Minimal Restrictions Research Articles

Future of sustainable renewable-based energy systems in smart city industry: Interruptible load scheduling perspective

As the industrial and household loads continue to grow in smart cities, power supply and usage balance is getting more challenging. The increase in supply-side energy production is one method of alleviating peak demand proposed by a few investigations. As peak loads last for a short time, additional installations might be required. In addition, facilities that store energy can be used to reduce peak demand. As a consequence of the previous investigation, interruptible load regulation was not taken into account in optimizing system performance. The regulation of interruptible loads can greatly reduce system peak loads in smart city and within the concept of microgrids (MGs). The study proposes an interruptible load scheduling (ILS) scheme that considers consumer subsidy rates with the goal of reducing the peak load of the MG and its operating prices. To this end, a digital twin is developed in which the consumer interruption load time and minimal per-day load decrease restrictions have been completely met in the scheme. The ILS model is solved using a combination of the Min-Conflict Algorithm and the Gray Wolf Optimization Algorithm. Furthermore, simulations demonstrate the efficiency of the suggested algorithm and the show the substantial benefits of the scheme in reducing peak loads and operating prices in smart cities.

Are COVID-19 lockdowns associated with a change in sexual desire? Results from an online survey of Australian women

ABSTRACT In early 2020, the Australian government implemented lockdown restrictions to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Our study aims to investigate the impact of lockdowns on sexual desire and enjoyment of sex among Australian women. We conducted an online survey in August 2020 when Victoria was in strict lockdown, but all other states/territories had minimal restrictions. Here, we report on responses from female participants aged ≥18 years. Respondents were asked whether COVID-19 had impacted their desire and/or enjoyment of sex (yes/no). Those who responded “yes” were asked to elaborate in a free-text question. Factors associated with desire were investigated using the chi-square test. Conventional content analysis was used to explore free-text responses. Of the 622 participants, 44.1% reported COVID-19 related impacts on their sexual desire. Women living in Victoria, who were not heterosexual, and whose employment was negatively affected by lockdown were all more likely to report an impact on their sexual desire. Free-text comments revealed that mental health, living arrangements, and a reduced ability to meet with sexual partners were key reasons behind these impacts. The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown measures clearly impacted the desire and enjoyment of sex for many women, important factors of people’s relationships, health, and wellbeing.

Mobile Device-Based Video Screening for Infant Head Lag: An Exploratory Study.

Video-based automatic motion analysis has been employed to identify infant motor development delays. To overcome the limitations of lab-recorded images and training datasets, this study aimed to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) model using videos taken by mobile phone to assess infants' motor skills. A total of 270 videos of 41 high-risk infants were taken by parents using a mobile device. Based on the Pull to Sit (PTS) levels from the Hammersmith Motor Evaluation, we set motor skills assessments. The videos included 84 level 0, 106 level 1, and 80 level 3 recordings. We used whole-body pose estimation and three-dimensional transformation with a fuzzy-based approach to develop an AI model. The model was trained with two types of vectors: whole-body skeleton and key points with domain knowledge. The average accuracies of the whole-body skeleton and key point models for level 0 were 77.667% and 88.062%, respectively. The Area Under the ROC curve (AUC) of the whole-body skeleton and key point models for level 3 were 96.049% and 94.333% respectively. An AI model with minimal environmental restrictions can provide a family-centered developmental delay screen and enable the remote monitoring of infants requiring intervention.

