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The Coexistence of Infection Spread Patterns in the Global Dynamics of COVID-19 Dissemination

Abstract The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, commonly referred to as COVID-19, triggered the global pandemic.Although the nature of the international spread of infection is an important issue,extracting diffusion networks from observations is challenging because of its inherent complexity.In this paper, we investigate the process of infection worldwide, including time delays, based on global infection case data collected from January 3, 2020 to December 31, 2022.We approach the data with a complex Hilbert principal component analysis, which can consider not only the concurrent relationships between elements, but also the leading and lagging relationships.Then, we examine the interactions among countries by considering six factors: geography, population, GDP, stringency of countermeasures, vaccination rates, and government type.The results show two primary trends occurring in 2020 and in 2021-2022and they interchange with each other.Specifically, European, highly populated, and democratic countries, i.e., countries with high mobility rates, show leading trends in 2020.In contrast, African and nondemocratic countries show leading trends in 2021-2022, followed by countries with high vaccination rates and advanced countermeasures.The results reveal that, although factors that increase infection risk lead to certain trends at the beginning of the pandemic,these trends dynamically changes over time due to socioeconomic factors, especially the introduction of countermeasures.The findings suggest that international efforts to promote countermeasures in developing countries can contribute to pandemic containment.

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Vaccine Hesitancy and Susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 Misinformation in Japanese Youth: The Contribution of Personality Traits and National Identity.

During the pandemic, the Japanese government drew upon the cultural concept of jishuku, or personal self-constraint, requesting that individuals accept responsibility for their behaviors and consider minimizing the potential negative impact on others. While the jishuku approach to pandemic management rests upon the established and persuasive influence of cultural norms, variability in adherence can be expected according to age. This article documents an investigation into factors impacting vaccine hesitancy and susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 misinformation among Japanese youth. The point of departure is the belief that attitudes and behaviors, such as those underpinning the jishuku approach to pandemic management, arise from within a relational framework. Therefore, developmental characteristics, such as personality traits, and in-group affinity attachments, such as facets of national identity, can be expected to function as predictors of health attitudes and behaviors. The tested structural model of hypothesized interactions accounted for 14% of the observed variance in vaccine hesitancy and 20% in susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 misinformation. With the inclusion of gender, political ideology, and trust in government SARS-CoV-2 response as control variables, the respecified model increased the amount of variance observed in vaccine hesitancy to 30% and to 25% in susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 misinformation. The outcomes are discussed in relation to the communication of coherent public health discourse relative to personality traits and facets of national identity.

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Assessment of energy consumption for information flow control protocols in IoT devices

In the IoT (Internet of Things), millions of devices are interconnected and devices support too poor computation resources to install enough security functions to protect from malicious accesses. Hence, devices have to be supported with access control mechanisms. The CBAC (Capability-Based Access Control) model is most useful to be as access control model for IoT devices because it is sufficient for each device to just check the capability of each access request. However, illegal and late information flows among devices and subjects occur. Types of IFC (Information Flow Control) protocols like the OI and TBOI protocols to prevent illegal and late types of information flows are proposed in our previous studies. A secure device supports the CBAC model and the IFC protocols. First, an EC (Energy Consumption) model is proposed to show how a secure device consumes the electric energy in this paper. By using the EC model, the IFC protocols are evaluated in terms of the energy consumed by secure devices. A secure device mostly consumes energy to check capability tokens of each access request. In the simulation, the energy consumed by secure devices to process access requests can be reduced by selecting only tokens required. About 69% and 73% of energy in the OI and TBOI protocols can be reduced by adopting the CTS (Capability Token Selection) algorithms, respectively.

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