Mechanism of interferon induction by cannabidiol (CBD) and analogues in lung cancer cells

CBD, an FDA approved drug for epilepsy, may have therapeutic potential for other diseases and is currently being tested for efficacy in cancer-related clinical trials. As the literature about CBD, especially in vitro reports, is often contradictory, increasing our understanding of its specific action on a molecular level will allow to determine whether CBD can become a useful therapy or exacerbates specific cancers in a context-dependent manner. Due to its relative lipophilicity, CBD is challenging to dispense at therapeutic concentrations;therefore, one goal is to identify cannabinoid congeners with greater efficacy and reduced drug delivery challenges. We recently showed that CBD activates interferons as a mechanism of inhibiting SARS-CoV-2 replication in lung carcinoma cells. As factors produced by the innate immune system, interferons have been implicated in both pro-survival and growth arrest and apoptosis signaling in cancer. Here we show that CBD induces interferon production and interferon stimulated genes (ISGs) through a mechanism involving NRF2 and MAVS in lung carcinoma cells. We also show that CBDV, which differs from CBD by 2 fewer aliphatic tail carbons, has limited potency, suggesting that CBD specifically interacts with one or more cellular proteins rather than having a non-specific effect. We also identified other CBD-related cannabinoids that are more effective at inducing ISGs. Taken together, these results characterize a novel mechanism by which CBD activates the innate immune system in lung cancer cells and identify related cannabinoids that have possible therapeutic potential in cancer treatment.

COVID-19 impacts on United States crawfish. (Special Issue: COVID-19 impacts on selected commodities.)

This research determines the impacts of COVID-19 US on crawfish production and consumption for 2020 and 2021 using an Equilibrium Displacement Model. In the US, crawfish is one of the seafood commodities where most production is consumed by domestic consumers (7% of domestic consumption is from imports). Crawfish and rice are complementary. Therefore, the impacts of COVID-19 on crawfish consumption simultaneously influence rice production and crawfish producers and consumers. In the first year of COVID-19 (2020), the reduction in crawfish retail demand caused negative effects on final consumers and producers. However, crawfish consumption recovered significantly in the second year (2021), which could compensate for the loss in 2020. Overall, consumer and producer gains ranged from $549 to $626 million if the COVID-19 pandemic only impacted retail consumption. However, in 2021, the increase in production costs due to higher oil/diesel prices and other input prices caused the farm supply to decrease. As a result, total welfare gains ranged from $200 to $228 million. If the demand in 2021 did not increase, but the crawfish farm supply decreased, consumer and producer losses ranged from $929 to $1045 million. Overall, the total effects of COVID-19 on consumers and producers for 2020 and 2021 depend on its effects in 2021. If the demand in 2021 increased following the decrease in farm supply, consumers and producers would benefit from the shocks of COVID-19 due to higher post-COVID-19 demand.

Navigating the iodinated contrast media shortage: A review

The current COVID-19 climate has caused an unforeseen supply shortage of iodinated contrast media (ICM) worldwide, disrupting global distribution.1 In addition, the scarcity has resulted in a ripple effect in healthcare facilities such as radiology departments where ICM is required to perform contrast-enhanced examinations. ICM plays a significant part in contrast-enhanced CT, angiography and fluoroscopic procedures within the radiology department, holding a primary role in the differentiation and diagnosis of pathologies which range from pulmonary emboli to tumours.1 Its use extends beyond radiology, where ICM is heavily relied on in cardiology, urology and gastrointestinal studies, further highlighting the heavy dependence on the critical agent.2 With the global increase in the number of CT examinations requested, where approximately 60% of studies require ICM, optimal usage of ICM must be considered to meet heightened demand.3 The shortage has represented an opportunity for imaging providers to re-examine current imaging protocols and identify whether non-contrast imaging, alternative contrast agents and other imaging modalities could be viable options moving forward.1,2 Additionally, current literature has discussed volume-reduction strategies and dual-energy use in newer-generation CT scanners to conserve ICM.1,4 This review will explore currently proposed solutions that can be implemented in the radiology department to maximise ICM supply with minimal impact on patient care.

