Are memes selfish? How Internet memes reflect crisis–Covid-19 pandemic in Israel

Purpose: The paper aims to explore, using an analysis of the three components of memes content, form and stance – whether and how the memes offer a broad picture of a specific society during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Design/methodology/approach: The author collected, from the two largest Facebook groups in Israel, 25 memes with the largest number of likes in each month, beginning from the month in which awareness of COVID-19 increased significantly, between March 2020 and February 2019. A total of 597 memes were collected. The data were analyzed by a quantitative and qualitative analysis. Findings: Findings indicate that meme culture effectively reflects a society's situation and the challenges it faces. Memes also reflect local cultural icons and effects. Meme contents vary across groups. During a crisis, memes do not function as fertile groups for sharp criticism or calls to take action to resolve society's social ills. Practical implications: Memes may serve as a tool to understand and explore an unfamiliar, foreign culture, its state of mind and its history through meme culture. Social implications: Memes may constitute a platform for relieving stress through light-hearted humor, unaccompanied by a true call to action;that is, "slacktivism” which gives a sense of active participation without involvement in actual activities for change. Originality/value: The study reveals that the Israeli meme culture is not activist and rather focuses on humor to relieve stress. Memes may be used as "bread and circuses” or a means of "slacktivism” that fails to call to genuine activism. Peer review: The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-07-2022-0381. © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited.

PhysioVec: A Multi-stage Deep-Learning Framework for Searching Online Health Information with Breath Sound

The COVID-19 outbreak presents a major challenge in diagnosing and monitoring respiratory diseases. IoT has the potential to address the challenges by remotely providing patients with rich information about respiratory health. However, current IoT-based health monitoring systems do not provide users with sufficient information to access the rich information in Health Social Network (HSN). We developed PhysioVec, a framework for searching HSN using breath sounds. PhysioVec consists of three components: Local Recurrent Transformer (LRT), a Multivariate radial-basis Logistic Interpreter (MLI), and an existing sentence embedding module. LRT combines local attention and recurrent Transformer to reduce overfitting and improve performance in the segmentation of breathing sounds. Physiological information detected from breathing sounds is used to search for relevant health information. PhysioVec achieved 100%., 59.8%., 92.2%., and 100% precision in the top one search results for breath sound with the common cold, influenza, pneumonia, and bronchitis, respectively. Our proposed framework allows users to search HSN for useful information just by recording their breathing sounds on mobile phones. © 2022 IEEE.

New Phosphinic and Phosphonic acids: Synthesis, antidiabetic, anti-Alzheimer, antioxidant activity, DFT study and SARS-CoV-2 inhibition

Two new α-aminophosphinic (A) and α-aminophosphonic (B) acids were synthesized through a one-pot three-component reaction with good yields of 89 % and 85 %, respectively. The NMR and mass spectroscopies have been used to identify the obtained compounds and confirm their structures, while the IR spectroscopy has been used to characterize functional groups and the type of vibrations involved for the studied compounds. Moreover, the examination of the structural properties and the comparison between the theoretical and the experimental results have been performed using DFT/B3LYP/6-31G (d,p) method. Consequently, the calculated values of the total energy and the energy gap indicate that the (B) is more stable and less reactive than the (A). Also, MEP maps show that oxygen atoms are the probable sites of electrophilic reactions. In this context, the high reactivity of the (A) can be related to the replacement of the (OH) functional group by a hydrogen atom. Further, six in vitro assays have been used to evaluate the antioxidant potential of (A) and (B), which illustrate that both compounds exhibited an excellent activity (e.g., DPPH/IC50(B): 2.42 μg/mL and DPPH/IC50(A): 2.10 μg /mL). The anti-Alzheimer and antidiabetic effects of the studied compounds have been estimated in vitro by evaluating their inhibition of acetylcholinesterase, butyrylcholinesterase and α-glucosidase. The both compounds showed a good inhibitory activity for α-glucosidase (IC50(A): 12.63 and IC50(B): 25.26 μg/mL), and exhibited higher inhibitory activity against butyrylcholinesterase (BChE) than against acetylcholinesterase (AChE) (IC50(A): 36.71±0.95 and IC50(B): 26.56±1.32 μg/mL). Furthermore, the in silico docking study of the inhibitory action of SARS-CoV-2 main protease (Mpro) showed that (A) and (B) have a significant inhibitory action with total energy values of - 96.23 and - 99.99 kcal/mol, respectively.

