ABSTRACT
Purpose: This article attempts to highlight the defining role that community media engagements play during times of the pandemic. It is argued that the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic forced community news media houses to reinvent their news reporting practices to cover issues pertaining to the marginalized and underprivileged sections of the society. It explores the role of community media in engaging and empowering the citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic. Design/methodology/approach: Central to our study is the analysis of the news model of "Video Volunteers” (henceforth VV), an independent community-based online news platform based in India. To understand the level of citizen participation and engagement in the making and dissemination of news during the pandemic, the authors conducted 13 interviews with different stakeholders of VV, including founders and news audiences. Findings: It seeks to reveal that when the mainstream media have failed to represent the issues of a local community, it is the independent media platforms like VV which function as a veritable source of information and sharing of knowledge. Most importantly, this paper emphasizes that the communicative model of independent community-based online platforms has been most successful in the coverage of the pandemic and the level of engagement with the citizenry. Originality/value: The study contributes to the aspects of reciprocity and collaborative journalism in community news media and its potential impacts on news creation and dissemination. © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited.
ABSTRACT
We present deep cascade reconstruction of degraded low-resolution ultra-low-dose computed tomography (LR-ULDCT) chest images to restored and super-resolved (SR) ULDCT as accessible, affordable, and relatively less hazardous recourse for lungs health monitoring in COVID-19;when compared to relatively less available, costly, and high radiation dose high-resolution CT (HRCT). The degraded LR-ULDCT is first restored with unsupervised dictionary-based deep residual learning network that handles degradations along with Poisson noise found in CT data. The restored version is given to SR network that increases its spatial resolution by minimizing adversarial loss between LR-ULDCT and reconstructed SR-ULDCT within minimax game. It is then fed for segmentation which is achieved by additional block of convolution, Leaky-ReLU, and batch-normalization in U-Net. Thus restored segmented SR-ULDCT estimates presence of ground glass opacity and facilitates monitoring of lungs health at par HRCT. Comparative experiments and ablation study are presented using synthetic and real COVID-19 data. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Purpose In light of growing concerns related to the psychological vulnerability during the pandemic, this study aims to examine the impact of fear or trauma of COVID-19 on stress, anxiety and depression among management students. Additionally, the study also explores the possible strategies adopted by professional students to cope with the pandemic situation. Design/methodology/approach With an approach to establish a probable concrete relationship between fear with the level of stress, anxiety and depression, the data for the study was collected from 1,408 management students through a structured questionnaire designed in Google Form and administered through WhatsApp. The survey was carried out in the month of July and August 2020 during the lockdown period. Correlation and structural equation modeling have been used to examine the relationship among the test attributes. Findings The results from the study discovered that "fear of COVID-19" has a significant and considerable impact on the increased level of anxiety and stress among the professional students, but the observations did not demonstrate a significant influence of the "fear" on "depression." The responses reveal that students have developed anxiety and felt stressed mostly due to uncertainty in the upcoming academic plans, disturbances in their regular academic routines and concerns about their future careers. Further, the findings have portrayed that students have adopted both protective and avoidance coping strategies to overcome the adverse consequences of the pandemic. Research limitations/implications The study gives an insight on the psychological vulnerability of the management students and their capability to overcome such sudden disruptions due to pandemics. This research could thus, serve as a reference to the policymakers, universities and institutions while planning out programs and schemes, which would encourage the aspiring managers to overcome the crisis and prepare themselves to befit the vibrant corporate world. Originality/value Several studies exist on the impact of the pandemic on undergraduate students in different universities. However, there are a dearth of literature, which reflects the psychological vulnerability of professional graduates especially management students who are on the verge of starting their professional career.