Post-COVID Reflections and Practice from the Oral Surgeon’s Perspective


 Introduction
 Globally, the post-COVID era has afforded practitioners the opportunity to evaluate the quality assurance measures for continued safe service delivery. The preventive measures against COVID-19 have been relaxed and most intense care units and hospital bed spaces dedicated to the management of COVID-19 cases have been relaxed or, in some places, closed.
 Methods
 The study was conceptualized as a narrative review of focal literature that focused on the COVID-19 and its impact on the practice of oral and maxillofacial surgery and dentistry. The study built a synthesis to describe the post-COVID era and the reflections on dental practice and oral and maxillofacial surgery. Literature searches were carried out using PubMed and Google Scholar with no search filters, using Boolean Logic ‘‘AND’’ and ‘‘OR.’’ Searches of the literature cited by eligible studies were also performed.
 Expert opinion
 There is the assumption that all trainers and trainees have been vaccinated and less at risk of contracting COVID-19 and Oral and Maxillofacial Surgical training has returned to the pre-COVID approach where physical contact and bedside teachings are no longer restricted. All specialties of dentistry conduct training programs with minimal restrictions on physical contact and one-one interactions between trainers and trainees. 
 Keywords: Coronavirus, WHO, Aerosols, Patient services, Training, Post-COVID

Automatic knowledge generation for a persuasion dialogue system with enthymemes

Persuasion dialogues in multi-agent systems are required in situations in which agents debate to defend their viewpoint on a certain topic. In this work, we introduce a dialogue system for persuasion dialogues in which participants can exchange and complete enthymemes using structured argumentation as the underlying knowledge representation formalism. In our approach, the dialogue system provides the means to create arguments from enthymemes by generating assumptions based solely on the enthymeme's structure. Then, arguments are used to determine the dialectical status of the dialogue. We prove that under minimal restrictions, agents involved in a persuasion dialogue can reach an agreement successfully, and they can acquire knowledge such that their mental model is consistent with the outcome of the dialogue.

Prophylactic cranial irradiation in small cell lung cancer patients in the era of magnetic resonance imaging: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

e20636 Background: Patients with small cell lung cancer (SCLC) are at a particularly high risk for the development of brain metastases. Current guidelines recommend prophylactic cranial irradiation (PCI) for these patients to prevent brain metastases and prolong overall survival (OS), although the clinical evidence for recommendations stems from an era without routine use of brain imaging. We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis of all available studies reporting on PCI for SCLC patients with minimal inclusion restrictions to assesses the efficacy of PCI in patients with limited disease (LD) and extensive disease (ED) SCLC and focus on the impact of routine brain imaging. Methods: A literature search for studies reporting on PCI in SCLC patients performed in EMBASE, MEDLINE, CENTRAL, and grey literature sources identified 4,783 studies. Random-effects meta-analyses pooled hazard ratios (HR) for overall survival (OS) between PCI and no intervention groups. Results: 208 individual studies reported on outcomes related to PCI with 175 studies assessing survival differences associated with PCI, and 87 of these being amenable to meta-analysis. The majority (n = 79) were retrospective cohort studies. PCI was associated with improved OS in all SCLC patients (HR 0.60; 95% CI 0.55-0.65; n = 87 studies; n = 50,339 patients; I2= 77%), as well as in cohorts exclusively consisting of LD patients (HR 0.60; 95% CI 0.54-0.66; n = 58 studies; n = 22,417 patients; I2= 76%) or ED patients (HR 0.63; 95% CI 0.53-0.75; n = 23 studies; n = 24,997; I2= 75%). Only eight studies confirmed absence of IMD at restaging using magnetic resonance imaging in all patients and found OS no longer to be in favour of PCI (HR 0.75; 95% CI 0.50-1.12; n = 1,318 patients; I2= 77%). Pooled OS from randomized controlled trials was not associated with PCI (HR 0.88; 95% CI 0.65-1.12; n = 5 studies; n = 925 patients; I2= 62.5%). Among studies not amenable to meta-analysis for OS, 4 radiographically confirmed absence of IMD, but none found OS to be in favour of PCI. Conclusions: Administration of PCI is associated with a significant OS benefit, but not when considering studies that radiographically confirmed absence of IMD at restaging or randomized controlled trials, suggesting that patient selection may be contributing to this observation.

