Talking Person Research Articles

A Short Review on COVID-19

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has made a global impact on the daily lives of humanity, devastating health systems and ultimately affecting the world’s economy. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a highly contagious respiratory disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. SARS-CoV-2 is thought to spread from person to person through droplets released when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or talks. It may also be spread by touching a surface with the virus on it and then touching one’s mouth, nose, or eyes, but this is less common. There are four trusted source subtypes of coronavirus - alpha, beta, gamma, and delta and scientists use these classifications to categorize the various species. Among all the corona viruses, seven have affected humans. Four of these are common and cause mild illnesses in the upper and lower airways, nose, sinuses, throat, and lungs. The remaining three can cause more severe illness. This article provides a comprehensive review of this subject with a focus on the history, clinical manifestations, and complications including new insights into the pathophysiology, diagnosis, Management stategies and treatment.

Childhood Trauma, Trauma Symptoms, Family Fat Talk in Relation to Adolescent Eating Behavior

The aim of the study was to examine whether childhood traumatic experience, trauma symptoms, and family discussions about obesity are associated with adolescent eating behavior. In addition, the study examined gender differences. Participating in the study were 726 adolescents (369 – girls, 344 – boys, 13 – no specific gender) aged 11 to 16. They completed the following questionnaires: Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (Fink et al., 1995); Trauma Symptom Checklist for Children (Briere, 1995); Eating Attitudes Test (Garner et al., 1982); Family Fat Talk Questionnaire (Macdonald et al., 2015). The results showed positive associations between perceived altered eating behaviors and emotional and sexual abuse, depressive and dissociative symptoms, personal and family talk about obesity. Personal conversations about obesity predicted 21% of the variation of the adolescent’s perception of altered eating behavior. The addition of emotional abuse and dissociative symptoms in the regression model increased the explained variance to 25%. Girls reported significantly higher ratings on the study variables.

Analysis of the Discourse of Disrespect of Women in Politics: Hating Hillary and Getting Gillard

From June 2010 until June 24th 2013, and at times into 2014 the then Prime Minister of Australia The Honourable Ms Julia Gillard was subjected to the most intense and ruthless political rhetoric ever seen in Australian media. Personal attacks and talk back callers openly admitting they “hated her” and calling into question her mental state and hormonal status was just part of a brutal media campaign aided and abetted by Opposition Leader in Tony Abbott. He linguistically derailed a reforming and intelligent woman who held together a minority parliament which delivered significant legislation. In addition, a selection of media articles and a review of media analysis of the candidacy of Hillary Clinton in preparing a run for the White House in the USA during the years 2015-2016 echoes eerie parallels to a sub textual cultural discourse of misogyny especially in politics. This discourse analysis and media study questions whether the core of the Real Matilda misogyny reported by Miriam Dixson in Australia since 1976 is alive and well and lingers on in our linguistic heritage. The polarisation of political debate and concomitant bias some media quarters is analysed and shown to have a significant pattern beginning with disapproval and ending in directional linguistic commands from media. The end result was that the Politicians listened to the unrelenting chorus of demands to “end leadership speculation “and complete chaos and to go to an election.

Treatment Analysis Respiratory Physical therapy on SARS-COV-2

SARS-CoV-2 is a member of a large family of viruses called coronaviruses. This specific viruses can infect human and some animals. SARS-CoV-2 was first known to infect people in 2019. The virus is thought to spread from person to person through droplets released when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or talks. It may also be spread by touching a surface with the virus on it and then touching one’s mouth, nose, or eyes, but this is less common. Research is being done to treat COVID-19 and to prevent infection with SARS-CoV-2. Also called severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. Coronavirus disease 2019, SARS-CO V-2 is the 3rd coronavirus infectious disease happening in 20 years was initially defined in Asia, later Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), & Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). SARS-CO V-2 illness expands globally, intensive care unit (ICU) specialists, health care management, authority, plan creators, and researchers need to brace for sudden increase of high volume in critical patients. Physiotherapists (PTs), mostly respiratory PTs, are healthcare specialists involved in managing and caring for the population of these patients, & play important part in conservative care and treatment, changes in posture, functional mobility and while invasive mechanical ventilator support is being weaned. The objective of the study is to identify treatment analysis recent research evidences for the management of physiotherapist during SARS-CO V-2 pandemic. This study provide a quick respiratory physiotherapist reference guide to set up treatments for the management in acute stages of patients suffering from severe SARS-CO V-2.