Simulating COVID-19 Spreads in Indoor Space

It is known that the transmissibility of COVID-19 is higher in indoor space than outdoor. The fact that the indoor space is usually closed and has less factors to take into account than outdoor may facilitate the analysis of COVID-19 infection. However, few works have been done on the analysis on COVID-19 transmissibility in indoor space. In this paper, we discuss simulation methods to analyze the transmissibility in indoor space, particularly a simulation environment consisting of three components;indoor maps, positions and trajectories of persons in indoor space, and infection models of COVID-19 in indoor space. And we analyze the requirements and design issues of each component. Among three COVID-19 infection models, we developed a simulation tool for indoor person-person infection model. While only the person-person infection model has been implemented for the simulation, the other two models of COVID-19 are planned to be designed and implemented in the future. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

A Critical Study on the Impact of Covid-19 Pandemic on the Tourism Industry at Nainital, Uttarakhand, India

Nainital is a well-known hill station in Uttarakhand, India where there is footfall of thousands of tourists every year. Tourism industry at Nainital has always been the main source of income for the people of Nainital. This business has continuously aided in generating high revenue for Uttarakhand State Government. Due to the advent of Covid-19 pandemic, the Government of India enforced complete and partial lockdowns from time to time during 2020-2021 as a measure to control the existing hazardous circumstances prevailing in the country. This brought a drastic blow to the tourism industry at Nainital as well and directly affected the economy of the Uttarakhand State. The abrupt downfall in the industry due to covid -19 instigated the researchers to analyze the scenario in the duration 2020-2021. There were periods of lockdown as well as unlock/partial lockdown in this duration. The researchers analyzed the impact of the pandemic in the tourism industry at Nainital in both the stages-during lockdown and unlock/ partial lockdown. A SWOC (Strengths, Weaknesses, and Opportunities & Challenges) analysis was taken up as an effective warfare mechanism against the ubiquitous unpleasant situation. It was decoded that the surging conditions precipitated from certain psychological and behavioral impediments of all the three components- Government, Public and Covid 19 virus, which were essentially required to be mapped. The present pyramid study is imperial in nature. In the present study the researchers have focused on the study of relationship between the first two components-Government and Public and the third component-Virus of the pyramid. It attempts to trace the impact of these three components on one another through questionnaire survey, group discussion, and telephonic interview. In the present study the researchers not only consider the impact of the pandemic on the unemployment and economy of the state but also on the psychology of the local people as- a-whole. The present study is a visionary and rationalist wherein the researchers consider the scope of survival of tourism industry at Nainital in 2022. © 2021 IEEE.

Team-based Cooperative Learning Intervention in Technical Courses

Effective teamwork is one of the top skills demanded by the industry and essential to the success of new graduates. Meanwhile, college students enrolled in technical courses, such as mathematics-intensive and/or research methods courses, are often challenged by steep learning curves. To promote students’ learning in technical courses via effective teamwork, researchers at a large southern university have created and implemented a team-based cooperative learning intervention in two disciplines, social science and engineering, and evaluated effects of the program. All participants were voluntary and instructed to finish a three-component study: a pre-test survey, a post-test survey, and a semi-structured interview. After validating measurements, data from the surveys and interview have been analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. Results indicate positive influences of the intervention on course perception and individual success. Many participants reported good team identification, perception, academic support, and collective efficacy. The studies were affected by the teaching-learning mode change during the COVID-19 pandemic. The present paper also discusses limitations and challenges in the studies and presents recommendations for future team-based interventions. © 2022, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Inc.. All rights reserved.