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In modern-day computing, cloud services are widely used in every aspect of life. So, user satisfaction depends on the effectiveness and efficiency of cloud services. Service broker policy of the cloud maintains the effectiveness and efficiency of cloud services. Service broker policy provides the rules and norms based on which a data center is selected for a userbase request. This paper proposes a genetic algorithm-based service broker policy that provides the optimal sequence of data centers for different userbases based on their requirements. This research aims to find an optimal data center for userbases that can achieve user satisfaction by minimizing the cloud service's response time and data processing time. We have experimented with our proposed genetic algorithm-based service broker policy in the CloudAnalyst platform based on different real-world scenarios. Simulation results indicate that our proposed genetic algorithm outperforms existing traditional algorithms. © 2023 IEEE.

Impaired autonomic modulation and baroreflex sensitivity (BRS) have been reported during and after COVID-19. Both impairments are associated with negative cardiovascular outcomes. If these impairments were to exist undetected in young men after COVID-19, they could lead to negative cardiovascular outcomes. Fatigue is associated with autonomic dysfunction during and after COVID-19. It is unclear if fatigue can be used as an indicator of impaired autonomic modulation and BRS after COVID-19. This study aims to compare parasympathetic modulation, sympathetic modulation, and BRS between young men who had COVID-19 versus controls and to determine if fatigue is associated with impaired autonomic modulation and BRS. Parasympathetic modulation as the high-frequency power of R-R intervals (lnHFR-R), sympathetic modulation as the low-frequency power of systolic blood pressure variability (LFSBP), and BRS as the -index were measured by power spectral density analysis. These variables were compared between 20 young men who had COVID-19 and 24 controls. Independent t-tests and Mann-Whitney U tests indicated no significant difference between the COVID-19 and the control group in: lnHFR-R, P=0.20; LFSBP, P=0.11, and -index, P=0.20. Fatigue was not associated with impaired autonomic modulation or BRS. There is no difference in autonomic modulations or BRS between young men who had COVID-19 compared to controls. Fatigue did not seem to be associated with impaired autonomic modulation or impaired BRS in young men after COVID-19. Findings suggest that young men might not be at increased cardiovascular risk from COVID-19-related dysautonomia and impaired BRS.

COVID-19 has extensively reshaped lifestyle practices, supply chain dynamics, and climate mitigation efforts. The resulting crises from the pandemic in relation to local and community sustainability practices have not yet been investigated in depth. There is a need to explore the individual characteristics and responses from rapid transitions of lifestyles at various scales. Analysing how the COVID-19 pandemic has shaped and altered sustainable living practices, and the motivations supporting them, has yet to be determined but is crucial to gain further insight to improve management responses to large-scale disruptive change. Presenting empirical findings from semi-structured interviews in New Haven County, Connecticut, this study elucidates the ways in which the lifestyles have been altered and how they responded while specifically highlighting the consequences for behavioural routines and sustainable lifestyle practices. As a result of lockdowns and pandemic mitigation responses, individual sustainability engagement fluctuated with participants shifting dietary, mobility, and energy and food consumption patterns. Specifically, participants emphasised substantial decrease in daily travel during initial phases of the pandemic alongside increased online shopping and energy use at home. Though changes to consumption practices were replaced former habits with unsustainable ones, individuals also noted how they co-opted the pandemic over time to pursue sustainable actions at home. As a macro-level ‘window of opportunity’ and disruptive change, this study illustrates how sustainable lifestyle practices were reshaped; some by choice, some by force, and some reflecting a forced choice. These findings have clear implications for the stability of maintaining sustainable practices influenced by landscape-level shocks.

