Modeling Bioterrorism in the Livestock Sectors of NAFTA Members

Until two years ago, most citizens of Canada, the United States and Mexico experienced terrorism as a distant reality viewed from the safety of their living rooms. Today, North Americans encounter constant reminders of the aggravation and economic costs imposed on them by the now real threat of terrorism. The United States, the most obvious target for new terrorist activity, has responded by tightening its border security with all countries including its NAFTA partners.(2) Canada and Mexico joined the NAFTA to obtain preferred and more secure access to the United States market. The increased threat of terrorist activity in North America raises three crucial questions for NAFTA members. First, how real is a bioterrorism threat? Second, how can the United States maintain access to its market for its NAFTA partners and at the same time meet its legitimate security concerns? Third, what are the potential economic effects of a bioterrorism attack on North America? While it is generally assumed that the United States would be the primary target of a terrorist attack, Canada, Mexico or all three NAFTA countries could be targeted.Agricultural and Food Policy, International Relations/Trade,

Smartphone security awareness, perceptions and practices:a Welsh higher education case study

Higher Education students are purported to be heavy users of technology; specifically smartphones, which represent the “Internet of Things” (IoT). These have revolutionized every sector of public and personal lives, and also revolutionised teaching and learning within Higher Education, providing students a 21st century learning experience. The way students engage with each other, with institutions of higher learning, and with their own learning, has changed dramatically. The smartphone is used to assist with all areas of their lives; however, a plethora of security issues accompanies its use. Cybersecurity perceptions are said to inform security practices and precautionary-related behaviours. If perceptions are skewed, the necessary security behaviours might be inadequate. The main objective of this quantitative study was to investigate the level of smartphone security awareness of Higher Education students undertaking a Business degree at a Welsh University during the 2016-17 and 2018-19 academic years. Understanding whether students have acquired prior cybersecurity knowledge through formal means was key to understanding whether there was a link between security education, security awareness, smartphone security behaviours, perceptions and practices.This research therefore aimed to investigate:1) The level of smartphone security awareness depicted in the attitudes, behaviours, knowledge and competences of these university students;2) Any gender differences in terms of attitudes, behaviours, knowledge and competences regarding smartphone security awareness;3) The importance of cybersecurity awareness training.Participants in this study were largely male, with half of the participants having undertaken a prior information communication technology related type courses. Almost all participants recognised that there were security related issues with social networking and location based applications. The majority of participants did not deploy measures to prevent viruses, this being the case for significantly more females. More than half of the participants used some mechanisms to protect their data. However, significantly more of the 2018-19 participant group compared to the 2016-17 participant group indicated that they did not do this. Moreover, a large proportion of the participants were unaware of the liability linked to the use of social media and the related rules applicable. This study suggests that students who received some formal information communication technology training prior to university entry were more aware of the security risks and their behaviours reflect this. Despite this, the level of smartphone security awareness is not as high as it should be which is in keeping with other research findings. This study suggests that as technology and digital literacy gain further importance, smartphone security literacy training should not be left to chance. . It is clear that education and training should occur early in the education life cycle, and should be a lifelong learning activity

Higher Education Students’ Perceptions of Online Learning during COVID-19—A Comparative Study

The pandemic and subsequent ‘lockdown’ has dramatically changed the educational landscape of higher education institutions. Pre-covid-19, traditional universities had choices in pedagogical practice, which included a variety of teaching delivery modes. Overnight, a single mode of delivery became the only option for traditional higher education institutions. All services had to be migrated to digital platforms, leading to a period of “emergency eLearning”. The full impact of this sudden shift to digital platforms on all cohorts of students is still uncertain. A measure of disruption to the normal student learning experience, especially for those attending traditional universities, was inevitable. Moreover, this disruption was varied depending on the University’s country and the country’s lockdown rules. This international, comparative, quantitative research project aimed to investigate and understand the higher education students’ perceptions of emergency eLearning during the first wave of COVID-19. Experiences of students at universities in three countries were evaluated in terms of four dimensions: 1) home learning environment, 2) engagement, 3) participation preference, and 4) impact on learning skills. The research revealed significant differences between the participating universities. The most important differences were in the ‘home learning environment’, followed by ‘engagement’ and the perception of ‘impact on learning skills’. The differences in the ‘home learning environment’ can be attributed to the differing economic and digital development of the surveyed countries: South Africa, Wales, and Hungary. Finally, different cultural backgrounds suggest a noticeable difference in student engagement, participation, and learning skills

