Dimensions of technophobia – Technophilia among senior staff members of the University of Calabar, Nigeria

The fact that the world is now a global village has become a cliché, yet many members of this village seem to be reluctant to get involved with Information & Communication Technology (ICT), the fastest and best means of communication in this world comity. The study therefore ascertained the level of ICT interaction among senior staff members of the University of Calabar (UNICAL) and thereby determined their levels of technophobia. Using the ex-post facto design, 4 hypotheses were generated. Through stratified random sampling of 9 faculties/division comprising a total population of 1894, 290 respondents were sampled. Data were collected using a questionnaire consisting of BackgroundInformation Scale (BIS) and Level of Interaction with Modern Information & Technology Scale (LIWICTS). Result indicates that there is a significant level of technophobia among senior staff members of UNICAL. It was recommended among other things that university staff members either accept technological changes and move with the times or remain clogs in the wheel of progress and perpetual technophobes

Community acceptance of tsetse control baits: a qualitative study in Arua District, North West Uganda.

BACKGROUND There is renewed vigour in efforts to eliminate neglected tropical diseases including sleeping sickness (human African trypanosomiasis or HAT), including attempts to develop more cost-effective methods of tsetse control. In the West Nile region of Uganda, newly designed insecticide-treated targets are being deployed over an area of ∼500 km(2). The operational area covers villages where tsetse control has not been conducted previously. The effectiveness of the targets will depend, in part, on their acceptance by the local community. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We assessed knowledge, perceptions and acceptance of tsetse baits (traps, targets) in villages where they had or had not been used previously. We conducted sixteen focus group discussions with male and female participants in eight villages across Arua District. Discussions were audio recorded, translated and transcribed. We used thematic analysis to compare the views of both groups and identify salient themes. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE Despite the villages being less than 10 km apart, community members perceived deployed baits very differently. Villagers who had never seen traps before expressed fear, anxiety and panic when they first encountered them. This was related to associations with witchcraft and "ghosts from the river" which are traditionally linked with physical or mental illness, death and misfortune. By contrast, villagers living in areas where traps had been used previously had positive attitudes towards them and were fully aware of their purpose and benefits. The latter group reported that they had similar negative perceptions when tsetse control interventions first started a decade ago. Our results suggest that despite their proximity, acceptance of traps varies markedly between villages and this is related to the duration of experience with tsetse control programs. The success of community-based interventions against tsetse will therefore depend on early engagements with communities and carefully designed sensitization campaigns that reach all communities, especially those living in areas new to such interventions

The Perfect Glass Paradigm: Disordered Hyperuniform Glasses Down to Absolute Zero

Rapid cooling of liquids below a certain temperature range can result in a transition to glassy states. The traditional understanding of glasses includes their thermodynamic metastability with respect to crystals. However, here we present specific examples of interactions that eliminate the possibilities of crystalline and quasicrystalline phases, while creating mechanically stable amorphous glasses down to absolute zero temperature. We show that this can be accomplished by introducing a new ideal state of matter called a "perfect glass." A perfect glass represents a soft-interaction analog of the maximally random jammed (MRJ) packings of hard particles. These latter states can be regarded as the epitome of a glass since they are out of equilibrium, maximally disordered, hyperuniform, mechanically rigid with infinite bulk and shear moduli, and can never crystallize due to configuration-space trapping. Our model perfect glass utilizes two-, three-, and four-body soft interactions while simultaneously retaining the salient attributes of the MRJ state. These models constitute a theoretical proof of concept for perfect glasses and broaden our fundamental understanding of glass physics. A novel feature of equilibrium systems of identical particles interacting with the perfect-glass potential at positive temperature is that they have a non-relativistic speed of sound that is infinite

BJS commission on surgery and perioperative care post-COVID-19

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was declared a pandemic by the WHO on 11 March 2020 and global surgical practice was compromised. This Commission aimed to document and reflect on the changes seen in the surgical environment during the pandemic, by reviewing colleagues' experiences and published evidence