The HF method uses single determinant to solve Schrödinger equation and obtain molecular orbitals. A variety of post-HF methods such as MP2 and CCSD are needed to treat molecular systems in ground states accurately, while the CIS and EOM-CCSD methods are developed to study excited states. All these methods can write out wavefunction files in single determinant so that the unique electron density distributions of the system at all these calculation levels are available. The quantum theory of atoms in a molecule (QT-AIM) performs density topological analyses and rigorously obtain properties such as net atomic charges and delocalization and localization indices for ground states at HF/CIS and post-HF levels and for excited states at CIS, EOM-CCSD levels. The density functional theory (DFT) develops a larger number of functionals to account for the electron–electron correlation via exchange-correlation potentials, and TD-DFT methods study properties of electronically excited states. The DFT and TD-DFT methods rely on electron density to solve Schrödinger equations and write out final wavefunctions in single determinant format. Therefore, density-based analyses can be also done for a variety of DFT and TD-DFT methods. Along with molecular orbitals, density-based analyses are applied to explain ambident reactivity, to identify bonding characteristics in organic transition metal compounds, and to evaluate the performance of current DFT and TD-DFT methods. © 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

This chapter explores the case of President Bill Clinton and the Lewinsky scandal as a pivotal moment in the convergence of political, technological, and cultural changes that elevated the presence of gossip and rumor in mainstream news sources, with major, lasting consequences. Throughout the unfolding of the scandal, unconfirmed and often salacious information about what had happened was transmitted among individuals and amplified through the media. The chapter takes a close look at some key elements contributing to such trends, including use of anonymous sourcing, heightened competition between media outlets, and the emergence of new media actors covering American politics and the presidency. An analysis of two specific incidents, involving coverage of allegations there were eyewitnesses to the president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and that Lewinsky had a dress stained with the president’s DNA in her possession, demonstrates how prominent national news outlets publicized information reflecting weaker reporting standards and conveyed unsubstantiated rumors as news. As the news media devalued itself in cases such as this one, abandoning professional conventions and prioritizing sensational, entertaining content, the public began to no longer trust or rely on such sources to help it interpret events. We continue to see the ramifications of those developments in the present, with widespread belief in fake news, little consensus on what constitute facts or reality, and stark partisan divides about who can be relied upon to transmit the truth of political events. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Whereas research on caregiving is well documented, less is known about gender inequalities in caregiver stress, coping mechanisms, and health outcomes, all of which may vary by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. This scoping review investigated racial and ethnic disparities using the Stress Process Model among male caregivers. Several databases were searched including Academic Search Premier, Medline Complete, APA PsycInfo, CINHAL, Google, ProQuest, and Web of Science. Included were peer-reviewed articles in English, published from 1990 to 2022. A total of nine articles fulfilled inclusion criteria. Most of the articles indicated that compared to White male caregivers, African American male caregivers provided more hours of care, assisted with more activities of daily living (ADLs) and instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs), and experienced more financial stress. In terms of coping style, one study found African American male caregivers, compared to White male caregivers, held negative religious beliefs. Another study showed that they were at a higher risk for stroke than their White counterparts. The search revealed a dearth of studies on racial disparities in stress, coping, and health outcomes among male caregivers. Further research is needed on the experiences and perspectives of male minority caregivers. © 2023 by the authors.