A general theory of consciousness II: The language problem

ABSTRACT It is generally assumed that what we hear in our head is what we think and that, when we tell a thought to somebody else, the other person understands what our thought has been. This paper analyzes how we think and what happens when we communicate our thoughts verbally to others and to ourselves. The assumption that we become conscious in language is erroneous: verbal communication is only an intermediary. The conscious experience of verbal communication is a sensory phenomenon. We think through sensory images (see Part I). This natural way of thinking, is a very refined and accurate method of translating thought into consciousness. It expresses our essentially unconscious neural cognitive activity in conscious sensory images: visual thinkers ‘see’ what they have thought. Why humans use verbal communication to express their thoughts to themselves is difficult to understand as the verbal way is extremely limited. The complex parallel cognitive activity has to be encoded into language tokens which are positioned sequentially as a string of symbols which somehow must express something comparable. Talking to oneself is directed to an imaginary person who is assumed to be the talking person himself. This imaginary person develops with the inner voice in infants and when the child grows up, that imaginary person remains there, somebody he talks to when he thinks and to which he attributes his feelings and his actions. The imaginary person is experienced as the human Self, but actually verbalizes the thoughts of the natural – animal – Self.

Cerebrovascular Disease and Covid-19: A Systematic Review of the Literature

Abstract This article covers various aspects of COVID-19, also known as the new coronavirus. It is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus and was first identified in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. The virus has rapidly spread globally and caused a pandemic. The primary mode of transmission is through respiratory droplets when an infected person talks, coughs or sneezes. While most people will experience mild or moderate symptoms, the disease can be severe and even fatal, especially for older adults and those with underlying health conditions. Additionally, the article discusses the immunopathology of SARS-CoV-2 and its effects on the immune system, as well as the neurological manifestations of COVID-19 and its impact on cerebrovascular disease.

How to tell the kids? Parental crisis communication during the COVID-19 pandemic

Crisis communication in a pandemic is challenging for parents, who have to explain risks and prevention measures to their children without transferring their own worries. Studies about crises indicate, that inappropriate crisis communication with children can ignite fears, worries, and even trauma among them. Recommended parental communication strategies in such situations are: (1) to consider developmental level to ensure comprehensibility; (2) to address age-related concerns; and (3) to use naturally occurring situations to talk about the crisis. However, the application of such strategies during a world-wide crisis is not known yet. Thus, we analyzed how parents explained their children the COVID-19 pandemic, which media they used, and which situations they employed. Following a mixed-method approach, semi-structured interviews (n = 55) and an online survey (n = 146) were conducted with parents in Germany. We identified three types of parental crisis communication (use of children-specific media, co-use of adult media, personal talk), found differences due to the developmental stage of the children, and recognized how parents used daily life activities for crisis talk. In sum, parents mostly employed forms of crisis communication recommended by experts, although they were sometimes hindered by the high burdens of their own emotional and organizational challenges.

Terrain Perception Using Wearable Parrot-Inspired Companion Robot, KiliRo.

Research indicates that deaths due to fall incidents are the second leading cause of unintentional injury deaths in the world. Death by fall due to a person texting or talking on mobile phones while walking, impaired vision, unexpected terrain changes, low balance, weakness, and chronic conditions has increased drastically over the past few decades. Particularly, unexpected terrain changes would many times lead to severe injuries and sometimes death even in healthy individuals. To tackle this problem, a warning system to alert the person of the imminent danger of a fall can be developed. This paper describes a solution for such a warning system used in our bio-inspired wearable pet robot, KiliRo. It is a terrain perception system used to classify the terrain based on visual features obtained from processing the images captured by a camera and notify the wearer of terrain changes while walking. The parrot-inspired KiliRo robot can twist its head and the camera up to 180 degrees to obtain visual feedback for classification. Feature extraction is followed by K-nearest neighbor for terrain classification. Experiments were conducted to establish the efficacy and validity of the proposed approach in classifying terrain changes. The results indicate an accuracy of over 95% across five terrain types, namely pedestrian pathway, road, grass, interior, and staircase.

