Interconnected Community Research Articles

Resilience in interconnected community and formal health (and connected) systems

Enhancing the resilience of health systems to expected and unexpected shocks – from COVID-19 to the health impacts of climate change – is becoming a defining challenge of this century worldwide. To date, health system resilience research has focused on formal government health systems, yet emerging evidence points to the importance of families, communities and connected systems (such as disaster management, water, sanitation, social protection and gender disparities) that influence the health status of people, and health system functioning and capacities to respond to shocks. We argue that resilience capacities in both formal and community health systems, and connected systems, be considered in health system resilience conceptual frameworks, and that well-established literature on community resilience capacities from diverse disciplines can help frame research on community health system resilience.

Exploratory Analysis of Local Media across the Post-Pandemic Era: Between Glocality and Closeness

This study examines the role of local media in fostering a sense of community belonging among readers in the Ecuadorian context, focusing on how geographical coverage, news sources, and covered themes reinforce community identity. Through content analysis of 17 local media outlets and 6356 news pieces, we investigate how these elements cohesively contribute to the construction of an interconnected community. The findings indicate that predominantly local and regional coverage, along with reliance on primary sources within the community and the prevalence of topics related to politics, sports, and culture, play pivotal roles in creating a shared community fabric. By contextualizing the importance of “glocalization” in journalism, the study demonstrates how local media act as a mirror to community realities and aspirations, promoting a sense of intersubjectivity, adaptability, and civic engagement. This work underscores the critical importance of local media in representing the diversity of reality, facilitating civic participation, and strengthening the social fabric within the local context.

Covariance Matrix Estimation for High-Throughput Biomedical Data with Interconnected Communities

Estimating a covariance matrix is central to high-dimensional data analysis. Empirical analyses of high-dimensional biomedical data, including genomics, proteomics, microbiome, and neuroimaging, among others, consistently reveal strong modularity in the dependence patterns. In these analyses, intercorrelated high-dimensional biomedical features often form communities or modules that can be interconnected with others. While the interconnected community structure has been extensively studied in biomedical research (e.g., gene co-expression networks), its potential to assist in the estimation of covariance matrices remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we propose a procedure that leverages the commonly observed interconnected community structure in high-dimensional biomedical data to estimate large covariance and precision matrices. We derive the uniformly minimum variance unbiased estimators for covariance and precision matrices in closed forms and provide theoretical results on their asymptotic properties. Our proposed method enhances the accuracy of covariance- and precision-matrix estimation and demonstrates superior performance compared to the competing methods in both simulations and real data analyses.

Students Community App Using Flutter

The Student Community App is a comprehensive digital platform meticulously crafted to cater to the diverse needs of today's student population. At its core, the app seeks to create a vibrant and interconnected community within educational institutions, transcending the limitations of physical boundaries. A key feature of the app is its intuitive and user-friendly interface, ensuring accessibility for all students. Real-time messaging capabilities form the backbone of communication, enabling instant and direct connections between individuals or within groups. This facilitates seamless collaboration on academic projects, extracurricular activities, and even fosters casual social interactions. The app goes beyond traditional communication tools by incorporating dynamic group forums. These forums serve as virtual spaces where students can engage in in-depth discussions, share valuable insights, and seek or offer academic support. This not only enhances the learning experience but also cultivates a culture of knowledge-sharing and mutual growth

Impact of Effective Communication on Institutional Performance: Case Study in Higher Learning Institutions

Effective communication is crucial for institutional success as the globe becomes a smaller and more interconnected community. In recent times, Information technology has significantly improved how employees and employers interact with each other. Effective and efficient communication is achieved when institutions adopt new and faster technologies that improve the performance of employees. This research empirically tests the impact of effective communication on institutional performance in the educational sector, specifically in Bayelsa Medical University, Yenagoa, Bayelsa State. Questionnaires were administered to sample respondents which comprised of Principal officers, Deans, Directors, Heads of Departments, academic and senior non-academic staff. ANOVA and factor analysis were used to assess the structural relationship between the variables at a 5% level of significance.
 A total of 180 respondents (25 academic staff and 155 non-academic staff members) from fourteen (14) different departments/units participated in this study. The findings of this study revealed that effective communication via the studied variables has a significantly positive effect on employee performance Four key variables (Communication Process (t = 4.003, β = 1.786, p = 0.00); Culture/Climate (t = 3.316, β = 1.483, p = .001); Verbal and Non-verbal Cues (t = 1.990, β= .832, p = .047); and Communication Techniques (t = 5.092, β = 1.808, p = .000)) were determinants of employee effective communication in an institution. The findings revealed that effective communication process were significantly related to organizational performance.
 The researchers recommends that every institution should make an effort to incorporate effective communication into its management strategies, as doing so will help reduce organizational conflict, clear up misunderstandings, and improve cordial relationship between management and workforce.

