scholarly journals Cybersecurity Concerns & Teleworking in the COVID-19 Era: A Socio-Cybersecurity Analysis of Organizational Behavior

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-30
Author(s):  
Claude Turner ◽  
Carlene Buchanan Turner ◽  
Yuying Shen

This research project examines the relationship between teleworking cybersecurity protocols during the COVID-19 era and employee’s perception of their efficiency and performance predictability.  COVID-19 is the infectious disease caused by the most recently discovered coronavirus and it has been declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. Since March 2020, many employees in the United States who used operate onsite, have been working from their homes (teleworking) to mitigate the spread of the virus through social distancing. The premise of this research project is that teleworking can transform these employees into unintentional insider threats or UITs. Iinterviews were conducted through video conferencing with nine employees in Virginia, USA to examine the problem. This is an interdisciplinary research project which brings together the disciplines of sociology and computer science. Narrative Analysis was used to unpack the interviews. The major findings from the research efforts demonstrate that employees are trusting of the cybersecurity protocols that their organizations implemented but they also believe they are vulnerable, and that the protocols are not as reliable as in-person working arrangements. While the respondents perceived that the cybersecurity protocols lend to performance predictability, they seem to think it disrupts their efficiency.

2020 ◽  
Vol 96 (5) ◽  
pp. 1281-1303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carla Norrlöf

Abstract COVID-19 is the most invasive global crisis in the postwar era, jeopardizing all dimensions of human activity. By theorizing COVID-19 as a public bad, I shed light on one of the great debates of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries regarding the relationship between the United States and liberal international order (LIO). Conceptualizing the pandemic as a public bad, I analyze its consequences for US hegemony. Unlike other international public bads and many of the most important public goods that make up the LIO, the COVID-19 public bad not only has some degree of rivalry but can be made partially excludable, transforming it into more of a club good. Domestically, I demonstrate how the failure to effectively manage the COVID-19 public bad has compromised America's ability to secure the health of its citizens and the domestic economy, the very foundations for its international leadership. These failures jeopardize US provision of other global public goods. Internationally, I show how the US has already used the crisis strategically to reinforce its opposition to free international movement while abandoning the primary international institution tasked with fighting the public bad, the World Health Organization (WHO). While the only area where the United States has exercised leadership is in the monetary sphere, I argue this feat is more consequential for maintaining hegemony. However, even monetary hegemony could be at risk if the pandemic continues to be mismanaged.


Author(s):  
Letizia Appolloni ◽  
Alberto Giretti ◽  
Daniela D'Alessandro

Background: The World Health Organization (WHO) stresses the need to create active environments, able to promote physical activity of people, according to their ability. Objective; This paper describes a new tool curried out to meaasure the relationship between the characteristics of urban space and its salutogenicity, intended as its ability to address population toward healthy lifestyles. Salutogenity has been read in terms of ergonomics of urban space. Method: The tool includes a set of 67 parameters, classified in needs, requirements and performance. It focuses on three requirements: usability, wellbeing and safety. The related performances are measured by a set of 29 indicators, divided in 5 categories (natural elements, built environment, mobility, urban furniture and perceived environment). To calibrate the tool, it was applied to 10 neighborhoods of Rieti city. To take into account the relationship between the variables, a causal network (Bayesian network) was applied. Findings: The average value of ergonomics of Rieti city, obtained applying the discrete bayesian model is 44.25%. Using the network, it is evident that by intervening on one node, the information requested expands to all the other nodes to which it is connected directly or indirectly, showing all the possible related factors. Conclusions: By using the tool and the discrete bayesian network it was possible to focus on the realities requiring analysis and to indicate the areas where the first interventions would be useful to increase the value of the analyzed nodes and, consequently, to improve the urban salutogenicity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 839-842
Author(s):  
Navid Shaghaghi ◽  
Andres Calle ◽  
George Kouretas ◽  
Jaidev Mirchandani ◽  
Michael Castillo

Abstract Vaccination is the primary strategy to prevent COVID-19 illness and hospitalization. However, supplies are scarce and due to the regional mutations of the virus, new vaccines or booster shots will need to be administered potentially regularly. Hence, the prediction of the rate of growth of COVID-19 cases is paramount to ensuring the ample supply of vaccines as well as for local, state, and federal government measures to ensure the availability of hospital beds, supplies, and staff. eVision is an epidemic forecaster aimed at combining Machine Learning (ML) - in the form of a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Recursive Neural Network (RNN) - and search engine statistics, in order to make accurate predictions about the weekly number of cases for highly communicable diseases. By providing eVision with the relative popularity of carefully selected keywords searched via Google along with the number of positive cases reported from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and/or the World Health Organization (WHO) the model can make highly accurate predictions about the trend of the outbreak by learning the relationship between the two trends. Thus, in order to predict the trend of the outbreak in a specific region, eVision is provided with a weekly count of the number of COVID-19 cases in a region along with statistics surrounding common symptom search phrases such as “loss of smell” and “loss of taste” that have been searched on Google in that region since the start of the pandemic. eVision has, for instance, been able to achieve an accuracy of %89 for predicting the trend of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States


2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-133
Author(s):  
Wirya Sastra Amran ◽  
Putri Suci ◽  
Nina Aspiah ◽  
Menaldi Rasmin ◽  
Prasenohadi Prasenohadi ◽  
...  