Blogpost Website

As the name implies "Blog Post Website" is an educational website where there will be many blogs from a variety of topics. The main purpose of our website is to create a powerful platform where users can read various blogs and at the same time, users can publish their content or blogs on the website by creating an account, other users can log in / sign in. They can engage by doing likes, commenting on blogs. We will be adding this feature to increase engagement in our platform. Our Blogpost website is a website that is used for the chronological listing of the blog posts. Contains the most recent content first followed by previously updated content. In this there are many sections and posts written by a large number of authors. People can just create an account and start publishing their blogs. Blogs are a new and exciting way to communicate and to learn. Personal talk has evolved into a new and useful tool. Blogs have become an important form of emotional release and information for a growing number of people. With this website we are trying to enhance the learning perspective through blogs.

What drives changes in expressive social media use for generational cohorts?

Extant literature has often focused on digital citizenship amongst youths in particular instances and contexts, but is limited in addressing how such citizenship compare to other generational cohorts. Examining political expression as a particular form of actualising citizenship, the paper utilises a longitudinal approach to explore the effects of changes in political efficacy, media use, political knowledge, media trust and political talk on political expression – and the differences between generational cohorts over two general elections in Singapore. Findings indicate that while changes in mass media use, social media use, trust in instant messaging and personal communications and political talk were positively associated with changes in political expression as a whole, changes in political knowledge and trust in mass media negatively predicted political expression. With different effects observed for different generational cohorts of citizens, findings from the study contribute to deeper understandings of practices of actualising citizenship over time.

A review article on global situation of COVID-19 at present

COVID-19 is a coronavirus virus that does not belong to the Coronaviridae family. It was suggested that it originated in the Bats and was distributed to the people of Wuhan, China, in an anonymous way. When an infected person coughs, sneezes, or talks, COVID-19 is spread through respiratory droplets. By touching something dirty and touching the eyes, mouth, or nose, people can get sick. Ideally the incubation period of COVID-19 virus is between three and fourteen days. Nowadays, thousands of people are suffering from this deadly virus and many of them have been died because of this deadly disease. Symptoms of the disease are coughing, fever, sneezing, and sore throat, shortness of breath, headache, and fatigue. In both COVID-19 diagnoses, samples of upper and lower respiratory tract are collected and tested in a laboratory. X-rays and CT scans of the chest are also used to diagnose the disease. Currently, there is no specific treatment for this disease, and as a result there is a need to prevent the disease from spreading.

Predicting the spatio-temporal infection risk in indoor spaces using an efficient airborne transmission model.

We develop a spatially dependent generalization to the Wells–Riley model, which determines the infection risk due to airborne transmission of viruses. We assume that the infectious aerosol concentration is governed by an advection–diffusion–reaction equation with the aerosols advected by airflow, diffused due to turbulence, emitted by infected people, and removed due to ventilation, inactivation of the virus and gravitational settling. We consider one asymptomatic or presymptomatic infectious person breathing or talking, with or without a mask, and model a quasi-three-dimensional set-up that incorporates a recirculating air-conditioning flow. We derive a semi-analytic solution that enables fast simulations and compare our predictions to three real-life case studies—a courtroom, a restaurant, and a hospital ward—demonstrating good agreement. We then generate predictions for the concentration and the infection risk in a classroom, for four different ventilation settings. We quantify the significant reduction in the concentration and the infection risk as ventilation improves, and derive appropriate power laws. The model can be easily updated for different parameter values and can be used to make predictions on the expected time taken to become infected, for any location, emission rate, and ventilation level. The results have direct applicability in mitigating the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Person Localization Model Based on a Fusion of Acoustic and Visual Inputs

PLEA is an interactive, biomimetic robotic head with non-verbal communication capabilities. PLEA reasoning is based on a multimodal approach combining video and audio inputs to determine the current emotional state of a person. PLEA expresses emotions using facial expressions generated in real-time, which are projected onto a 3D face surface. In this paper, a more sophisticated computation mechanism is developed and evaluated. The model for audio-visual person separation can locate a talking person in a crowded place by combining input from the ResNet network with input from a hand-crafted algorithm. The first input is used to find human faces in the room, and the second input is used to determine the direction of the sound and to focus attention on a single person. After an information fusion procedure is performed, the face of the person speaking is matched with the corresponding sound direction. As a result of this procedure, the robot could start an interaction with the person based on non-verbal signals. The model was tested and evaluated under laboratory conditions by interaction with users. The results suggest that the methodology can be used efficiently to focus a robot’s attention on a localized person.