Engineering in a Crisis: Observing Students' Perceptions of Macroethical Responsibilities during Pandemics and Natural Disasters

When the ethical responsibilities of engineers are discussed in classrooms, the focus is usually on microethics, which concentrates on individual decision-making, rather than macroethics, that addresses broad societal concerns. Pandemics (e.g., COVID-19) and natural disasters (e.g., hurricanes, derechos) have presented unique opportunities to observe engineering macroethical responsibilities, because unjust social, economic, and environmental systems have been brought to the forefront amidst the responses (e.g., inequitable transportation access). In this paper, we consider pandemics and natural disasters through the lens of engineering macroethics, aiming to understand students' perceptions about the macroethical responsibilities of engineers. In the fall of 2020, we deployed a survey to undergraduate engineering students at two universities (n=424). Students were asked to discuss what they perceived to be the role of engineering professionals in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic and natural disasters. We used a qualitative content analysis to explore the macroethical responsibilities mentioned in students' responses. Many of these responses include considerations of infrastructure resilience, resource distribution, and community equity. Logit models were used to identify which sociodemographic factors were associated with responses that included macroethical responsibilities, revealing engineering major (specifically, civil engineering), employment status, gender identity, and family size, among others as significant factors. The implications from this study include recommendations on curricular content, and identifying which student sociodemographic groups would especially benefit from macroethical content in coursework. © 2023 American Society of Civil Engineers.

Partnership in Social Work Education Along the New Silk Road: Towards a Transformative Cultural Inclusion Model

We live in a world of disruption aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In view of the highly divisive global discourse, we envision a different way of regional and international partnership in social work education and practice through our proactive partnership, to build hope and transformation. Social work educators from the Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong SAR, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Israel, and Vietnam, who have developed partnerships with counterparts in the countries along the New Silk Road, have come together to reflect on their partnership experiences, having developed the "Transformative Cultural Inclusion Model” consisting of four essential pillars: (1) equal partnership, (2) cultural inclusion, (3) capacity-building, and (4) social solidarity. Social work is a catalyst for social change and development, and we hope that the model can provide insights and principles to guide future development of regional and international partnerships. This will, in turn, develop context-specific authentic social work theories and practice by partnering together, engaging in participatory practice research, and making positive changes through education, research, and action with regional, international, and local partners. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Evaluating factors affecting attitudes of IT-intensive and non-IT-intensive students towards e-assessment

Despite the significant shift to distance computer-based test as an inevitable outcome of Industry 4.0 and the public lockdown of COVID-19, little effort has been made to research this new testing mode. To address this issue, this study targets two groups of information technology (IT)-intensive and non-IT-intensive students with an aim of investigating factors that effectively encourage each group to adopt online assessment and whether their majors cause any differences in the students' attitudes. Based on the student perception of e-assessment questionnaire (SPEAQ) with some slight modifications, a final 28-item survey was formed and distributed to 400 students. Results have shown that the factors of security, and affective factors were the top factors to impact both groups of students, while the impact of validity and practicality varied among the two groups and reliability and teaching-learning were at the bottom. Besides, there were no noticeable differences in the attitudes of students coming from different majors. © 2023, Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science. All rights reserved.

Evaluating the Impact of COVID-19 on the Behaviour of Pedestrians

The COVID-19 pandemic has considerably impacted pedestrians' perceived comfort in a public setting. The virus's transmissibility and social distancing restrictions have resulted in a shift in pedestrians' perceived comfort, with more pedestrians becoming more conscious of other pedestrians and the distance between pedestrians. The changes in pedestrians' perception have resulted in the Pedestrian Level Of Service (PLOS) models becoming outdated. The models may not accurately portray the actual status of pedestrians' Level Of Service (LOS) according to the pedestrian needs during a pandemic, which generally lasts for a couple of years. These pandemics will happen in the future;hence, their impact on pedestrian comfort on sidewalks is worth considering. This research aims to analyse the effect of COVID-19 on PLOS by compiling data using a face-to-face questionnaire survey in the Melbourne Central Business District (CBD). From the 445 completed surveys, 72% of respondents extensively considered social distancing due to COVID-19 when commuting in the CBD, and 49% preferred a 1–1.5 m distance between pedestrians. In conjunction with an in-depth analysis of the data, an ordinal regression model has been used to analyse the factors that influence the perceived comfort of the pedestrians and estimate the PLOS. The model results show that pedestrian density, COVID-19 social distancing, continuous footpath, and pedestrian flow in opposite directions on the sidewalk greatly impacted the walking comfort of pedestrians during the pandemic. © 2023 by the authors.