Survey of colleges and schools of pharmacy to determine restrictions for teaching, research, and advocacy related to contraception

IntroductionThe pharmacist's role in reproductive health is evolving. Since 46 states allow providers to refuse to provide reproductive health services, it is important to consider whether learning is impacted by institution restrictions on contraception teaching, advocacy, and research. MethodsAn electronic survey was emailed to deans of all pharmacy schools on the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy Institutional Membership list with a request to share with faculty teaching women's health content within their curriculum. The survey collected information about contraception teaching, research, and advocacy. ResultsOf 145 schools contacted, 39 (27%) provided complete responses. Of these, 22 (56%) were public, not religiously-affiliated, seven (18%) were private, not religiously-affiliated, six (15%) were private, currently religiously-affiliated, and four were (10%) private, historically religiously-affiliated. All respondents taught hormonal contraception in the required curriculum and 15 (39%) taught miscarriage management/abortifacients. None reported restrictions on contraception teaching or research. One respondent cited an advocacy restriction for contraception methods due to violation of the school's beliefs, and another cited an advocacy restriction for miscarriage management/abortifacients. Respondents noted students expressed ethical questions/concerns about refusing to dispense contraception (59%), dispensing certain contraceptives (54%), dispensing to minors (46%), and dispensing all contraceptives (21%). Additionally, respondents reported pharmacists/faculty expressed ethical questions/concerns about refusing to dispense contraception (31%), dispensing to minors (21%), dispensing certain contraceptives (15%), and all contraceptives (13%). ConclusionsOverall, respondents reported no restrictions in contraception teaching and scholarship and minimal advocacy restrictions. Faculty should consider ethical questions/concerns from students, faculty, and pharmacists when teaching this material.

AUKUS: The Regulation of the Ocean and the Legal Dangers of Working Together

Abstract On 16 September 2021, the leaders of Australia, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US), announced the AUKUS arrangement, a security agreement which provides a framework for nuclear-powered submarine technology to be shared by the US and the UK with Australia, as well as other forms of new military technology. This article explores the legal im-plications of this alliance and the increase in technological sharing and maritime cooperation it promises. It first provides an overview of the AUKUS arrangement, situating it within the long history of cooperation be-tween these three countries. It then considers how international law regu-lates the sharing of maritime military technology, contrasting the significant constraints on sharing nuclear technology with the minimal restrictions on sharing non-nuclear technology. Lastly, the legal implications of States working closely together on the ocean are addressed. While there might be military and strategic advantages to this close collaboration, when and how States might be complicit in the international wrongs of partner States and the challenge that can be posed by legal interoperability are explored.

An Analysis of Sexual Comments on Social Media: Men's Comments On Women's Twitter Posts

This research aimed to analyze the sexual comments made by men on women’s posts on Twitter. During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an increase in the use of social media Twitter makes it easier for individuals to communicate with people they know and to interact with other users with minimal restrictions. Twitter allows its users to upload selfies and allows other users to comment on those pictures. This research analyzed sexual comments on @lucintaluna and @dododid selfies during 2021. The authors found three major themes in the comments using Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis method. They were calling the women beautiful, objectifying the women and expressing stigmas and stereotypes. Through this research, the authors also found that online-based gender violence can be experienced by anyone in various forms.
 Keywords: Pandemic covid-19, Gender Violence, Social Media, Twitter, Critical Discourse Analysis

An analysis of key stakeholder policy perspectives in the proposed e-cigarette regulations in New Zealand.

