Sociodemographic Factors as Predictors of Low Influenza Vaccination in Chicago, Illinois

Outbursts of seasonal influenza contribute to morbidity and mortality in the United States. Influenza is a contagious disease caused by influenza viruses. The main subtypes of the influenza virus are Type A and Type B. Influenza vaccines are among the most effective methods in preventing the spread of the influenza virus because they offer the best immune defense. However, health care providers face significant challenges due to low patient compliance with current vaccine recommendations and misinformation. Scholars have yet to expand and further explore the reasons for the gap in influenza vaccination between White individuals and minorities, such as the non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic populations. Following the social cognitive theory as a theoretical framework, the research questions for this study tested the potential association between sociodemographic factors that might predict the lack of flu vaccination in racial minorities living in Chicago, Illinois. A logistical regression and chi-square test were used to answer the research questions. The data analysis showed that, in Chicago, there is a statistically significant association between annual household income, age group, and flu vaccine refusal among racial minorities. This study contributed to filling the gap in the literature regarding the social and environmental factors associated with flu vaccination uptake in Hispanic and Non-Hispanic Black adults living in the United States. The potential positive social change implications include the insight into how household income and age could relate to health behaviors and flu vaccination hesitancy among Hispanic and Non-Hispanic Black adults living in the United States and apply this knowledge to future vaccination practice promotion activities

Zero-Level-Set Encoder for Neural Distance Fields

Neural shape representation generally refers to representing 3D geometry using neural networks, e.g., to compute a signed distance or occupancy value at a specific spatial position. Previous methods tend to rely on the auto-decoder paradigm, which often requires densely-sampled and accurate signed distances to be known during training and testing, as well as an additional optimization loop during inference. This introduces a lot of computational overhead, in addition to having to compute signed distances analytically, even during testing. In this paper, we present a novel encoder-decoder neural network for embedding 3D shapes in a single forward pass. Our architecture is based on a multi-scale hybrid system incorporating graph-based and voxel-based components, as well as a continuously differentiable decoder. Furthermore, the network is trained to solve the Eikonal equation and only requires knowledge of the zero-level set for training and inference. Additional volumetric samples can be generated on-the-fly, and incorporated in an unsupervised manner. This means that in contrast to most previous work, our network is able to output valid signed distance fields without explicit prior knowledge of non-zero distance values or shape occupancy. In other words, our network computes approximate solutions to the boundary-valued Eikonal equation. It also requires only a single forward pass during inference, instead of the common latent code optimization. We further propose a modification of the loss function in case that surface normals are not well defined, e.g., in the context of non-watertight surface-meshes and non-manifold geometry. We finally demonstrate the efficacy, generalizability and scalability of our method on datasets consisting of deforming 3D shapes, single class encoding and multiclass encoding, showcasing a wide range of possible applications

Risk perceptions of cyber-security and precautionary behaviour

A quantitative empirical online study examined a set of 16 security hazards on the Internet and two comparisons in 436 UK- and US students, measuring perceptions of risk and other risk dimensions. First, perceived risk was highest for identity theft, keylogger, cyber-bullying and social engineering. Second, consistent with existing theory, significant predictors of perceived risk were voluntariness, immediacy, catastrophic potential, dread, severity of consequences and control, as well as Internet experience and frequency of Internet use. Moreover, control was a significant predictor of precautionary behaviour. Methodological implications emphasise the need for non-aggregated analysis and practical implications emphasise risk communication to Internet users