A New Chapter for Medical Image Generation: The Stable Diffusion Method

Data collecting and sharing have been widely accepted and adopted to improve the performance of deep learning models in almost every field. Nevertheless, in the medical field, sharing the data of patients can raise several critical issues, such as privacy and security or even legal issues. Synthetic medical images have been proposed to overcome such challenges;these synthetic images are generated by learning the distribution of realistic medical images but completely different from them so that they can be shared and used across different medical institutions. Currently, the diffusion model (DM) has gained lots of attention due to its potential to generate realistic and high-resolution images, particularly outperforming generative adversarial networks (GANs) in many applications. The DM defines state of the art for various computer vision tasks such as image inpainting, class-conditional image synthesis, and others. However, the diffusion model is time and power consumption due to its large size. Therefore, this paper proposes a lightweight DM to synthesize the medical image;we use computer tomography (CT) scans for SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) as the training dataset. Then we do extensive simulations to show the performance of the proposed diffusion model in medical image generation, and then we explain the key component of the model. © 2023 IEEE.

Intérêt d'une dose unique de Tocilizumab 400 mg sur les formes sévères d'infection respiratoire à COVID-19

Introduction Afin d'éviter le transfert en réanimation, des patients atteints de formes sévères de COVID-19 ont bénéficié hors AMM d'un traitement par tocilizumab, un médicament ciblant l'interleukine-6. Cette étude cherche à évaluer l'impact de cette thérapeutique. Patients et méthodes Tous les patients atteints de formes respiratoires sévères du COVID-19 hospitalisés dans les unités COVID à Robert Ballanger entre le 28 février et le 31 mai 2020 ont été inclus. La forme sévère est définie par une SpO2 ≤ 96 % malgré une oxygénothérapie ≥ 6 L/min pendant plus de 6 heures. Ont été exclus les patients admis en service de réanimation ou ceux restés aux portes. À partir de cette cohorte une étude cas-témoins rétrospective a cherché à comparer la survie sans intubation des patients n'ayant pas reçu le tocilizumab versus ceux qui l'ont reçu (posologie de 400 mg dose unique) à l'aide de trois méthodes statistiques : appariement sur le score de propension, survie en multivariée de Cox et analyses de pondération du score de probabilité inverse. Le critère de jugement principal était la survie sans intubation à 28 jours. Résultats 246 patients ont été inclus (106 traités par tocilizumab). Ils étaient âgés de 67,6 ± 15,3 ans, dont 95 (38,5 %) de femmes. Le délai entre les premiers symptômes et l'inclusion était de 8,4 ± 4,5 jours. 105 (42,7 %) patients n'ont pas survécu sans intubation dans les 28 jours dont 71 (28,9 %) décès. Parmi cette cohorte nous avons obtenus 84 paires de patients comparables. Dans la cohorte appariée (n = 168), le tocilizumab était associé à une meilleure survie sans incubation (hazard ratio (HR) = 0,49 (intervalle de confiance à 95 % (95CI) = 0,3–0,81), p = 0,005). Ces résultats étaient similaires dans la cohorte globale (n = 246), et l'analyse multivariée de Cox confirme un effet protecteur du tocilizumab sur l'apparition du critère de jugement principal (HR ajusté = 0,26 (95CI = 0,135–0,51, p = 0,0001), tout comme l'analyse IPSW (p < 0,0001). Des analyses sur la mortalité seule avec un suivi de 28 jours ont donné des résultats similaires. Conclusion Dans cette étude rétrospective, le tocilizumab à dose unique a été associé à une amélioration de la survie sans ventilation mécanique chez les patients atteints de COVID-19 sévère.