The use of e-cigarettes is increasing; New Zealand (NZ) has witnessed a rapid rise in consumption. Policymakers face a challenge to balance the impacts of regulation on those who use e-cigarettes as a smoking cessation tool while protecting people who do not smoke from the harms of e-cigarette use, particularly young people. Previous research has demonstrated varying perspectives on e-cigarette regulation according to different stakeholders and interest groups. This study examined key stakeholders' positions on the drafted legislation to regulate e-cigarettes in NZ. Using written submissions made during public consultation in 2020, we conducted a content analysis to determine levels of support for e-cigarette regulations. Submissions made by the e-cigarette industry and the health sector were included for analysis. The tobacco industry is heavily invested in ensuring that e-cigarettes continue to be promoted and available in NZ with minimal restrictions. On the contrary, health organisations supported the introduction of regulations to reduce marketing to, and use of e-cigarettes by youth and people who do not smoke. The industry opposes restrictions using similar approaches employed against tobacco control measures. Despite perceptions of division, the health sector is generally unified in support of e-cigarette restrictions. SO WHAT?: Policymakers must protect public health policies from commercial interests and be cautious of opposition framed as public health concerns.

What constitutes equitable data sharing in global health research? A scoping review of the literature on low-income and middle-income country stakeholders’ perspectives

IntroductionDespite growing consensus on the need for equitable data sharing, there has been very limited discussion about what this should entail in practice. As a matter of procedural fairness and...

Legitimate aim in the implementation of measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus disease

The acute respiratory disease COVID-19 has caused restrictions on human rights not seen since the end of the Second World War. Restrictive measures aimed at preventing the spread of the coronavirus disease have been introduced almost all over the world. However, like any restrictions on human rights, such measures must meet the requirements of the principle of proportionality. The principle of proportionality provides for three main criteria for restrictions to be proportionate: they must be provided for by law, have a legitimate purpose and be proportional «stricto sensu». The paper is devoted to consideration of both the general goal of all restrictive measures and individual goals of specific restrictions. Having analyzed the issue of the existence of a legitimate goal of the implementation of measures aimed at preventing the spread of the coronavirus disease, we established the existence of a goal in the form of protecting the life and health of the population. Having investigated the legitimacy of human rights restrictions related to measures aimed at preventing the spread of the coronavirus disease, it can be concluded that preventing the spread of COVID-19 and ensuring the readiness of health care facilities to provide medical assistance to patients with acute respiratory disease COVID-19, were quite important targets in the fight against the coronavirus infection. However, due to a significant period of time after the declaration of a pandemic, such goals can only be the basis for minimal restrictions in specific critical situations. Some measures aimed at preventing the spread of the coronavirus disease introduced by Resolution No. 255 did not have a legitimate purpose at all, and therefore they cannot be recognized as proportionate restrictions on human rights.

Implicit propagation of directly addressed grids in lattice Boltzmann methods

SummaryLattice Boltzmann methods (LBM) are well suited to highly parallel computational fluid dynamics simulations due to their separability into a perfectly parallel collision step and a propagation step that only communicates within a local neighborhood. The implementation of the propagation step provides constraints for the maximum possible bandwidth‐limited performance, memory layout and usage of vector instructions. This article revisits and extends the work on implicit propagation on directly addressed grids started by A‐A and its shift‐swap‐streaming (SSS) formulation by reconsidering them as transformations of the underlying space filling curve. In this work, a new periodic shift (PS) pattern is proposed that imposes minimal restrictions on the implementation of collision operators and utilizes virtual memory mapping to provide consistent performance across a range of targets. Various implementation approaches as well as time dependency and performance anisotropy are discussed. Benchmark results for SSS and PS on SIMD CPUs including Intel Xeon Phi as well as Nvidia GPUs are provided. Finally, the application of PS as the propagation pattern of the open source LBM framework OpenLB is summarized.