We seek to develop a low-dimensional model for the interactions between horizontally adjacent turbulent convection rolls. This was tested in Rayleigh-Bénard convection experiments with two adjacent cubic cells with a partial wall in between. Observed stable states include both counterrotating and corotating states for Rayleigh number 7.6×107< Ra <3.5×109 and Prandtl number 6.41. The stability of each of these states and their dynamics can be modeled low-dimensionally by stochastic ordinary differential equations of motion in terms of the orientation, amplitude, and mean temperature of each convection roll. The form of the interaction terms is predicted based on an effective turbulent diffusion of temperature between the adjacent rolls, which is projected onto the neighboring rolls with sinusoidal temperature profiles. With measurements of a constant coefficient for effective thermal turbulent diffusion, quantitative predictions are made for the nine forcing terms which affect stable fixed points of the corotating and counterrotating states for 5.5×108< Ra <3.5×109. Predictions are found to be accurate within a factor of 3 of experiments. This suggests that the same turbulent thermal diffusivity that describes macroscopically averaged heat transport also controls the interactions between neighboring convection rolls. The surprising stability of corotating states is due to the temperature difference between the neighboring rolls becoming large enough that the heat flux between the rolls stabilizes the temperature profile of aligned corotating states. This temperature difference can be driven with an asymmetry, for example, by heating the plates of the two cells to different mean temperatures. When such an asymmetry is introduced, it also shifts the orientations of the rolls of counterrotating states in opposite directions away from their preferred orientation, which is otherwise due to the geometry of the cell. As the temperature difference between the plates of the different cells is increased, the shift in orientation increases until the counterrotating states become unstable and only corotating states are stable. At very large temperature differences between cells, both the counterrotating and predicted corotating states become unstable; instead we observe a corotating state with much larger temperature difference between the rolls that cannot be explained by turbulent thermal diffusion. Spontaneous switching between corotating and counterrotating states is also observed, including in nominally symmetric systems. Switching to counterrotating states occurs mainly due to cessation (a significant weakening of a convection roll), which reduces damping on changes in orientation, allowing the orientation to change rapidly due to diffusive fluctuations. Switching to corotating states is mainly driven by smaller diffusive fluctuations in the orientation, amplitude, and mean temperature of rolls, which have a positive feedback that destabilizes the counterrotating state. © 2023 American Physical Society.

The elliptic (v2) and triangular (v3) azimuthal anisotropy coefficients in central He3+Au, d+Au, and p+Au collisions at sNN=200 GeV are measured as a function of transverse momentum (pT) at midrapidity (|η|<0.9), via the azimuthal angular correlation between two particles both at |η|<0.9. While the v2(pT) values depend on the colliding systems, the v3(pT) values are system independent within the uncertainties, suggesting an influence on eccentricity from subnucleonic fluctuations in these small-sized systems. These results also provide stringent constraints for the hydrodynamic modeling of these systems. © 2023 American Physical Society.

Monitoring of electrical distribution grids requires the joint processing of electrical measurements from different grid locations. Such type of processing is influenced by inaccuracies in measurement data originating from measurement errors, non-ideal clocks in measurement devices, and from time averaging of measurands as part of the data collection process. This paper introduces an approach to assess the impact of these three different measurement artifacts in realistic measurement scenarios of electrical distribution grids. A case study of power loss calculation in a real-life medium-voltage grid is presented, covering both technical loss obtained from current measurement and total loss obtained from power measurements. The results show that total loss in general is more robust to aggregation of power measurements over longer measurement intervals, while it is more sensitive to measurement errors and clock offsets. The results of the study are important for quantifying the trustworthiness of the obtained loss values and for the future enhancement of the measurement data collection process. © 2023 ACM.

The optical disc in the human retina can reveal important information about a person's health and well-being. We propose a deep learning-based approach to automatically identify the region in human retinal images that corresponds to the optical disc. We formulated the task as an image segmentation problem that leverages multiple public-domain datasets of human retinal fundus images. Using an attention-based residual U-Net, we showed that the optical disc in a human retina image can be detected with more than 99% pixel-level accuracy and around 95% in Matthew's Correlation Coefficient. A comparison with variants of UNet with different encoder CNN architectures ascertains the superiority of the proposed approach across multiple metrics.

In this work, we propose a multi-task learning-based approach towards the localization of optic disc and fovea from human retinal fundus images using a deep learning-based approach. Formulating the task as an image-based regression problem, we propose a Densenet121-based architecture through an extensive set of experiments with a variety of CNN architectures. Our proposed approach achieved an average mean absolute error of only 13pixels (0.04%), mean squared error of 11 pixels (0.005%), and a root mean square error of only 0.02 (13%) on the IDRiD dataset.

