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COVID-19 pandemic has affected people’s daily life dramatically since December 2019. More than 211 million cases and 4.42 million deaths have been reported and confirmed all over the world. Long-term care facilities are taking the biggest hit during this pandemic, even after the spread-out of the vaccines. Globally, residents in long-term care facilities have experienced disproportionately high morbidity and mortality from COVID-19. Elderlies residing in long-term care facilities have the greatest susceptibility to COVID-19 and the poorest outcomes from infections. This chapter overviewed the insight, impact, and challenges of COVID-19 on the residential care homes in UK, US, and Australia and provided possible implications for the long-term care market post-pandemic.

This paper examines the performance of two state-owned airlines: Ethiopian Airlines and Ghana Airways. While Ethiopian Airlines continues to operate successfully, the other airline has gone out of business. In an industry characterized by heavy competition and a high rate of failure, the success of the state- owned Ethiopian Airlines is intriguing. The evidence shows that Ethiopian Airlines outperforms the industry on some important benchmarks. These findings suggest that being a state enterprise is not necessarily a characteristic that leads to failure. Corporate culture and governance appear to be important factors in the success of Ethiopian Airlines.

Manganese dioxide-multiwall carbon nanotube (MnO2-MWCNT) nanocomposites were synthesized via one-pot synthesis method with varying concentrations of 1 mg/ml, 4 mg/ml, and 10 mg/ml MWCNT. The synthesized nanocomposites were characterized using x-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and electrochemical measurements. The intent of studying different concentrations is, ultimately, to correlate the effect of the concentration of multiwall carbon nanotube on the electrochemical performance of the MnO2-MWCNT nanocomposites. Two primary phenomena were observed as CNT concentration increased. First, less crystalline MnO2 adsorption onto individual CNTs occurred. Subsequently, CNT agglomeration became the primary feature of the nanostructures of high CNT concentration. The electrochemical studies reveal that the specific capacitance of MnO2 increases from 124 F/g to 145 F/g by the addition of 1 mg/ml MWCNTs and decreases to 102 F/g for MnO2-10 mg/ml MWCNT nanocomposite. © 2023

Introduction/Purpose  Athletic administrators (AA) in U.S. high schools are uniquely positioned to provide guidance and endorsement for the prevention and management of common sport-related catastrophic injuries, such as the development of a spinal cord injury management (SCIM) policy. The purpose of this project was to evaluate AA’s knowledge of comprehensive SCIM policies in U.S. high schools. Secondarily, we aimed to investigate the factors, facilitators, and barriers to the development and adoption of comprehensive policies. Methods  An online questionnaire was distributed to 6423 AA working in U.S.-based high school athletics, with 366 included in the final data analysis. The questionnaire evaluated AA’s knowledge of comprehensive SCIM policies addressing components of adoption, documentation, and communication. The questionnaire was developed based on the 2002 “National Athletic Trainers’ Association Position Statement: Acute Management of the Cervical Spine-Injured Athlete.” The questionnaire also inquired about facilitators and barriers to developing and adopting comprehensive policies. Proportions were calculated for policy adoption, and independent-samples t-tests evaluated the influence of athletic training services on comprehensive SCIM policies. Results  About half of AA (49.2%, n = 180/366) reported having all recommended components of a written SCIM policy. AA who had access to an athletic trainer (yes = 62.9%, no = 18.1%, unknown = 19%) were more likely to have a comprehensive SCIM policy compared with those without access (80.6% vs 19.4%, χ21 = 7.091, P = 0.008, prevalence ratio = 1.24, 95% confidence interval = 1.03–1.50). The most commonly reported facilitator (49.9%) was “having a medical professional at the school,” and the main barrier (30.2%) was “my school would need more information, resources, assistance, etc.” Conclusions  The findings identify areas for improvement in supporting the health and safety of children in high school participating in interscholastic athletics. Future dissemination and implementation research should develop strategies tailored to individual school community and need to improve SCIM policy adoption and implementation.

Traditional crisis management approaches have often overlooked the role of community and nonprofit organizations. In this study, we investigated how nonprofits and communities contributed to problem-solving during crises through self-organization on social media. We applied social network analysis to 17,732 interactions using #TwitterFoodBank, a self-organized network emerged during the early stage of COVID-19 to address food insecurity. Our results highlighted the significant role of nonprofits in coordinating the community’s self-organized network. However, they also revealed a lack of coordination among these organizations in maintaining a viable network. These findings have valuable implications for nonprofits seeking to leverage the potential of online self-organized communities in crisis management.

A young boy remembers fond childhood memories at his grandmother's house, where he learned the small things in life that truly mattered.

Disruptive technological changes, including carbon capture and storage, can have macroeconomic rebound effects that pose a threat to long term environmental sustainability when not accompanied by pollution taxes. The paper demonstrates that when the elasticity of intertemporal substitution is less than one, implementing a Pigouvian tax effectively stabilizes pollution emissions, regardless of technical and consumption elasticities of substitution. However, if the elasticity of intertemporal substitution exceeds one, flexibility in technical or consumption substitution could cause sustainable growth to falter. The policy implications concerning the role of subsidies for clean technology are discussed.