POLITICAL RIGHTS IMPLEMENTATION OF UKRAINIAN CITIZENS AMID COUNTERACTING THE COVID-19 EPIDEMIC

Among the catalog of political rights of citizens of Ukraine, the COVID-19 epidemic made significant adjustments to the implementation of only two – the right to participate in elections (the opportunity to participate in government and public affairs) and the right to participate in peaceful assemblies. Instead, the other political rights (right of appeal, right of association, etc.) were subject to minimal restrictions, which were offset by electronic means of appeals, inquiries, and administrative services. The local elections held in Ukraine on October 25, 2020, testified to the readiness of the Ukrainian state to conduct democratic procedures in difficult epidemic conditions. For this purpose, special regulations were adopted and appropriate security measures were applied. Although voter turnout was expected to be low, an objective opportunity to exercise their right to freely choose and be elected was created and ensured. The campaigns discussions and debates continued mainly online. However, the voting itself took place on election day and without the use of alternatives technologies (electronic voting, voting by mail, on behalf of, etc.). At the time of the epidemic, the right to peaceful assembly was being severely restricted in Ukraine. The quarantine resolutions of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine set various restrictions on the concentration of people (initially not more than 200, and later – not more than 10), and hence the possibility of full-fledged meetings. Although these provisions were by-laws and inconsistent with the Constitution of Ukraine, law enforcement agencies were largely guided by them and opposed the assembly. Judicial practice did not solve this problem either, as administrative rulings and protocols were revoked by courts on formal grounds, and not due to the unconstitutionality of the quarantine restriction.

An Evaluation of Los Angeles’s Orange Line Busway

The new 14.2-mile Orange Line Busway opened in October 2005. Many aspects of the Orange Line’s design should be copied elsewhere: its attractive guideway and stations, state-of-the-art buses, proof-of-payment fare collection, and well-done environmental mitigations. On the other hand, a typical Orange Line bus trip catches about 11 red lights and waits up to nine minutes for them to change. Its end-to-end travel speed is 20 mph. The travel time is also compromised by a 25 mph speed restriction at all intersections and speed limits along other portions of the busway.The lesson of the Orange Line to transit planners is that an at-grade busway will almost certainly not get signal preemption. This means it will not have the crossing gates that allow its buses to cross intersections at speed. Therefore, every other effort should be made to increase a busway’s travel speed through off-board fare collection, well-located platforms, minimal speed restrictions, and quick transferring to connecting services. A busway will be less expensive to build than a light rail alternative, but without signal preemption its travel speed will be significantly less.A light rail alternative for the Orange Line would have had required crossing gates. Even if trains operated at the same lower speeds as buses within median rights-of-way, they would have been much faster (29 mph) and offered a more stable ride quality.

Positive incentives for managing groundwater in the presence of informal water markets: perspectives from India

Abstract Groundwater is rapidly declining in India. A history of subsidized well-drilling, pumps, and energy with minimal restrictions on well installation, in a landscape characterized by millions of smallholder farmers renders standard ‘market-based’ approaches such as water pricing and quotas on abstraction challenging to introduce from a cost, political and institutional perspective. Instead, federal and state governments are experimenting with positive incentive programs, which draw from payments-for-ecosystem-service-type market approaches, by rewarding reductions in groundwater abstraction rather than penalizing abstraction. Whether such programs succeed will depend, among other things, on the state of informal groundwater markets (IGMs) where wells owners supply irrigation services to other farmers, often smaller ones, for a charge; in addition to irrigating their own fields. While IGMs are quite extensive, data on them is poor and outdated, and are often overlooked in the design of positive incentive programs. This oversight can also detrimentally affect the access to irrigation of smaller farmers who purchase these services. Representative and systematic data on IGMS would help policy markers design positive incentive programs that are informed by the tradeoffs between reducing abstraction of groundwater and its welfare implications for sellers and buyers of irrigation services.

