Adapting to Provide Innovative In-Person Extension Programming During a Pandemic

The success of Extension programming is often predicated on in-person events, and numerous Extension programs are preplanned and scheduled well in advance of the anticipated programming date. In-person events help foster community, collaboration, and the human connection within our society. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it is critical for Extension to be adaptive and innovative and react proactively to worldwide, nationwide, and local authorities\u27 and health professionals\u27 recommendations to protect clientele, staff, and volunteers. Extension educators can tailor in-person programs to align with health professionals\u27 recommendations by using creative, innovative, and adaptive measures. We describe two such programs

Know the Land, Save the Land: Apparel Design for Extension Education

We leveraged collaboration by a county Extension office, apparel design undergraduate students, and university faculty to develop an innovative educational product to capture the attention of new audiences for invasive plant education programming. Nationwide press highlighted the project—titled Know the Land, Save the Land—generating national interest and sales. We achieved our goal of using innovative educational materials to reach new audiences for Extension education. As well, the project is fiscally self-sustaining and continues to support experiential student learning opportunities for apparel design students through future product releases

vPlanSim: An Open Source Graphical Interface for the Visualisation and Simulation of AI Systems

We introduce vPlanSim, an open source tool to aid in AI PDDL development. This tool is primarily aimed at researchers and developers who need a visual representation of their planning problem so that they can make useful insights into the performance of their system, and also to naturally convey their system to others. It is an open-source tool which allows a user to quickly and easily visualise a target environment to generate the problem files and also to visualise a plan. It is particularly well suited to spatial planning problems. This paper will demonstrate vPlanSim on 2D and 3D planning problems. vPlanSim is based on a small and carefully considered set of dependencies such as VTK and PyQt. It can be set up on different platforms and compiled from source with minimal effort. The code is and maintained via a clear code review mechanism. We welcome contributions from the open-source community

Exploring Service Provider Perceptions of Treatment Barriers Facing Black, Non-Gay-Identified MSMW

Non-gay-identified men who have sex with men and women and who use alcohol and other drugs are a vulnerable population. Little is known about health and medical service provider interaction with these underserved clients. This article presents a thematic analysis of two focus groups undertaken with social and medical service providers regarding the needs of non-gay-identified men who have sex with men and women. Four emergent themes (labeling, constructions of masculinity, HIV/AIDS awareness, and treatment success) illustrate perceived barriers to HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, as well as treatment success. Implications for policy, practice, and future research are discussed

Incubation Periods of Yellow Fever Virus

Yellow fever virus is a global health threat due to its endemicity in parts of Africa and South America where human infections occur in residents and travelers. To understand yellow fever dynamics, it is critical to characterize the incubation periods of the virus in vector mosquitoes and humans. Here, we compare four statistical models of the yellow fever incubation periods fitted with historical data. The extrinsic incubation period in the urban vector Aedes aegypti was best characterized with a temperature-dependent Weibull model with a median of 10 days at 25°C (middle 95% = 2.0–37 days). The intrinsic incubation period, fitted with a log-normal model, had a median of 4.3 days (middle 95% = 2.3–8.6 days). These estimates and their associated statistical models provide a quantitative basis to assist in exposure assessments, model potential outbreaks, and evaluate the effectiveness of public health interventions