Ecophrastic Weaving: Cecilia Vicuña’s Multidimensional Ecopoetics in Kon Kon

A word in the air lets you hear the image see the sound –Cecilia Vicuña, “K’isa/Alangó/A Vibratory Disorder” It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. –Annie Dillard, “Teaching a Stone to Talk” By all accounts, 2022 was a banner year for Chilean poet and multi-medium artist Cecilia Vicuña. From May until September, she had a celebrated solo exhibition, Spin, Spin Triangulene, at the Guggenheim in New York and an equally heralded multimedia Tate Modern exhibition, Brain Forest Quipu, which opened in October. Earlier in the year, along with the German sculptor Katharina Fritsch, Vicuña won the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Vicuña responded to this great honor in part by saying that she believes “art and consciousness can play a role in the urgent need to move away from violence and destruction, to save our environment from impeding collapse [ … ] we badly need to find a new way of being on Earth” (“Venice Biennale”). Her concern with the power of art to modify ontological preoccupations, especially as they relate to human-to-nonhuman interrelations, has long been part of her worldview. Perhaps this is what Cecilia Alemani, the curator for the 59th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale means when she expressed that, “Vicuña has travelled her own path, doggedly, humbly, and meticulously, anticipating many recent ecological and feminist debates and envisioning new personal and collective mythologies” (“Venice Biennale”). Clearly, many aspects of Vicuña’s oeuvre have anticipated the climate crisis by recognizing the importance of ecological thought in art and literature. In a 2013 interview, for example, she says that “toda la poesía pertenece a la tierra” [“all poetry belongs to the earth”] (Personal interview).1 She further explains that Indigenous poetry from around the world has always been “dedicado a escuchar al mundo suprahumano, al mundo más allá de lo humano” [“dedicated to listening to the suprahuman world, to the more-than-human world”]. Vicuña’s answer both rejects restrictions on poetry and accepts the idea that poetry always places humanity in a larger interconnected community and an ontological mesh of life. Her work speaks to an ecological or environmental reality by uncovering and listening to the human-to-nonhuman interrelationships of the world.

Mine land reclamation, mine land reuse, and vegetation cover change: An intriguing case study in Dartford, the United Kingdom

Dartford, a town in England, heavily relied on industrial production, particularly mining, which caused significant environmental pollution and geological damage. However, in recent years, several companies have collaborated under the guidance of the local authorities to reclaim the abandoned mine land in Dartford and develop it into homes, known as the Ebbsfleet Garden City project. This project is highly innovative as it not only focuses on environmental management but also provides potential economic benefits, employment opportunities, builds a sustainable and interconnected community, fosters urban development and brings people closer together. This paper presents a fascinating case that employs satellite imagery, statistical data, and Fractional Vegetation Cover (FVC) calculations to analyse the re-vegetation progress of Dartford and the development of the Ebbsfleet Garden City project. The findings indicate that Dartford has successfully reclaimed and re-vegetated the mine land, maintaining a high vegetation cover level while the Ebbsfleet Garden City project has advanced. This suggests that Dartford is committed to environmental management and sustainable development while pursuing construction projects.