Dynamics of a Novel IVRD Pandemic Model of a Large Population over a Long Time with Efficient Numerical Methods

The model of any epidemic illness is evolved from the current susceptibility. We aim to construct a model, based on the literature, different to the conventional examinations in epidemiology, i.e., what will occur depends on the susceptible cases, which is not always the case; one must consider a model with aspects such as infections, recoveries, deaths, and vaccinated populations. Much of this information may not be available. So without artificially assuming the unknown aspects, we frame a new model known as IVRD. Apart from qualitative evaluation, numerical evaluation has been completed to aid the results. A novel approach of calculating the fundamental reproduction/transmission range is presented, with a view to estimating the largest number of aspects possible, with minimal restrictions on the spread of any disease. An additional novel aspect of this model is that we include vaccines with the actively infected cases, which is not common. A few infections such as rabies, ebola, etc., can apply this model. In general, the concept of symmetry or asymmetry will exist in every epidemic model. This model and method can be applied in scientific research in the fields of epidemic modeling, the medical sciences, virology, and other areas, particularly concerning rabies, ebola, and similar diseases, to show how immunity develops after being infected by these viruses.

TIGRE-VarianCBCT for on-board cone-beam computed tomography, an open-source toolkit for imaging, dosimetry and clinical research

We presented TIGRE-VarianCBCT, an open-source toolkit Matlab-GPU for Varian on-board cone-beam CT with particular emphasis to address challenges in raw data preprocessing, artifacts correction, tomographic reconstruction and image post-processing. The aim of this project is to provide not only a tool to bridge the gap between clinical usage of CBCT scan data and research algorithms but also a framework that breaks down the imaging chain into individual processes so that research effort can be focused on a specific part. The entire imaging chain, module-based architecture, data flow and techniques used in the creation of the toolkit are presented. Raw scan data are first decoded to extract X-ray fluoro image series and set up the imaging geometry. Data conditioning operations including scatter correction, normalization, beam-hardening correction, ring removal are performed sequentially. Reconstruction is supported by TIGRE with FDK as well as a variety of iterative algorithms. Pixel-to-HU mapping is calibrated by a CatphanTM 504 phantom. Imaging dose in CTDIw is calculated in an empirical formula. The performance was validated on real patient scans with good agreement with respect to vendor-designed program. Case studies in scan protocol optimization, low dose imaging and iterative algorithm comparison demonstrated its substantial potential in performing scan data based clinical studies. The toolkit is released under the BSD license, imposing minimal restrictions on its use and distribution. The toolkit is accessible as a module at https://github.com/CERN/TIGRE.

PCR15 The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Lockdowns on the Health-Related Quality of Life of People Living with Multiple Sclerosis in Australia

People living with multiple sclerosis (PwMS) in metropolitan Victoria, Australia experienced a 112-day, COVID-19 related lockdown in mid-2020. This lockdown severely limited civilian movement and access to services. Contemporaneously, Australian PwMS elsewhere experienced minimal restrictions. The resulting natural experiment was exploited by this study, which assessed the associations between lockdowns, COVID-19 related adversity, and health-related quality of life (HRQoL).

Spatio-temporal spread of COVID-19: Comparison of the inhomogeneous SEPIR model and data from South Carolina.

During the COVID-19 pandemic authorities have been striving to obtain reliable predictions for the spreading dynamics of the disease. We recently developed a multi-“sub-populations” (multi-compartments: susceptible, exposed, pre-symptomatic, infectious, recovered) model, that accounts for the spatial in-homogeneous spreading of the infection and shown, for a variety of examples, how the epidemic curves are highly sensitive to location of epicenters, non-uniform population density, and local restrictions. In the present work we test our model against real-life data from South Carolina during the period May 22 to July 22 (2020). During this period, minimal restrictions have been employed, which allowed us to assume that the local basic reproduction number is constant in time. We account for the non-uniform population density in South Carolina using data from NASA’s Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), and predict the evolution of infection heat-maps during the studied period. Comparing the predicted heat-maps with those observed, we find high qualitative resemblance. Moreover, the Pearson’s correlation coefficient is relatively high thus validating our model against real-world data. We conclude that the model accounts for the major effects controlling spatial in-homogeneous spreading of the disease. Inclusion of additional sub-populations (compartments), in the spirit of several recently developed models for COVID-19, can be easily performed within our mathematical framework.