Facemask Global Challenges: The Case of Effective Synthesis, Utilization, and Environmental Sustainability

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has caused a rapidly spreading pandemic and is severely threatening public health globally. The human-to-human transmission route of SARS-CoV-2 is now well established. The reported clinical observations and symptoms of this infection in humans appear in the range between being asymptomatic and severe pneumonia. The virus can be transmitted through aerosols and droplets that are released into the air by a carrier, especially when the person coughs, sneezes, or talks forcefully in a closed environment. As the disease progresses, the use and handling of contaminated personal protective equipment and facemasks have become major issues with significant environmental risks. Therefore, providing an effective method for treating used/contaminated facemasks is crucial. In this paper, we review the environmental challenges and risks associated with the surge in facemask production. We also discuss facemasks and their materials as sources of microplastics and how disposal procedures can potentially lead to the contamination of water resources. We herein review the potential of developing nanomaterial-based antiviral and self-cleaning facemasks. This review discusses these challenges and concludes that the use of sustainable and alternative facemask materials is a promising and viable solution. In this context, it has become essential to address the emerging challenges by developing a new class of facemasks that are effective against the virus, while being biodegradable and sustainable. This paper represents the potentials of natural and/or biodegradable polymers for manufacturing facemasks, such as wood-based polymers, chitosan, and other biodegradable synthetic polymers for achieving sustainability goals during and after pandemics.

Effect of visual input on syllable parsing in a computational model of a neural microcircuit for speech processing

Objective. Seeing a person talking can help us understand them, particularly in a noisy environment. However, how the brain integrates the visual information with the auditory signal to enhance speech comprehension remains poorly understood. Approach. Here we address this question in a computational model of a cortical microcircuit for speech processing. The model consists of an excitatory and an inhibitory neural population that together create oscillations in the theta frequency range. When stimulated with speech, the theta rhythm becomes entrained to the onsets of syllables, such that the onsets can be inferred from the network activity. We investigate how well the obtained syllable parsing performs when different types of visual stimuli are added. In particular, we consider currents related to the rate of syllables as well as currents related to the mouth-opening area of the talking faces. Main results. We find that currents that target the excitatory neuronal population can influence speech comprehension, both boosting it or impeding it, depending on the temporal delay and on whether the currents are excitatory or inhibitory. In contrast, currents that act on the inhibitory neurons do not impact speech comprehension significantly. Significance. Our results suggest neural mechanisms for the integration of visual information with the acoustic information in speech and make experimentally-testable predictions.

A phenomenological analysis of teachers’ perceptions of ethical factors affecting the teacher–student relationships

ABSTRACT As a culture-specific phenomenon, academic dishonesty (AD) remains an under-researched domain. The purpose of this study was to voice teachers’ perceptions of: (a) the influential factors contributing to AD, (b) the consequences of AD for the quality of teacher–student relationships (TSR), and (c) the specific strategies for regulating TSR. Using a qualitative phenomenological design, we attempted to present a detailed description of teachers’ lived experiences regarding the above aims. The participants (n = 26) were English language and Mathematics teachers with different personal and professional characteristics (M age = 33.59; novice = 12, experienced = 14) working in public high schools of Iran. Data was collected through intensive semi-structured interviewing and analyzed by a five-step approach applied to phenomenology in psychological research. Data analysis revealed three general themes regarding teachers’ perceptions with several components. We found that the lack of attention and intrinsic motivation were the prominent perceived factors with consequences for TSR. Also, personal talk and active supervision were the common techniques that teachers utilized with students who commit AD to manage and control the TSR quality. The results were discussed with reference to teachers’ academic discipline, gender, and teaching experience.

Don’t read the comments: A fat girl’s audacity

ABSTRACT This is a story about my experience of delivering messages of health in a fat body. Of course, there’s a breadth of experience of feeling the world’s resistance to this, both from a fat prejudice and shaming perspective, and because it’s destabilizing for people. Me standing at a microphone in this body talking about what healthy food is and how people should eat creates lots of dissonance in people’s minds, as it challenges their existing notions of good health, and who the experts are. What grows from this though, is the idea of my own internal conflict, the disconnect between the inside and outside versions of me, and the fact that my personal is inextricably political. And even further, there was a moment a few years ago when I realized that my hesitation about not feeling entitled to have an opinion about healthy eating (and share it publicly), was actually standing in the way of the growth of the revolution that I’m trying to wage. If I absorbed all of everyone else’s opinions about being a fat person talking about health, I’d likely retreat, and cash in my chips. I had to reconcile the versions of me that exist here, and reject the hateful shame that this world constantly dumps on me. I had to decide to choose my own truth over other people’s bullshit, and the terrible ways that they decide to lay it on me.