We report a new measurement of the production of electrons from open heavy-flavor hadron decays (HFEs) at mid-rapidity (|y| &lt; 0.7) in Au+Au collisions at sNN = 200 GeV. Invariant yields of HFEs are measured for the transverse momentum range of 3.5 &lt; p T &lt; 9 GeV/c in various configurations of the collision geometry. The HFE yields in head-on Au+Au collisions are suppressed by approximately a factor of 2 compared to that in p + p collisions scaled by the average number of binary collisions, indicating strong interactions between heavy quarks and the hot and dense medium created in heavy-ion collisions. Comparison of these results with models provides additional tests of theoretical calculations of heavy quark energy loss in the quark-gluon plasma. [Figure not available: see fulltext.] © 2023, The Author(s).

ABSTRACT: Breastfeeding affords numerous health benefits to mothers and children, but for women with HIV in the United States, avoidance of breastfeeding is recommended. Evidence from low-income countries demonstrates low risk of HIV transmission during breastfeeding with antiretroviral therapy, and the World Health Organization recommends exclusive breastfeeding and shared decision making about infant feeding options in low-income and middle-income countries. In the United States, gaps in knowledge exist surrounding the experiences, beliefs, and feelings of women with HIV surrounding infant feeding decisions. Undergirded by a framework of person-centered care, this study describes the experiences, beliefs, and feelings of women with HIV in the United States surrounding recommendations for breastfeeding avoidance. Although no participants reported consideration of breastfeeding, multiple gaps were identified with implications for the clinical care and counseling of the mother-infant dyad. Copyright © 2023 Association of Nurses in AIDS Care.

Purpose: Reduced use of visible articulatory information on a speaker's face has been implicated as a possible contributor to language deficits in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We employ an audiovisual (AV) phonemic restoration paradigm to measure behavioral performance (button press) and event-related potentials (ERPs) of visual speech perception in children with ASD and their neurotypical peers to assess potential neural substrates that contribute to group differences. Method: Two sets of speech stimuli, /ba/–“/a/” (“/a/” was created from the /ba/ token by a reducing the initial consonant) and /ba/–/pa/, were presented within an auditory oddball paradigm to children aged 6–13 years with ASD (n = 17) and typical development (TD; n = 33) within two conditions. The AV condition contained a fully visible speaking face; the pixelated (PX) condition included a face, but the mouth and jaw were PX, removing all articulatory information. When articulatory features were present for the /ba/–“/a/” contrast, it was expected that the influence of the visual articulators would facilitate a phonemic restoration effect in which “/a/” would be perceived as /ba/. ERPs were recorded during the experiment while children were required to press a button for the deviant sound for both sets of speech contrasts within both conditions. Results: Button press data revealed that TD children were more accurate in discriminating between /ba/–“/a/” and /ba/–/pa/ contrasts in the PX condition relative to the ASD group. ERPs in response to the /ba/–/pa/ contrast within both AV and PX conditions differed between children with ASD and TD children (earlier P300 responses for children with ASD). Conclusion: Children with ASD differ in the underlying neural mechanisms responsible for speech processing compared with TD peers within an AV context.

This article examines anthropocentric and ecocentric tendencies in two major works written by Mario Vargas Llosa, The Storyteller and The Dream of the Celt, to identify the value of those novels in ecocritical terms. I provide this analysis in the context of recent academic dialogue which notes an apparent contradictory relationship between the presentation of abuses of Amazonian people and their environment, and the portrayal of Westernized protagonists as their saviors in fiction written by Vargas Llosa. This essay provides a solution to this paradox and other apparent contradictions in his narratives and posits that even though the anthropocentric literary discourse concerning the environment has declined throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, in part, due to the rise of the environmental movement, this type of discourse has changed in Vargas Llosa’s literature, rejecting early twentieth century misconceptions of the natural world but holding onto technocentric neoliberal beliefs. © 2023, University of Montevideo. All rights reserved.

"Drawing on research conducted in Cuzco, Peru, The Wari Civilization and Their Descendants: Imperial Transformation in Pre-Inca Cuzco analyzes the political and social transformations that led to the downfall of the Wari civilization in the Andean Middle Horizon period (AD 500-1000) and resulted in the rise of the Inca state."--