Acute kidney injury in patients undergoing elective primary lower limb arthroplasty

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Abhi Punit for his contributions in data collection towards the above article Funding No funds, grants or other support was received.Open access via springer agreementPeer reviewedPublisher PD

Comparing Three Countries’ Higher Education Students’ Cyber Related Perceptions and Behaviours during COVID-19

In 2020, a global pandemic led to lockdowns, and subsequent social and business restrictions. These required overnight implementation of emergency measures to permit continued functioning of vital industries. Digital technologies and platforms made this switch feasible, but it also introduced several cyber related vulnerabilities, which students might not have known how to mitigate. For this study, the Global Cyber Security Index and the Cyber Risk literacy and education index were used to provide a cyber security context for each country. This research project—an international, cross-university, comparative, quantitative project—aimed to explore the risk attitudes and concerns, as well as protective behaviours adopted by, students at a South African, a Welsh and a Hungarian University, during the pandemic. This study’s findings align with the relative rankings of the Oliver Wyman Risk Literacy and Education Index for the countries in which the universities reside. This study revealed significant differences between the student behaviours of students within these universities. The most important differences were identified between students’ risk attitudes and concerns. It was also discovered that South African students reported having changed their protective online behaviours to the greatest extent, since the pandemic commenced. Recommendations are made suggesting that cyber security training and education, as well as improving the digital trust and confidence in digital platforms, are critical

‘Lockdown' : digital and emergency eLearning technologies - a student perspective

As the digitalization process has become more and more important in our daily lives, during recent decades e-commerce has greatly increased in popularity, becoming increasingly used, therefore representing an extremely convenient alternative to traditional stores. In order to develop and maintain profitable businesses, traders need accurate forecasts concerning their future sales, a very difficult task considering that these are influenced by a wide variety of factors. This paper proposes a novel e-commerce sales forecasting method that dynamically builds a Directed Acyclic Graph Neural Network (DAGNN) for Deep Learning architecture. This will allow for long-term, fine-grained forecasts of daily sales revenue, refined up to the level of product categories. The developed forecasting method provides the e-commerce store owner an accurate forecasting tool for predicting the sales of each category of products for up to three months ahead. The method offers a high degree of scalability and generalization capability due to the dynamically incremental way in which the constituent elements of the DAGNN's architecture are obtained. In addition, the proposed method achieves an efficient use of data by combining the numerous advantages of its constituent layers, registering very good performance metrics and processing times. The proposed method can be generalized and applied to forecast the sales for up to three months ahead in the case of other e-commerce stores, including large e-commerce businesses

Home and Online Management and Evaluation of Blood Pressure (HOME BP) using a digital intervention in poorly controlled hypertension: randomised controlled trial

Objective: The HOME BP (Home and Online Management and Evaluation of Blood Pressure) trial aimed to test a digital intervention for hypertension management in primary care by combining self-monitoring of blood pressure with guided self-management. Design: Unmasked randomised controlled trial with automated ascertainment of primary endpoint. Setting: 76 general practices in the United Kingdom. Participants: 622 people with treated but poorly controlled hypertension (>140/90 mm Hg) and access to the internet. Interventions: Participants were randomised by using a minimisation algorithm to self-monitoring of blood pressure with a digital intervention (305 participants) or usual care (routine hypertension care, with appointments and drug changes made at the discretion of the general practitioner; 317 participants). The digital intervention provided feedback of blood pressure results to patients and professionals with optional lifestyle advice and motivational support. Target blood pressure for hypertension, diabetes, and people aged 80 or older followed UK national guidelines. Main outcome measures: The primary outcome was the difference in systolic blood pressure (mean of second and third readings) after one year, adjusted for baseline blood pressure, blood pressure target, age, and practice, with multiple imputation for missing values. Results: After one year, data were available from 552 participants (88.6%) with imputation for the remaining 70 participants (11.4%). Mean blood pressure dropped from 151.7/86.4 to 138.4/80.2 mm Hg in the intervention group and from 151.6/85.3 to 141.8/79.8 mm Hg in the usual care group, giving a mean difference in systolic blood pressure of −3.4 mm Hg (95% confidence interval −6.1 to −0.8 mm Hg) and a mean difference in diastolic blood pressure of −0.5 mm Hg (−1.9 to 0.9 mm Hg). Results were comparable in the complete case analysis and adverse effects were similar between groups. Within trial costs showed an incremental cost effectiveness ratio of £11 ($15, €12; 95% confidence interval £6 to £29) per mm Hg reduction. Conclusions: The HOME BP digital intervention for the management of hypertension by using self-monitored blood pressure led to better control of systolic blood pressure after one year than usual care, with low incremental costs. Implementation in primary care will require integration into clinical workflows and consideration of people who are digitally excluded. Trial registration: ISRCTN13790648

