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Sensing Dye-Contaminated Veggies Utilizing Low-Field NMR Relaxometry.
COVID-19 has caused the closure of university campuses around the world and migration of all learning, teaching, and assessment into online domains. The impacts of this on the academic community as frontline providers of higher education are profound. In this article, we report the findings from a survey of n = 1148 academics working in universities in the United Kingdom (UK) and representing all the major disciplines and career hierarchy. Respondents report an abundance of what we call 'afflictions' exacted upon their role as educators and in far fewer yet no less visible ways 'affordances' derived from their rapid transition to online provision and early 'entry-level' use of digital pedagogies. Overall, they suggest that online migration is engendering significant dysfunctionality and disturbance to their pedagogical roles and their personal lives. They also signpost online migration as a major challenge for student recruitment, market sustainability, an academic labour-market, and local economies.Some fossils, such as crinoid stems, are not widely appreciated by collectors and researchers, yet can provide unique data regarding taphonomy and palaeoecology. A long crinoid pluricolumnal showing a distinctive pattern of preservation was collected from the Clare Shale Formation (Upper Carboniferous) at Fisherstreet Bay, Doolin, County Clare, western Ireland. The specimen is partly disarticulated and represents the mesistele to mesistele/dististele transition; attachment was by unbranched long, slender radices; pluricolumnal heteromorphic; fragments of pluricolumnal are of multiples of a unit length. This specimen, cladid? sp. indet., slumped to the seafloor after death and started to disarticulate as ligaments rotted. By reference to the broken stick model, the pattern of disarticulation suggests that the noditaxis of the heteromorphic stem was N212.The novel SARS-CoV2 has disrupted health systems and the economy, and public health interventions to slow its spread have been costly. How and when to ease restrictions to movement hinges in part on whether SARS-CoV2 will display seasonality due to variations in temperature, humidity, and hours of sunshine. Here, we address this question by means of a spatio-temporal analysis in Spain of the incidence of COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. Use of spatial Seemingly Unrelated Regressions (SUR) allows us to model the incidence of reported cases of the disease per 100,000 population as an interregional contagion process, in addition to a function of temperature, humidity, and sunshine. In the analysis we also control for GDP per capita, percentage of older adults in the population, population density, and presence of mass transit systems. The results support the hypothesis that incidence of the disease is lower at higher temperatures and higher levels of humidity. Sunshine, in contrast, displays a positive association with incidence of the disease. Our control variables also yield interesting insights. Higher incidence is associated with higher GDP per capita and presence of mass transit systems in the province; in contrast, population density and percentage of older adults display negative associations with incidence of COVID-19.The question of uncertainty has generated substantial critical engagements across the social sciences. While much of this literature falls within the domains of anthropology, science studies, and sociology, this short introductory paper highlights how geographical scholarship can also enrich emerging transdisciplinary debates on uncertainty. Specifically, we discuss how geographers engage with uncertainties produced through and reconfigured by some of the most formidable issues of our contemporary moment, including neoliberal transformation, disease and illness, resource conflict, global climate change, and ongoing struggles around knowledge, power, and justice. In conversation with debates in cognate fields, this special issue brings together contributions that grapple with uncertainty through key geographic concepts such as scale, power, spatiality, place, and human-environment relations. This work extends scholarly understanding of how uncertainty arises, is stabilized, and also how people navigate, experience, challenge, and rationalize uncertainty in everyday life. In doing so, we signal the immense potential offered by emerging intersections between human geography and broader critical social science interventions on the question of uncertainty.Globalised food supply chains are increasingly susceptible to systemic risks, with natural, social and economic shocks in one region potentially leading to price spikes and supply changes experienced at the global scale. Projections commonly extrapolate from recent histories and adopt a 'business as usual' approach that risks failing to take account of shocks or unpredictable events that can have dramatic consequences for the status quo, as seen with the global Covid-19 pandemic. This study used an explorative stakeholder process and shock centred narratives to discuss the potential impact of a diversity of shocks, examining system characteristics and trends that may amplify their impact. Through the development of scenarios, stakeholders revealed concerns about the stability of the food system and the social, economic and environmental consequence of food related shocks. Increasing connectivity served as a mechanism to heighten volatility and vulnerability within all scenarios, with reliance on singular crops and technologies (i.e. low diversity) throughout systems highlighted as another potential source of vulnerability. The growing role of social media in shaping attitudes and