be gradually managed based on priority.
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Background: Previous research has discovered significant heterogeneity in older adults' activity patterns, as well as its associations with well-being. Studying activity pattern during the COVID-19 pandemic sheds new light on infection risks and coping strategies stratified by socioeconomic status. This study answers two research questions: (1) what are the typical activity patterns among older adults in the U.S.? and (2) how do different sociodemographic groups react to the COVID-19 pandemic by alternating activity pattern? Data: This study used data from the American Time Use Survey (2019 and 2020) to create an analytic sample of 5,068 older adults aged 65 and older. Method: First, we classified daily activity sequences into five typical activity patterns using cluster analysis. Second, we conducted multinomial logistic regression by including survey year and key covariates interactions to examine shifts between sociodemographic characteristics and activity pattern. Findings: We identified five distinct activity patterns including versatile (involves diverse types of activities), housework (daytime occupied by housework activities), work-centered (daytime dominated by paid work), leisure-intensive (long time spent in social and leisure activities), and inactive (intensive TV watching). Our findings show that SES does not affect predicted membership of the versatile group in pre-pandemic time, while an educational gradient becomes salient in 2020. Highly educated older adults are more likely to maintain the diversity of daily activities. Furthermore, the racial difference is more pronounced in the inactive group during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conclusion: Our findings suggest a buffering effect of social advantages on the impact of public health crisis.
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This paper employs a spatial econometrics method to study the international spillovers of economic policy uncertainty (EPU), and contributes to the literature by exploring the transmission channels. We comprehensively consider bilateral trade, financial investment, and information channels (government liability, trade imbalance, fiscal imbalance, business cycle). Based on a large sample of 21 countries from 2001Q1 to 2021Q4, our analysis indicates that the channels proposed are all significantly effective, and bilateral trade contributes the most. We also investigate the dominant channels during five crisis and non-crisis periods: in the global financial crisis, financial investment and government liability similarity are of utmost importance;in European debt crisis, bilateral trade and information channels of government liability and business cycle are the main channels;before these crises, the dominant channel is financial investment, which turned to be bilateral trade in the post-crises period;in COVID-19 pandemic, financial investment is the most important.