Socializing One Health: an innovative strategy to investigate social and behavioral risks of emerging viral threats

In an effort to strengthen global capacity to prevent, detect, and control infectious diseases in animals and people, the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) PREDICT project funded development of regional, national, and local One Health capacities for early disease detection, rapid response, disease control, and risk reduction. From the outset, the EPT approach was inclusive of social science research methods designed to understand the contexts and behaviors of communities living and working at human-animal-environment interfaces considered high-risk for virus emergence. Using qualitative and quantitative approaches, PREDICT behavioral research aimed to identify and assess a range of socio-cultural behaviors that could be influential in zoonotic disease emergence, amplification, and transmission. This broad approach to behavioral risk characterization enabled us to identify and characterize human activities that could be linked to the transmission dynamics of new and emerging viruses. This paper provides a discussion of implementation of a social science approach within a zoonotic surveillance framework. We conducted in-depth ethnographic interviews and focus groups to better understand the individual- and community-level knowledge, attitudes, and practices that potentially put participants at risk for zoonotic disease transmission from the animals they live and work with, across 6 interface domains. When we asked highly-exposed individuals (ie. bushmeat hunters, wildlife or guano farmers) about the risk they perceived in their occupational activities, most did not perceive it to be risky, whether because it was normalized by years (or generations) of doing such an activity, or due to lack of information about potential risks. Integrating the social sciences allows investigations of the specific human activities that are hypothesized to drive disease emergence, amplification, and transmission, in order to better substantiate behavioral disease drivers, along with the social dimensions of infection and transmission dynamics. Understanding these dynamics is critical to achieving health security--the protection from threats to health-- which requires investments in both collective and individual health security. Involving behavioral sciences into zoonotic disease surveillance allowed us to push toward fuller community integration and engagement and toward dialogue and implementation of recommendations for disease prevention and improved health security

Immunological changes during space travel: A ground-based evaluation of the impact of Neutron Dose Rate on Plasma Cytokine levels in human whole blood cultures

: In 2020, a global pandemic led to lockdowns, and subsequent social and business restrictions. These required overnight implementation of emergency measures to permit continued functioning of vital industries. Digital technologies and platforms made this switch feasible, but it also introduced several cyber related vulnerabilities, which students might not have known how to mitigate. For this study, the Global Cyber Security Index and the Cyber Risk literacy and education index were used to provide a cyber security context for each country. This research project—an international, cross-university, comparative, quantitative project—aimed to explore the risk attitudes and concerns, as well as protective behaviours adopted by, students at a South African, a Welsh and a Hungarian University, during the pandemic. This study’s findings align with the relative rankings of the Oliver Wyman Risk Literacy and Education Index for the countries in which the universities reside. This study revealed significant differences between the student behaviours of students within these universities

Modeling Bioterrorism in the Livestock Sectors of NAFTA Members

Until two years ago, most citizens of Canada, the United States and Mexico experienced terrorism as a distant reality viewed from the safety of their living rooms. Today, North Americans encounter constant reminders of the aggravation and economic costs imposed on them by the now real threat of terrorism. The United States, the most obvious target for new terrorist activity, has responded by tightening its border security with all countries including its NAFTA partners.(2) Canada and Mexico joined the NAFTA to obtain preferred and more secure access to the United States market. The increased threat of terrorist activity in North America raises three crucial questions for NAFTA members. First, how real is a bioterrorism threat? Second, how can the United States maintain access to its market for its NAFTA partners and at the same time meet its legitimate security concerns? Third, what are the potential economic effects of a bioterrorism attack on North America? While it is generally assumed that the United States would be the primary target of a terrorist attack, Canada, Mexico or all three NAFTA countries could be targeted