behaviours towards food, and the increasing role of automation emerged as contemporary areas of concern, which have thus far been little explored within the literature.This paper proposes a new distributed model predictive control (DMPC) for positive Markov jump systems subject to uncertainties and constraints. The uncertainties refer to interval and polytopic types, and the constraints are described in the form of 1-norm inequalities. A linear DMPC framework containing a linear performance index, linear robust stability conditions, a stochastic linear co-positive Lyapunov function, a cone invariant set, and a linear programming based DMPC algorithm is introduced. A global positive Markov jump system is decomposed into several subsystems. These subsystems can exchange information with each other and each subsystem has its own controller. Using a matrix decomposition technique, the DMPC controller gain matrix is divided into nonnegative and non-positive components and thus the corresponding stochastic stability conditions are transformed into linear programming. By virtue of a stochastic linear co-positive Lyapunov function, the positivity and stochastic stability of the systems are achieved under the DMPC controller. A lower computation burden DMPC algorithm is presented for solving the min-max optimization problem of performance index. The proposed DMPC design approach is extended for general systems. Finally, an example is given to verify the effectiveness of the DMPC design.The causal closure of physics is usually discussed in a context free way. Here I discuss it in the context of engineering systems and biology, where strong emergence takes place due to a combination of upwards emergence and downwards causation (Ellis, Emergence in Solid State Physics and Biology, 2020, arXiv2004.13591). Firstly, I show that causal closure is strictly limited in terms of spatial interactions because these are cases that are of necessity strongly interacting with the environment. Effective Spatial Closure holds ceteris parabus, and can be violated by Black Swan Events. Secondly, I show that causal closure in the hierarchy of emergence is a strictly interlevel affair, and in the cases of engineering and biology encompasses all levels from the social level to the particle physics level. However Effective Causal Closure can usefully be defined for a restricted set of levels, and one can experimentally determine Effective Theories that hold at each level. This does not however imply those effective theories are causally complete by themselves. In particular, the particle physics level is not causally complete by itself in the contexts of solid state physics (because of interlevel wave-particle duality), digital computers (where algorithms determine outcomes), or biology (because of time dependent constraints). Furthermore Inextricably Intertwined Levels occur in all these contexts.The COVID-19 crisis has fundamentally disrupted teaching and learning practices at many post-secondary institutions with a highly residential population. The present article outlines the situation at Harvard University and details the steps taken by the Language Center to mitigate the effects of the transition to remote teaching and learning. These include changes in communication strategies, support mechanisms for faculty and students, and modifications to the Center's operational policies. The authors provide a number of concrete recommendations for academic support units in transitions of this type.This article demonstrates how, at a time when learners may be experiencing fear and chaos in other aspects of their lives, a focus on language task engagement is essential across both online and offline language learning contexts. It presents a model of language task engagement and describes why and how teachers can use it to support learner achievement during the current crisis and in the future.Social distancing and lockdown measures taken to contain the spread of COVID-19 may have distributional economic costs beyond the contraction of GDP. Here we evaluate the capacity of individuals to work under a lockdown based on a Lockdown Working Ability index which considers their teleworking capacity and whether their occupation is essential or closed. Our analysis reveals substantial and uneven potential wage losses across the distribution all around Europe and we consistently find that both poverty and wage inequality rise in all European countries. Under four different scenarios (2 months of lockdown and 2 months of lockdown plus 6 months of partial functioning of closed occupations at 80%, 70% and 60% of full capacity) we estimate for 29 European countries an average increase in the headcount poverty index that goes from 4.9 to 9.4 percentage points and a mean loss rate for poor workers between 10% and 16.2%. 3-TYP The average increase in the Gini coefficient ranges between 3.5% to 7.3% depending on the scenario considered. Decomposing overall wage inequality in Europe, we find that lockdown and social distance measures produce a double process of divergence both inequality within and between countries increase.The Covid-19 pandemic forces North American churches to reckon with long-standing crises and questions surrounding online community, access to worship, decline in membership, the struggle of small congregations, and the reality of our global communion. This article describes a response grounded in faith defined as confidence in our liberation from pride and despair through Jesus Christ. There is need for clarity of doctrine and spiritual courage to fulfill the church's twofold mission to sustain and grow the body of Christ; both these tasks require courage to approach and speak from the Gospel in ever-new contexts and ages.
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