Improving user verification in human-robot interaction from audio or image inputs through sample quality assessment

• Novel approach to identity verification in Human-Robot interaction. • Identity verification produced from both sound (voice) and image (face) inputs. • Proposed approaches focus on identifying the parts of the signal that contains the high value information. • Through analysis of regions of interest substantial improvements are obtained over the state of the art. • Evaluation of performance is obtained in a complex dataset that portrays real life scenarios. In this paper, we tackle the task of improving biometric verification in the context of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). A robot that wants to identify a specific person to provide a service can do so by either image verification or, if light conditions are not favourable, through voice verification. In our approach, we will take advantage of the possibility a robot has of recovering further data until it is sure of the identity of the person. The key contribution is that we select from both image and audio signals the parts that are of higher confidence. For images we use a system that looks at the face of each person and selects frames in which the confidence is high while keeping those frames separate in time to avoid using very similar facial appearance. For audio our approach tries to find the parts of the signal that contain a person talking, avoiding those in which noise is present by segmenting the signal. Once the parts of interest are found, each input is described with an independent deep learning architecture that obtains a descriptor for each kind of input (face/voice). We also present in this paper fusion methods that improve performance by combining the features from both face and voice, results to validate this are shown for each independent input and for the fusion methods.

Uncovering Blind Spots in the Intention to Provide Adequate Help to Suicidal Individuals.

Background: An adequate reaction from families, friends, and colleagues who can provide help to suicidal individuals is a preventive factor. Despite the logical assumption that the mere presence of risk factors in individuals needing help may affect others' helping intentions, empirical evidence is lacking in this regard. Method: We tested whether the presence of various risk factors influences the intention to provide help to suicidal individuals. Individuals (N = 890) were exposed to a vignette in which they were asked to imagine meeting a distant acquaintance. Such persons talk about serious problems and suddenly use the word "suicide." In a one-factorial between-subjects design with 21 groups, we manipulated person-related attributes corresponding to risk factors for suicide. Results: Some attributes increased helping intentions: male gender, very young and old age, homosexuality and transsexuality, terminal illness, previous nonsuicidal self-injury, previous suicide attempt, and seeking out lethal means. However, some attributes did not: female gender, major depression, chronic pain, different stressful life events, previously experienced violence, a family history of suicide, and a cry for help. Limitations: We measured self-reported behavioral intentions. Conclusions: Although people seem to adapt their helping intentions in response to some attributes, there seem to be many blind spots.

Scientific Evaluation of Dhuma Yoga (An Ayurvedic Fumigation Medicine) as Preventive and Curative on Symptoms of Covid-19 Disease

Covid-19, an infectious disease caused by a novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 spreads primarily through droplets of saliva or discharge from the nose when an infected person talks, coughs or sneezes where the viruses are active in the environment within the suspended micro droplets. Sanitization of environment to weaken/terminate the virus and halting the replication of virus inside the host along with symptomatic treatment is the primary approach to end the pandemic. In Ayurveda, Dhupana (medicated fumigation of vicinity) and Dhumapana (medicated smoking) therapies done by drugs of herbal/animal/mineral origin are a swift way to decontaminate the environment and Respiratory system. Dhuma (medicated fumes) is a unique drug delivery system acting directly on respiratory tissues which can deliver quick results in this Covid-19 pandemic by its local and systematic effects recommended by AYUSH ministry in the guidelines for Covid-19. We intend to put forward the scientific explanation of powerful Ayurvedic Cannabis based polyherbal dhumapana (medicated smoking) medication named Dhuma Yoga available in the market as an alternate remedy for Covid-19 whose four out of five herbal ingredients are in the list of WHO manual of traditional medicine. We emphasized on Vijaya (Cannabis sativa Linn.) as the centre of formulation because it is a Rasayana (rejuvenative) herb having Vyavayi (fast acting) and Yogavahi (synergetic) properties. Phytochemicals of all the herbal ingredients of Dhuma Yoga formulation are studied through in silico, In vitro and In vivo studies for Covid-19 with favourable outcomes.