Human Resources Strategies & Lessons Learned During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Literature Review

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has been the most devastating public health crisis since the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1920. COVID-19 has impacted every human being and operational system throughout the land. The pandemic has caused challenging times for businesses, financial markets, government agencies, and academia. One area frequently overlooked is COVID-19’s impact implications for workplaces, working practices, and Human Resource Management (HRM) operationalization. This literature review aims to identify best practices implemented for the sustainability of Human Resources (HR) functions and the survival of institutions in the age of a dynamic public health crisis. This is an effective approach to better understand the disruptions caused by COVID-19 on HRM and examine how this pandemic has impacted organizations. The findings obtained focus on four main pillars: (1) recruitment, retention, and the Great Resignation, (2) employee well-being and wellness, (3) remote work options, practices, and professionalism, and (4) HR practitioners' leadership development. These have continued to be salient themes interwoven throughout many articles. These findings suggest that talent and having the most experienced, operationalized, and professional individuals as part of one’s organization are paramount to its success. Upskilling is imperative, and all stakeholders must be open to the inevitability of change as change is constant

Application of X-band radars for deriving intertidal bathymetries and characterising coastal behaviours

Coastal monitoring techniques aim to capture the relationship between physical forcing factors and morphological change, at a range of timescales to understand ongoing coastal processes and identify areas prone to erosion and flooding hazards posed by storms. Standard marine radar provides temporally and spatially continuous monitoring data over a wide area in all conditions, and images can be processed to generate intertidal bathymetries to assess morphological change across event (days-years) timescales. This research applies a series of intertidal bathymetries derived from a standard marine radar deployed at Camber Sands, southeast England in XBeach, a process-based, storm response model, to assess wave runup hazard at the coast during a high energy storm event from the deployment period. Wave runup is dependent on offshore wave climate and beach slope and used here as a proxy to explore the influence of nearshore morphological variability, represented by different processing techniques to derive intertidal bathymetries from the marine radar images, on a coastal hazard. XBeach is used in combination with beach survey data from the site to first demonstrate reasonable skill in reproducing wave runup observations. Intertidal bathymetries are derived from the marine radar images using either a local or regional water level signal, and an average of 1, 5, or 10 days of images preceding the storm event. Modelled wave runup shows up to 0.32 m sensitivity to input intertidal bathymetries, which could be important for overwash predictions. The slope and resolution of the radar-derived intertidal bathymetries is sensitive to the water level time series used. This research is the first time that radar-derived intertidal bathymetries have been used to assess a coastal hazard in a process-based model, and results show that ideally users would have a locally measured water level to accurately generate intertidal bathymetries, and extended beach surveys for ground truthing

Structure of Tagatose-1,6-bisphosphate Aldolase. Insight into chiral discrimination, mechanism, and specificity of class II aldolases

Tagatose-1,6-bisphosphate aldolase (TBPA) is a tetrameric class II aldolase that catalyzes the reversible condensation of dihydroxyacetone phosphate with glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate to produce tagatose 1,6-bisphosphate. The high resolution (1.45 Å) crystal structure of the Escherichia coli enzyme, encoded by the agaY gene, complexed with phosphoglycolohydroxamate (PGH) has been determined. Two subunits comprise the asymmetric unit, and a crystallographic 2-fold axis generates the functional tetramer. A complex network of hydrogen bonds position side chains in the active site that is occupied by two cations. An unusual Na(+) binding site is created using a interaction with Tyr(183) in addition to five oxygen ligands. The catalytic Zn(2+) is five-coordinate using three histidine nitrogens and two PGH oxygens. Comparisons of TBPA with the related fructose-1,6-bisphosphate aldolase (FBPA) identifies common features with implications for the mechanism. Because the major product of the condensation catalyzed by the enzymes differs in the chirality at a single position, models of FBPA and TBPA with their cognate bisphosphate products provide insight into chiral discrimination by these aldolases. The TBPA active site is more open on one side than FBPA, and this contributes to a less specific enzyme. The availability of more space and a wider range of aldehyde partners used by TBPA together with the highly specific nature of FBPA suggest that TBPA might be a preferred enzyme to modify for use in biotransformation chemistry

Dynamic interactions between coastal storms and salt marshes: A review

This manuscript reviews the progresses made in the understanding of the dynamic interactions between coastal storms and salt marshes, including the dissipation of extreme water levels and wind waves across marsh surfaces, the geomorphic impact of storms on salt marshes, the preservation of hurricanes signals and deposits into the sedimentary records, and the importance of storms for the long term survival of salt marshes to sea level rise. A review of weaknesses, and strengths of coastal defences incorporating the use of salt marshes including natural, and hybrid infrastructures in comparison to standard built solutions is then presented. Salt marshes are effective in dissipating wave energy, and storm surges, especially when the marsh is highly elevated, and continuous. This buffering action reduces for storms lasting more than one day. Storm surge attenuation rates range from 1.7 to 25 cm/km depending on marsh and storms characteristics. In terms of vegetation properties, the more flexible stems tend to flatten during powerful storms, and to dissipate less energy but they are also more resilient to structural damage, and their flattening helps to protect the marsh surface from erosion, while stiff plants tend to break, and could increase the turbulence level and the scour. From a morphological point of view, salt marshes are generally able to withstand violent storms without collapsing, and violent storms are responsible for only a small portion of the long term marsh erosion. Our considerations highlight the necessity to focus on the indirect long term impact that large storms exerts on the whole marsh complex rather than on sole after-storm periods. The morphological consequences of storms, even if not dramatic, might in fact influence the response of the system to normal weather conditions during following inter-storm periods. For instance, storms can cause tidal flats deepening which in turn promotes wave energy propagation, and exerts a long term detrimental effect for marsh boundaries even during calm weather. On the other hand, when a violent storm causes substantial erosion but sediments are redistributed across nearby areas, the long term impact might not be as severe as if sediments were permanently lost from the system, and the salt marsh could easily recover to the initial state