The impact of care of the elderly certificates of added competence on family physician practice: results from a pan-Canadian multiple case study

BackgroundFamily physicians serve an important role in the care of older adults, and have variable levels of training and comfort navigating this complex patient population. The Care of the Elderly (COE) Certificate of Added Competence offered by The College of Family Physicians of Canada recognizes family physicians with advanced expertise in older adult healthcare. We explored how COE training and certification impacts primary care delivery to older patients, including factors that impact group practice.MethodsWe conducted a secondary analysis of multiple case study data to explore similarities and differences within and across cases. We defined cases as a practice or collective of family physicians working within a defined group of patients in an interconnected community. We analyzed semi-structured interview transcripts (n = 48) from six practice groups of family physicians across Canada using conventional (unconstrained, inductive) content analysis.ResultsWe identified similarities and differences in how COE family physicians function within their group practice and the broader healthcare system. In some cases, COE certifications increased patients’ access to geriatric resources by reducing travel and wait times. Some physicians observed minimal changes in their role or group practice after earning the COE designation, including continuing to largely function as a generalist. While family physicians tended to highly value their COE CAC, this designation was differentially recognized by others.ConclusionsOur findings highlight the impacts and limitations of COE training and certification, including an opportunity for COE family physicians to fill knowledge and practice gaps. As the number of older adults in Canada continues to grow and increasingly rely on primary care services, COE family physicians are uniquely positioned to strengthen the health system’s capacity to deliver specialized geriatric care.

1000 Hometown Heroes: Mobilising community social influencers for COVID-19 prevention, care and coping.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) created life‐disrupting stressors that disproportionately burden disadvantaged communities with devastating impacts that extend far beyond the burden of the disease itself, including joblessness, housing and food insecurity, educational system upheavals, isolation due to disrupted relationships, worsened mental health and substance use and violence. Socially interconnected community members are resources whose efforts can be mobilised to improve COVID‐19 coping within their social networks. This research examined the feasibility, acceptability, and reach of a social media‐based peer influencer intervention for COVID‐19 coping. Over a 9‐month period in 2020, the project enrolled 1253 social influencers in Milwaukee—primarily ethnic and racial minorities—who regularly received and passed along messages to members of their social networks that provided advice about COVID‐19 pandemic coping, economic survival, health protection, mental health, family needs, social justice and other impacts. Messages were shared by influencers with others over social media and also text messages, phone calls and conversations. Facebook social media tracking metrics objectively measured the community reach of social influencers' messages. Quantitative surveys and qualitative follow‐up interviews with a subset of influencers also measured the feasibility and acceptability of the intervention. Social media monitoring metrics showed that, by the end of the project, influencers' messages reached an average of 7978 unique individuals per week and had an average of 13,894 total views per week, with more than 140,000 total cumulative organic impressions. More than half of social influencers indicated that—beyond Facebook message sharing—they shared COVID‐19 prevention, care, and coping messages with social network members in conversations, phone calls and text messages. Social influencers reported that they valued having the opportunity to help community members to cope with pandemic stressors by conveying practical COVID‐19 coping advice.

Advancing Communication Infrastructure Theory: The Moderating Roles of Citizen Journalism Practice and Political Trust on Online Civic Participation

ABSTRACT The study integrates multiple theoretical perspectives of communication infrastructure, social capital, and citizen journalism to examine the interplay of interconnected community storytelling networks, social trust, and citizen contribution to the public sphere on civic participation. An analysis of nationwide survey data indicates that citizens’ integration into community storytelling network and citizen journalism practice alike contribute significantly to their civic activity. The findings reveal significant interactions between one’s integrated connection to storytelling network, their citizen journalism practice, and their political trust on online civic participation. Most notably, the three-way interactions suggest that the positive interaction between the integrated connection to storytelling network and citizen journalism practice is more pronounced among those who hold a high-level of political trust.

What’s in a Model? Shifting Multispecies Relationships in Sakha (Yakutia)

This paper explores continuities in multispecies relationships, expressed through art. It delineates these continuities through the study of a nineteenth-century model of a SakhaYhyakhcelebration. The indigenous Siberian Sakha people have experienced considerable transformation since the advent of Russian settlers. The story of theYhyakhmodel illustrates the alterations and continuities in Sakha experiences of multispecies community. It also shows how an interconnected community of human and non-human beings generates aesthetic expectations and affordances that contrast with those of a human-centric worldview.