Digital health literacy and well-being among university students: Mediating roles of fear of COVID-19, information satisfaction, and internet information search.

Background: Digital health literacy (DHL) enables healthy decisions, improves protective behaviors and adherence to COVID-19 measures, especially during the era of the "infodemic", and enhances psychological well-being. Objective: We aimed to explore the mediating roles of fear of COVID-19, information satisfaction, and the importance of online information searching on the association between DHL and well-being. Methods: A cross-sectional web-based survey was conducted among 1631 Taiwanese university students, aged 18 years and above, from June 2021 to March 2022. The collected data include sociodemographic characteristics (sex, age, social status, and financial satisfaction), the importance of online information searching, information satisfaction, fear of COVID-19, DHL, and well-being. A linear regression model was utilized to investigate factors associated with well-being, followed by a pathway analysis to assess the direct and indirect relationship between DHL and well-being. Results: The scores of DHL and overall well-being were 3.1 ± 0.4 and 74.4 ± 19.7, respectively. Social status (B = 2.40, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.73-3.07, p < 0.001), DHL (B 0.29, 95% CI 0.10-0.49, p < 0.001), importance of online information searching (B = 0.78, 95% CI 0.38-1.17, p < 0.001), and information satisfaction (B = 3.59, 95% CI 2.22-4.94, p < 0.001) were positively associated with well-being, whereas higher fear of COVID-19 scores (B = -0.38, 95% CI -0.55-(-0.21), p < 0.001) and female (B = -2.99, 95% CI -5.02-0.6, p = 0.004) were associated with lower well-being, when compared with lower fear scores and male, respectively. Fear of COVID-19 (B = 0.03, 95% CI 0.016-0.04, p < 0.001), importance of online information searching (B = 0.03, 95% CI 0.01-0.05, p = 0.005), and information satisfaction (B = 0.05, 95% CI 0.023-0.067, p < 0.001) were significantly mediated the relationship between DHL and well-being. Conclusion: Higher DHL scores show direct and indirect associations with higher well-being scores. Fear, importance of online information searching, and information satisfaction significantly contributed to the association.

Perception shifts in seafood consumption in the United States

Perceptions about specific seafood attributes play an essential role in American consumers' choices of a seafood entre ' e served in casual and fine dining restaurants. However, the trends and determinants of consumer per-ceptions are underexplored. This research analyzes how consumers perceive specific attributes of a seafood entre ' e and examines the effect of socioeconomic and demographic characteristics on their perceptions. Factor analysis and multivariate Tobit models were employed to analyze data collected online via Qualtrics' consumer panels in the U.S. The results indicate that the proportion of participants who deem farm-raised and sustainability-certified fish safer to eat, better tasting, higher quality, more fairly traded, and more environ-mentally friendly is the highest. However, the difference in perceptions of domestic and imported fish is ambiguous. The perceptions of nutritional value for human consumption are near neutral among these seafood attributes. The main determinants of these perceptions are the frequency they eat fish, whether having children in a household, gender, ethnicity, and the age of consumers. These perceptions and determinants are relatively consistent before and during Covid-19. This study contributes to the literature on seafood perceptions at casual and fine dining restaurants and provides the most recent trend on American seafood perceptions and their de-terminants. These results are beneficial to seafood producers, distributors, and policymakers for providing more appropriate regulations related to future seafood supply in the U.S.

Green financing for sustainable development: Insights from multiple cases of Vietnamese commercial banks

Although the public sector is seen as the main party responsible for taking action on climate change and sustainable development, private commercial banks are in a unique position to support or shift the funding focus on green investment. By employing a qualitative research approach based on six commercial banks, this paper aims to investigate the current practices of how commercial banks are contributing to advance green business initiatives. Accordingly, this research examines and identifies the facilitators and challenges in domestic and foreign commercial banks in Vietnam which support green business initiatives. In addition to addressing the recent calls for the investigation of the role of commercial banks in facilitating green finance, our study expands the emerging literature by demonstrating the current efforts of Vietnam's commercial banks in fostering green finance during the Covid-19 pandemic. © 2022 ERP Environment and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Nitric-oxide enriched plasma-activated water inactivates 229E coronavirus and alters antiviral response genes in human lung host cells