Defending against Sybil Devices in Crowdsourced Mapping Services

Real-time crowdsourced maps such as Waze provide timely updates on traffic, congestion, accidents and points of interest. In this paper, we demonstrate how lack of strong location authentication allows creation of software-based {\em Sybil devices} that expose crowdsourced map systems to a variety of security and privacy attacks. Our experiments show that a single Sybil device with limited resources can cause havoc on Waze, reporting false congestion and accidents and automatically rerouting user traffic. More importantly, we describe techniques to generate Sybil devices at scale, creating armies of virtual vehicles capable of remotely tracking precise movements for large user populations while avoiding detection. We propose a new approach to defend against Sybil devices based on {\em co-location edges}, authenticated records that attest to the one-time physical co-location of a pair of devices. Over time, co-location edges combine to form large {\em proximity graphs} that attest to physical interactions between devices, allowing scalable detection of virtual vehicles. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach using large-scale simulations, and discuss how they can be used to dramatically reduce the impact of attacks against crowdsourced mapping services.Comment: Measure and integratio

Deciphering the Grand Village of the Illinois: A Preliminary Assessment of the Grand Village Research Project

On April 24, 1987, Thomas Emerson at the State Historic Preservation Office received a telephone call from a Chicago lawyer who wanted an answer to a simple question: Are there any laws that protect old Indian villages and graves that are on the National Register? Unfortunately, the answer was a simple “no.” At the time, Emerson did not suspect that this question would initiate a more than four-year struggle to save one of the most important historic sites in the country. The site, known variously as the Zimmerman site, the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia, Old Kaskaskia Village, the Grand Village of the Illinois, or simply llLS13, was purchased by developers who planned to build vacation homes on it. Eventually, after a private and public campaign that reached an international level, Governor James Thompson authorized the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency (IHPA) to seek condemnation of the property to bring it into public ownership. In April 1991, a final settlement was reached and the site was purchased by the state. It is currently under the administration of the IHPA and has been renamed the Grand Village of the Illinois State Historic Site. The Grand Village is the most important surviving village and burial site of the seventeenth-century Illinois Confederacy. In addition, it is the location of the initial French-Illinois contact and of the first Catholic mission in the Illinois Country. The site also contains materials that represent an unbroken sequence of late prehistoric, protohistoric, and Historic Indian cultural development from the ninth to the last quarter of the eighteenth century

Different forms of African cassava mosaic virus capsid protein within plants and virions

One geminiviral gene encodes the capsid protein (CP), which can appear as several bands after electrophoresis depending on virus and plant. African cassava mosaic virus-Nigeria CP in Nicotiana benthamiana, however, yielded one band (~ 30 kDa) in total protein extracts and purified virions, although its expression in yeast yielded two bands (~ 30, 32 kDa). Mass spectrometry of the complete protein and its tryptic fragments from virions is consistent with a cleaved start M1, acetylated S2, and partial phosphorylation at T12, S25 and S62. Mutants for additional potentially modified sites (N223A; C235A) were fully infectious and formed geminiparticles. Separation in triton acetic acid urea gels confirmed charge changes of the CP between plants and yeast indicating differential phosphorylation. If the CP gene alone was expressed in plants, multiple bands were observed like in yeast. A high turnover rate indicates that post-translational modifications promote CP decay probably via the ubiquitin-triggered proteasomal pathway

Absorption and birefringence study for reduced optical losses in diamond with high NV concentration

The use of diamond color centers such as the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center is increasingly enabling quantum sensing and computing applications. Novel concepts like cavity coupling and readout, laser threshold magnetometry and multi-pass geometries allow significantly improved sensitivity and performance via increased signals and strong light fields. Enabling material properties for these techniques and their further improvements are low optical material losses via optical absorption of signal light and low birefringence. Here we study systematically the behavior of absorption around 700 nm and birefringence with increasing nitrogen- and NV-doping, as well as their behavior during NV creation via diamond growth, electron beam irradiation and annealing treatments. Absorption correlates with increased nitrogen-doping yet substitutional nitrogen does not seem to be the direct absorber. Birefringence reduces with increasing nitrogen doping. We identify multiple crystal defect concentrations via absorption spectroscopy and their changes during the material processing steps and thus identify potential causes of absorption and birefringence as well as strategies to fabricate CVD diamonds with high NV density yet low absorption and low birefringence.Comment: Accepted by Philosophical Transactions A (DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2022.0314