F.M. Dostoevsky, L.N. Tolstoy on the relationship of personality, individual and society

The main subject of this article is the relationship of a human as a personality or as an individual and society in the artistic and philosophical creativity of F.M. Dostoevsky and L.N. Tolstoy. The main goal of this work is, in comparison with the structuralist approach, to analyze the main provisions of the approaches of F.M. Dostoevsky and L.N. Tolstoy, which touched upon the problem of the relationship of a human as a personality or as an individual and society. The main objectives of this article: to analyze how the concepts of the personality and the individual differ, and what is the correlation of the personality and the individual with society as a whole. Then it is determined what is the understanding of the individual and his purely functional role in the society of the structuralist approach. Finally, the understanding of a person as a unique personality, created in the image and likeness of God in the works of F.M. Dostoevsky and L.N. Tolstoy. It is determined what is the advantage of such an existential-personalist approach of two Russian thinkers over the structuralist direction and its approach to the individual as just a "cog" of a systemically-functionally regulated society. So, as shown in the article, structuralism presupposes the domination of the general, the whole over the individual, the particular and grades a human as a personality, turning him into only an atomic social individual. In contradiction to structuralism, F.M. Dostoevsky and L.N. Tolstoy develop an approach to man as a person and offer an original model of society as an interconnected community of personalities. As the study proves, thinkers also influenced the personalist philosophy of the 20th century, and their approach as a whole allows a human to realize himself as a genuine, independent personality, and not as an individual governed by a social system, enslaved by the society.

Wampum: A Living Tradition

This essay is the result of a collaborative effort between the Hodinöhsö:ni’ (or Haudenosaunee, “People of the Longhouse”), for a long time called Iroquois, and the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac. The history of the relationship between museums and Indigenous people has been fraught with misunderstanding and misconception. For Indigenous people, traditional knowledge is a lens through which an exhibit or even an object is seen. For some Indigenous nations, like the Hodinöhsö:ni’, the Knowledge Bearers rely on a strong, codified, unbroken tradition of transmitting traditional knowledge, core values, practices, and beliefs to the next generation. Because of this, the cultural core of the Hodinöhsö:ni’ people has remained intact over the centuries. Individuals among the Hodinöhsö:ni’ have emerged — both through traditional roles and through individual determination — who have a complete understanding of the Hodinöhsö:ni’ world view, traditional culture, and history. The addition of historical research, and the emergence of an interconnected community of research and study have bolstered the traditional oral history. When the blending of academic study with the older traditional messages occurs, the reader can begin to glimpse a future in which the sum of that knowledge benefits all.

Research on Operation Strategy of Integrated Energy System in Electricity-Gas Interconnected Community Based on Two-Master and One-Slave Game

Research on Operation Strategy of Integrated Energy System in Electricity-Gas Interconnected Community Based on Two-Master and One-Slave Game

Speculating on the liberal arts: Exploring possible futures for humanities education

The article draws on concepts from speculative design to explore an alternative educational group existing outside the boundaries of an accredited university. Inspired by the imaginative approach of speculative design, I propose a small-scale reading and discussion group as a pathway to explore possible futures open to aspects of humanities education. The concept aims to reposition elements of the humanities from within the degree-granting Canadian university space to engage the wider public through a network meant to ideally foster an interconnected community of learners. This rhizomatic network would provide avenues for those without the means, access, or desire to pursue post-secondary education in the humanities to engage in questions that are relevant to their lived experience. I use an inquiry-based model of learning to explore probable, plausible, and preferable futures for liberal arts education as a way to challenge some current modes of thinking and provoke further discussion and research.

The Țigani Community Adaptability to Changes in Rural Romania and the COVID-19 Impact.