The ongoing pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, is influencing global health. Moreover, there is a major threat of future coronaviruses affecting the entire world in a similar, or even more dreadful, manner. Therefore, effective and biocompatible therapeutic options against coronaviruses are urgently needed. To address this challenge, medical specialists require a well-informed and safe approach to treating human coronaviruses (HCoVs). Herein, an environmental friendly approach for viral inactivation, based on plasma technology, was considered. A microwave plasma system was employed for the generation of the high amount of gaseous nitric oxide to prepare nitric oxide enriched plasma-activated water (NO-PAW), the effects of which on coronaviruses, have not been reported to date. To determine these effects, alpha-HCoV-229E was used in an experimental model. We found that NO-PAW treatment effectively inhibited coronavirus infection in host lung cells, visualized by evaluating the cytopathic effect and expression level of spike proteins. Interestingly, NO-PAW showed minimal toxicity towards lung host cells, suggesting its potential for therapeutic application. Moreover, this new approach resulted in viral inactivation and greatly improved the gene levels involved in host antiviral responses. Together, our findings provide evidence of an initiation point for further progress toward the clinical development of antiviral treatments, including such coronaviruses. © 2022 The Authors

Distribution of other Customer Perception on Brand Experience: A Bibliometrics Analysis Study

Purpose: The study aims to synthesize research trends regarding the distribution of ‘other customer perception' on ‘brand experience';concurrently, to identify the promising research directions and suggest useful for managers. Research design, data, and methodology: The paper deals with the distribution of ‘other customer perception' on ‘brand experience' through evaluating a systematic review combined with biological mapping analysis (VOS viewer) with 226 documents published in 142 journals from 1987 to 2021. Results: The study synthesizes and analyzes existing literature reviews on the distribution of ‘other customer perception' on ‘brand experience', which mainly highlights three research topic groups. Exploring the component of relationship should be considered in the brand experience scale when the research context is the social interactions surrounding the customer's purchasing process. Moreover, the presence of mindfulness in several publications has suggested a potential research direction in the consumer behavior field. Conclusions: The systematic reports can be a useful reference for managers towards building brand experience based on distribution of ‘other customer perception' with moderating of mindfulness - a new finding of behavioral interaction that has just experienced the Covid-19 pandemic which is experienced directly at the store and lead to many changes in consumer psychology. © The Author(s) This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://Creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Learners' satisfaction of courses on Coursera as a massive open online course platform: A case study

Online education has become more prevalent in the 21st century, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the major trends is the learning via Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which is increasingly present at many universities around the world these days. In these courses, learners interact with the pre-designed materials and study everything mostly by themselves. Therefore, gaining insights into their satisfaction of such courses is vitally important to improve their learning experiences and performances. However, previous studies primarily focused on factors that affected learners' satisfaction, not on how and what the satisfaction was. Moreover, past research mainly employed the narrative reviews posted on MOOC platforms;very few utilized survey and interview data obtained directly from MOOC users. The present study aims to fill in such gaps by employing a mixed-methods approach including a survey design and semi-structured interviews with the participation of 120 students, who were taking academic writing courses on Coursera (one of the world-leading MOOC platforms), at a private university in Vietnam. Results from both quantitative and qualitative data showed that the overall satisfaction of courses on Coursera was relatively low. Furthermore, most learners were not satisfied with their learning experience on the platform, primarily due to inappropriate assessment, lack of support, and interaction with teachers as well as improper plagiarism check. In addition, there were moderate correlations between students' satisfaction and their perceived usefulness of Coursera courses. Pedagogically, teachers' feedback and grading, faster support from course designers as well as easier-to-use plagiarism checking tools are needed to secure learners' satisfaction of MOOCs.