CuS and CuS-rGO nanocomposites were synthesized by the hydrothermal method. The synthesized CuS and rGO-CuS nanocomposite materials were physically characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscope (SEM) and were evaluated electrochemically for supercapacitor applications. The specific capacitance of CuS was determined to be 207 F/g, 150 F/g, and 97 F/g at a current density of 0.5 A/g, 5 A/g, and 20 A/g, respectively. The rGO-CuS nanocomposite showed improved specific capacitance of 350 F/g, 251 F/g, and 149 F/g at a current density of 0.5 A/g, 5 A/g, and 20 A/g, respectively.

Globally, air pollution accounts for approximately one in eight deaths, and diarrheal diseases account for one in nine child deaths annually. Lead exposure contributes to concerns of heart disease, stroke, and developmental intellectual disability. Further, across the world, nearly 23 million people are displaced by extreme weather events each year, which have been exacerbated by climate change and contribute to physical and mental health implications for entire communities. These and many other environmentally related experiences and their subsequent health outcomes are not experienced equally by race, ethnicity, or income, with Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities and low-income communities repeatedly experiencing the heaviest of burdens. Due to a variety of historic and contemporary policy and planning decisions, these patterns of environmental injustice persist on local, national, and global scales. In response, environmental justice (EJ) is a social movement, as well as a belief that people of all backgrounds deserve access to clean air and water and a healthy community in which to thrive. This chapter heavily focuses on the USA and its environmental health inequities, policies, and historic EJ movement. However, in our globalized society, EJ is a global issue that must be addressed as such by the field of public health.

The Gona paleoanthropological field project in the Afar region of Ethiopia has long been associated with the earliest Oldowan stone tools. However, over the last 20 years, ongoing research at Gona has expanded its contributions considerably, producing fossils of Ardipithecus kadabba, Ardipithecus ramidus, and Homo erectus, as well as additional archaeological evidence of the earliest Oldowan and early Acheulean. Moreover, in the last few years, the Gona team has turned its attention to the younger deposits exposed in its study area and discovered a surprising number of Middle Stone Age (MSA) and Later Stone Age (LSA) archaeological sites, mostly from the Late Pleistocene to the early-middle Holocene. While any sedimentary sequence is incomplete by virtue of episodic depositional and erosional events over time, we are struck by the relative completeness of the archaeological sequence at Gona (Quade et al., 2008). The hominin fossils attract deserved attention, but the Gona project may ultimately be best known for preserving arguably the most extensive, detailed, and continuous Stone Age or Paleolithic archaeological sequence in the world, all contained within a small 25 km × 10 km area, approximately half of the total project area.

Human impacts on wild populations are numerous and extensive, degrading habitats and causing population declines across taxa. Though these impacts are often studied individually, wild populations typically face suites of stressors acting concomitantly, compromising the fitness of individuals and populations in ways poorly understood and not easily predicted by the effects of any single stressor. Developing understanding of the effects of multiple stressors and their potential interactions remains a critical challenge in environmental biology. Here, we focus on assessing the impacts of two prominent stressors affecting many organisms across the planet – elevated salinity (an increasingly common pollutant in freshwater habitats) and elevated temperature. We examined a suite of physiological traits and components of fitness across populations of wood frogs originating from ponds that differ in their proximity to roads and thus their legacy of exposure to road salt pollution. When experimentally exposed to road salt, wood frogs showed reduced survival, especially those from ponds adjacent to roads, and delayed time to metamorphosis. Family level effects mediated these outcomes, but high salinity generally eroded family level variance. When combined, exposure to both temperature and salt resulted in very low survival, and this effect was strongest in roadside populations. Taken together, these results suggest that temperature is an important stressor capable of exacerbating impacts from a prominent contaminant confronting many freshwater organisms in salinized habitats. More broadly, it appears likely that toxicity might often be underestimated in the absence of multi-stressor approaches.

Facultatively symbiotic corals provide important experimental models to explore the establishment, maintenance, and breakdown of the mutualism between corals and members of the algal family Symbiodiniaceae. The temperate coral Astrangia poculata is one such model as it is not only facultatively symbiotic, but also occurs across a broad temperature and latitudinal gradient. Here, we report the de novo chromosome-scale assembly and annotation of the A. poculata genome. Though widespread segmental/tandem duplications of genomic regions were detected, we did not find strong evidence of a whole genome duplication (WGD) event. Comparison of the gene arrangement between A. poculata and the tropical coral Acropora millepora revealed 56.38% of the orthologous genes were conserved in syntenic blocks despite ∼415 million years of divergence. Gene families related to sperm hyperactivation and innate immunity, including lectins, were found to contain more genes in A. millepora relative to A. poculata. Sperm hyperactivation in A. millepora is expected given the extreme requirements of gamete competition during mass spawning events in tropical corals, while lectins are important in the establishment of coral-algal symbiosis. By contrast, gene families involved in sleep promotion, feeding suppression, and circadian sleep/wake cycle processes were expanded in A. poculata. These expanded gene families may play a role in A. poculata’s ability to enter a dormancy-like state (“winter quiescence”) to survive freezing temperatures at the northern edges of the species’ range.