Romanian rural villages are struggling to survive present times when youngsters leave for a better life in the city while elders work the land like a hundred years ago. Our paper integrates human environments research with public health preparedness, presenting the Țigani (Gypsy/Roma) ethnic group from rural Romania as an example to the world. The future security of mankind will require a new understanding of the human place in its environment. That will lead to a new society, not the most powerful or intelligent, but the one that is more adaptable to changes, with sensitive and interconnected community members. Therefore, the Țigani ethnic group that fought for its rights and flourished despite unfavorable odds, including the recent COVID-19 pandemic, represents the best example for a new world that prioritizes humans, promotes health and wellbeing, facilitating innovation and transformative networks environmental integration. This research attempts to quantify the Țigani′s unique attributes that helped their communities survive and made them more adaptive to change. Always marginalized, they identified the other ethnic groups’ weaknesses to penetrate the villages and learned to use the smartphone apps to communicate, for their trades, coppersmith, metal roof tiles and drainage systems. Our research was based on Geographical Information System, Microsoft Power Bi analytics data visualization tools and statistical analysis with SPSS V20 to demonstrate what enables their flourishing and what resistance they face locally. We argue that the Țigani′s intense social cooperation, strong sense of family, community and mutual assistance helped them to fight COVID-19, generating their significant adaptability to the societal changes and their power to keep intact their cultural identity. The results show how the constant growing Țigani population changed and may change Romania′s rural environments in the future.

Novel methods of teaching psychiatry to medical and postgraduate students.

Global burden of mental illness remains at an all-time high and provision of timely good quality care is a challenge globally. Current methods of medical and post-graduate education in psychiatry worldwide have been inadequate in treating those with mental illness. Enormous gaps exist in provision of high-quality teaching, particularly in poorer countries with many having no access to ongoing teaching and training. Technology and changes to curriculum design have transformed student experiences and highlighted the value of online learning. There are many models to consider from and we describe the development process for these, which also highlight why some can be superior to classroom-based learning. New innovations have significantly enhanced engagement and reach thereby bringing students across the globe into an interconnected community and putting them in touch with world experts. Although some of these options may be expensive, many can be made affordable and accessible. It is possible to use innovations in online education to ensure high-quality teaching is available globally. A high touch model may be suitable when resources permit, and otherwise low touch scalable models provide options for increasing reach. Together, these models provide optimism for improving standards of global psychiatric training.

Facilitating Recovery through Building an Interconnected Community: From Awareness to Action

This article describes stress that many Asian international students experience during their adjustment to U.S. universities. Reflecting on personal experiences that contributed to deeper self-understanding, I explain cultural incompatibilities that cause this stress, the negative impact that the stress has on mental health, and the lack of support systems that exacerbate mental health complications. In highlighting the prioritization of the mental health in Asian international students and initiating community outreach programs, I demonstrate that when Asian international students participate in creating an interconnected community, they have the potential to thrive despite the stressful adjustment period.

Mitochondrial Dynamics: Molecular Mechanisms, Related Primary Mitochondrial Disorders and Therapeutic Approaches.

Mitochondria do not exist as individual entities in the cell—conversely, they constitute an interconnected community governed by the constant and opposite process of fission and fusion. The mitochondrial fission leads to the formation of smaller mitochondria, promoting the biogenesis of new organelles. On the other hand, following the fusion process, mitochondria appear as longer and interconnected tubules, which enhance the communication with other organelles. Both fission and fusion are carried out by a small number of highly conserved guanosine triphosphatase proteins and their interactors. Disruption of this equilibrium has been associated with several pathological conditions, ranging from cancer to neurodegeneration, and mutations in genes involved in mitochondrial fission and fusion have been reported to be the cause of a subset of neurogenetic disorders.

ICN: Extracting interconnected communities in gene Co-expression networks.

The analysis of gene co-expression network (GCN) is critical in examining the gene-gene interactions and learning the underlying complex yet highly organized gene regulatory mechanisms. Numerous clustering methods have been developed to detect communities of co-expressed genes in the large network. The assumed independent community structure, however, can be oversimplified and may not adequately characterize the complex biological processes. We develop a new computational package to extract interconnected communities from gene co-expression network. We consider a pair of communities be interconnected if a subset of genes from one community is correlated with a subset of genes from another community. The interconnected community structure is more flexible and provides a better fit to the empirical co-expression matrix. To overcome the computational challenges, we develop efficient algorithms by leveraging advanced graph norm shrinkage approach. We validate and show the advantage of our method by extensive simulation studies. We then apply our interconnected community detection method to an RNA-seq data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) study and identify essential interacting biological pathways related to the immune evasion mechanism of tumor cells. The software is available at Github: https://github.com/qwu1221/ICN and Figshare: https://figshare.com/articles/software/ICN-package/13229093. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.