COVID-19 Impacts on United States Crawfish

This research determines the impacts of COVID-19 US on crawfish production and consumption for 2020 and 2021 using an Equilibrium Displacement Model. In the US, crawfish is one of the seafood commodities where most production is consumed by domestic consumers (7% of domestic consumption is from imports). Crawfish and rice are complementary. Therefore, the impacts of COVID-19 on crawfish consumption simultaneously influence rice production and crawfish producers and consumers. In the first year of COVID-19 (2020), the reduction in crawfish retail demand caused negative effects on final consumers and producers. However, crawfish consumption recovered significantly in the second year (2021), which could compensate for the loss in 2020. Overall, consumer and producer gains ranged from $549 to $626 million if the COVID-19 pandemic only impacted retail consumption. However, in 2021, the increase in production costs due to higher oil/diesel prices and other input prices caused the farm supply to decrease. As a result, total welfare gains ranged from $200 to $228 million. If the demand in 2021 did not increase, but the crawfish farm supply decreased, consumer and producer losses ranged from $929 to $1045 million. Overall, the total effects of COVID-19 on consumers and producers for 2020 and 2021 depend on its effects in 2021. If the demand in 2021 increased following the decrease in farm supply, consumers and producers would benefit from the shocks of COVID-19 due to higher post-COVID-19 demand. © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston 2022.

Social protection response to COVID-19: Experiences and lessons from Vietnam

COVID-19 is not merely a global health crisis, but a comprehensive socio-economic disaster worldwide due to its multidimensional impacts and wide-range consequences for most countries. As a middle-income country in Southeast Asia, Vietnam has been suffering from the multifaceted consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and has made the most significant effort to respond. In response to challenges caused by Covid 19, Vietnam has been trying to introduce social protection policies to support the COVID-19 affected groups. The study conducted 58 in-depth interviews with different representatives from policymakers, policy implementors at different levels, and beneficiaries (the poor, persons with disabilities, informal/freelance workers and so on) to draws a picture of the pandemic impacts via the voices of different stakeholders. It then describes how the government and community' social protection policies are responding to manage the pandemic and its multidimensional impacts. The paper highlights and discusses the lessons from Vietnamese experiences.

Face Recognition Based on Deep Learning and Data Augmentation

Face recognition is one of the most popular applications in video surveillance systems and computer vision. The researches of face recognition in recent years have been shown that their applications are widely used in practice. Particularly, during the pandemic of Covid-19, there were a lot of researches relating to face recognition with and without mask. The accuracy of the face recognition algorithms is depended on technical issues, implemented solutions and models of data processing. In this paper, we propose an improved method for face recognition based on deep learning techniques and data augmentation. Our contribution of the proposed method is focused on the following steps: (1) obtaining and pre-processing data for training dataset based on image processing techniques (i.e. noise removal, mask wearing). (2) Creating a trained model of new dataset based on the Inception Resnet-v1. (3) Building an application for face recognition in timekeeping of a company. We use the two popular face datasets which are open source and publicity available: Casia-WebFace [1] for training and LFW [2] for validation. Comparing the several methods, the accuracy of our method is higher in case with mask and the processing time is very fast in the real time. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

MAKING SENSE OF AN EMERGENT CRISIS: The case of the pandemic urbanism symposium

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted daily life in communities and cities around the world. This chapter examines how the rapid onset of these unprecedented conditions inspired novel modes of engaging and knowing around a crisis. In the first months of the pandemic, the authors convened a virtual symposium that brought together a diverse set of actors from academia, government, non-profit organizations, and community groups. The event revolved around a simple question: how do we understand what this pandemic means for cities? The resulting conversations and the organization of the forum to host them were a collective effort to make sense of phenomena that did not fit well within taken-for-granted frames of meaning and were poorly suited to established epistemologies of academic research. The pandemic called for different ways of knowing. To that end, the chapter draws out three characteristics of the Pandemic Urbanism symposium—adaptiveness, collectiveness, and openness—as examples of approaches that are generative of new meaning and insight. The authors argue that the case of this symposium offers lessons for productive sensemaking across knowledge domains in response to many other kinds of emergent socioecological challenges. © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Yizhao Yang and Anne Taufen;individual chapters, the contributors.