ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced Australia's need for diagnostic testing frameworks that are well-prepared, well-resourced, responsive, appropriately governed, scalable, interdisciplinary and collaborative.1 Point-of-care (POC) technologies offer diagnostic solutions capable of delivering individual, community and public health benefits in settings where: a) laboratory testing is not available, b) rapid turn-around time is needed, c) high loss to follow-up occurs in high-risk populations with standard of care cascades and/or d) disease transmission rates exceed laboratory response capacity. Key translational research derived from collaborative point-of-care testing networks for a) diabetes management (238 remote health services;3,233 operators;172,069 HbA1c and 51,379 urine albumin:creatinine ratio tests), b) acute care (106 remote health services;2,279 operators;32,950 blood gas, 32,689 cardiac troponin, 46,418 urea/electrolytes, 48,193 international normalised ratio tests), c) hepatitis C virus (HCV) (41 sites;110 operators;5,733 HCV tests;4,978 RNA, 755 antibody), d) syphilis screening (156 sites;1,412 operators), e) chlamydia, gonorrhea or trichomonas (51 sites;795 operators;>50,000 tests) or f) COVID-19 (101 remote health services, 733 operators, 72,624 tests) will be used to highlight operational, clinical, public health, and economic benefits of POC testing. Challenges associated with scale-up and accreditation pathways for decentralised POC testing will be discussed. Reference 1. Revised Testing Framework for COVID-19 in Australia, March 2022 Version 2.1. Communicable Disease Network Australia and Public Health Laboratory Network. Copyright © 2022
ABSTRACT
During the early stages of the Covid pandemic, the oil and gas industry was faced with significant challenges in executing inspections for ageing offshore oil and gas infrastructure together with the management of various operational integrity threats. These challenges were addressed through the collaborative development of remote, digital techniques to minimise inspector time offshore and maximise efficiency. This initially involved a review and challenge of our existing operational integrity management lifecycle, comprising systems data, risk-based strategy development, inspection planning, inspection execution, data management, anomaly management (including fabric maintenance and engineering repairs) and closeout. Working with our partner, GDi, we sought to drive a step change into digital integrity management, combined with streamlined workflows, activities, and administrative tasks. The pilot development involved comprehensive laser scanning of a floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) facility to generate a dimensionally accurate digital twin, overlayed with 360° HD photogrammetry to provide a thorough baseline for subsequent general visual inspections of pressure equipment, piping systems and structural elements. General visual inspections can now be executed remotely, without the requirement for an offshore inspector. The digital twin environment also supported transformation of inspector-led activities, through optimisation of processes, digital inspection workflows via tablets and seamless integration with the integrity management platform. The pilot development also involved enhancing the anomaly risk management process, including management of mitigations (such as temporary repairs) and actions required to resolve and close anomalies. For the anomaly actions, the digital twin environment enables the accurate estimation of fabric maintenance scopes and dimensionally accurate repairs for corrective work orders. The system also facilitates a unique overview of cumulative risk via the plotting of anomalies in the digital twin space. The digitally enhanced operational integrity management system has substantially reduced direct costs and personnel safety risks, enabled substantial improvements in productivity (up to 200% for inspections), and improved the quality of integrity management outcomes. Copyright © 2022, Society of Petroleum Engineers.
ABSTRACT
The Covid-19 pandemic has impacted lives globally and caused physical, economic and social havoc across the world. The impact to businesses in some instances has been catastrophic, while other businesses are figuring out how to navigate interactions with customers and modifying business models as the crisis ebbs and flows. Part of the unique challenge associated with the pandemic is navigating messaging to consumers. Now that the pandemic has continued for over a year, advertisers have had to consider the new normal in all of their advertising messaging. This notion of message development and effectiveness during a natural disaster stands at the core of this study. This study examines the impact of different types of advertising cues on consumer attitude formation and contributes to the literature by understanding how relation of cues to the current pandemic can be used to create effective advertising. We manipulate relationship of the cues to Covid at three levels in the advertisements to examine differences in consumer responsiveness to the ads. Data was collected from 228 participants. The findings indicated that an ad with high levels of Covid related cues (focus on active social responsiveness) was favorably evaluated by consumers. However, the ad with the lowest level of Covid related cues (focus on product efficiency) was just as effective. This may be due to the high relevance of the product being utilitarian in preventing Covid. It is noteworthy that the ad with moderate level of Covid related cues had the least favorable evaluation of consumers. The findings also suggest that it is important for companies to pay attention to self-referencing as a moderator in their advertising during a natural disaster. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
In response to shifts in the hardware foundations of computing, parallel and distributed computing (PDC) is now a key piece of the core CS curriculum. For CS educators, the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting switch to remote-learning add new challenges to the tasks of helping learners understand abstract PDC concepts and equipping them with hands-on practical skills. This paper presents several novel teaching materials for teaching PDC remotely, including: (i) using a Runestone Interactive "virtual" handout to learn how to run OpenMP multithreaded programs on a Raspberry Pi, and (ii) using Google Colab and Jupyter notebooks to run mpi4py instances on remote systems and thus learn about MPI distributed multiprocessing. The authors piloted these strategies during a multi-day faculty development workshop on teaching PDC. Assessment data indicates that the materials greatly aided professional development and preparedness to teach PDC.