Innovation is needed to solve nursing workforce issues during times of crisis. A collaborative effort between a hospital system and several universities resulted in the Bridge to Professional Practice Program that was implemented during a period of high patient volume and nursing student downtime. The program provided support for staffing needs and clinical hours to promote readiness for practice for students. The program evaluation outcomes and recommendations for improvement are addressed.

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Although clinical social work seeks to center the transformative potential of human relationships, practitioners are experiencing heightened systemic and organizational impingements from the dehumanizing pressures of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism and racism diminish the vitality and transformative potential of human relationships, disproportionately affecting Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. Practitioners are also experiencing increased stress and burnout related to increased caseloads and decreased professional autonomy and organizational practitioner support. Holistic, culturally responsive, and anti-oppressive processes seek to counter these oppressive forces but need further development to synthesize antioppressive structural understandings with embodied relational interactions. Practitioners can potentially contribute to efforts that apply critical theories and antioppressive understandings within their practice and workplace. Through an iterative flow of three sets of practices, the RE/UN/DIScover heuristic supports practitioners’ efforts to respond in those challenging everyday moments where oppressive forms of power are imposed and embedded within systemic processes. With themselves and other colleagues, practitioners engage in compassionate REcover practices; use curious, critical reflection to UNcover full understandings of power dynamics, impacts, and meanings; and draw on creative courage to DIScover and enact socially just and humanizing responses. This paper describes how practitioners can use the RE/UN/DIScover heuristic in two common challenging moments of clinical practice: systemic practice impingements and implementing a new training or practice model. The heuristic seeks to support practitioners’ efforts to preserve and expand socially just, relational spaces for themselves and those with whom they work within the context of systemic dehumanizing neoliberal forces.

The stratigraphic architecture of fjords is complicated due to the delicate interplay between ice dynamics, sediment supply, relative sea-level fluctuations and slope failures. Glaciogenic sediment is prone to failure and to be carried downslope to the fjord floor through the entire spectrum of mass movements and subaqueous density flows, as the unstable paraglacial submarine landscape moves towards stability. Palaeofjords formed by Gondwanan glaciers during the late Palaeozoic Ice Age contain a compelling record of gravitational resedimentation in fjord depositional systems. This paper showcases the geomorphology and depositional history of a glacial cycle in the Orutanda fjord in north-western Namibia as an example of an overdeepened fjord basin fill dominated by products of subaqueous gravitational processes. During glaciation, the Orutanda glacier carved a 20 km long by 3.7 km wide glacial trough that embodies an overdeepened basin. Ice thickness during terminal glacial occupation of the fjord is estimated to had been up to 200 m based on the fjord geomorphology. The progressive retreat of the tidewater glacier, concomitant with marine flooding, increased accommodation space in the overdeepened basin during deglaciation. During this stage, proglacial sedimentation through iceberg rafting and settling of turbid plumes was outpaced by intense paraglacial downslope resedimentation of glacially-transported debris. Successive failures from the fjord walls and downslope resedimentation resulted in coalescing debrite–turbidite lobes on the fjord floor. Slide deposits, composed entirely of deformed debrites and turbidites, indicate that these resedimented facies were prone to renewed mass wasting. As the Orutanda glacier melted, the fjord experienced the axial progradation of a fjord-head delta registered only by turbidites and slide deposits derived from its collapse. The Orutanda fjord sheds light on the relevance of paraglacial mass wasting in overprinting glaciogenic deposits. This insight is key to understanding the role of glaciers versus non-glacial processes in producing the glacial deep-time record.

Abstract The Armenian Memory Project (AMP) is a collaborative effort designed to harness the energy and resources of the University of Connecticut and the New England Armenian community for the goal of fostering greater understanding of the region’s Armenian cultural heritage and the impact human rights crimes had on the Armenian community. In 2019, students and faculty from the university worked with Armenian American institutions and individuals on an initial component of the AMP, employing digital media technology to tell the story of one immigrant Armenian family, the Dildilians. A unique course was created to produce a documentary film centring around this family’s experiences in Ottoman Turkey before, during, and after the Armenian Genocide. Designed and taught by a documentary filmmaker with support from a family archivist/historian, the course brought students together in a collaborative learning experience. By immersing themselves in the family’s extensive photograph archive, these students came to understand the important role that the past continues to play in the lives of present-day Armenians. Furthermore, by taking on the responsibility as storytellers of the Dildilian narrative, students developed a deeper identification with this distant history and, in a wider sense, an appreciation for the ethical value of memory in bearing witness to the past. This collaborative and participatory framework for teaching using archival collections can serve as a model for creating a transformative learning experience in the study of human rights, war, and genocide.