Based on calculations of over one million people in the world weighing excessively or known as obesity with body mass index (IMT) 25 kg / m2 or more. Obesity is the cause of morbidity, as is the case in the population of the United States an estimated 400,000 deaths caused due to obesity. Obesity especially abdominal obesity is a significant risk factor for cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and cancer. The relationship between obesity and chronic respiratory illness began to increase and began to be recognized. The World Health Organization (WHO) predicts about 10% of the global population will be obese by 2015. (J Respir Indo 2018; 38(2): 123-33)


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Armstrong-Mensah ◽  
Ato Kwamena Tetteh ◽  
Gifty Rhodalyn Tetteh

Face masks have been identified as one of the preventive methods for the control of the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Although the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend the universal use of face masks, there are controversies in the implementation of a national face mask mandate in the US. This commentary discusses the relationship between facemask mandates and key COVID-19 indicators such as infection rates and hospitalization rates in the US. It also summarizes some of the political issues surrounding the implementation of the national face mask mandate. We conducted an ecological study on the relationship between face mask mandates and key COVID-19 indicators. We searched PubMed and Google Scholar and reviewed 150 English articles related to face mask challenges in the US published from 2005 to 2021. We identified seven challenges associated with face mask wearing - conflicting messaging, individualism, denial, health consequences, lack of a national masking standard, concerns of African American males, and environmental issues. We found that North Dakota, a state without a face mask mandate had the highest COVID-19 prevalence of 13.3%. The mean prevalence for the highest top 10 ranked states without and with a face mask mandate was 11.1% and 10.5%, respectively. We also found that Florida, Arizona and Georgia, states without a face mask mandates, had the highest cumulative hospitalizations of 83,381, 58,670, and 57,911 hospitalizations, respectively. Alabama, Indiana, and Minnesota, which have face mask mandates, had the lowest hospitalization rates of 47,090, 47,787, and 26,651, respectively.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lukman Olagoke ◽  
Ahmet E. Topcu

BACKGROUND COVID-19 represents a serious threat to both national health and economic systems. To curb this pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a series of COVID-19 public safety guidelines. Different countries around the world initiated different measures in line with the WHO guidelines to mitigate and investigate the spread of COVID-19 in their territories. OBJECTIVE The aim of this paper is to quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of these control measures using a data-centric approach. METHODS We begin with a simple text analysis of coronavirus-related articles and show that reports on similar outbreaks in the past strongly proposed similar control measures. This reaffirms the fact that these control measures are in order. Subsequently, we propose a simple performance statistic that quantifies general performance and performance under the different measures that were initiated. A density based clustering of based on performance statistic was carried out to group countries based on performance. RESULTS The performance statistic helps evaluate quantitatively the impact of COVID-19 control measures. Countries tend show variability in performance under different control measures. The performance statistic has negative correlation with cases of death which is a useful characteristics for COVID-19 control measure performance analysis. A web-based time-line visualization that enables comparison of performances and cases across continents and subregions is presented. CONCLUSIONS The performance metric is relevant for the analysis of the impact of COVID-19 control measures. This can help caregivers and policymakers identify effective control measures and reduce cases of death due to COVID-19. The interactive web visualizer provides easily digested and quick feedback to augment decision-making processes in the COVID-19 response measures evaluation. CLINICALTRIAL Not Applicable


2021 ◽  
pp. 0261927X2110263
Author(s):  
David M. Markowitz

How do COVID-19 experts psychologically manage the pandemic and its effects? Using a full year of press briefings (January 2020–January 2021) from the World Health Organization ( N = 126), this paper evaluated the relationship between communication patterns and COVID-19 cases and deaths. The data suggest as COVID-19 cases and deaths increased, health experts tended to think about the virus in a more formal and analytic manner. Experts also communicated with fewer cognitive processing terms, which typically indicate people “working through” a crisis. This report offers a lens into the internal states of COVID-19 experts and their organization as they gradually learned about the virus and its daily impact.


2015 ◽  
Vol 112 (22) ◽  
pp. 7051-7054 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Elguero ◽  
Lucrèce M. Délicat-Loembet ◽  
Virginie Rougeron ◽  
Céline Arnathau ◽  
Benjamin Roche ◽  
...  

Sickle cell disease (SCD) is a genetic disorder that poses a serious health threat in tropical Africa, which the World Health Organization has declared a public health priority. Its persistence in human populations has been attributed to the resistance it provides to Plasmodium falciparum malaria in its heterozygous state, called sickle cell trait (SCT). Because of migration, SCT is becoming common outside tropical countries: It is now the most important genetic disorder in France, affecting one birth for every 2,400, and one of the most common in the United States. We assess the strength of the association between SCT and malaria, using current data for both SCT and malaria infections. A total of 3,959 blood samples from 195 villages distributed over the entire Republic of Gabon were analyzed. Hemoglobin variants were identified by using HPLCy (HPLC). Infections by three species of Plasmodium were detected by PCR followed by sequencing of a 201-bp fragment of cytochrome b. An increase of 10% in P. falciparum malaria prevalence is associated with an increase by 4.3% of SCT carriers. An increase of 10 y of age is associated with an increase by 5.5% of SCT carriers. Sex is not associated with SCT. These strong associations show that malaria remains a selective factor in current human populations, despite the progress of medicine and the actions undertaken to fight this disease. Our results provide evidence that evolution is still present in humans, although this is sometimes questioned by scientific, political, or religious personalities.


2021 ◽  
pp. 104365962110469
Author(s):  
Giorgia Rudes ◽  
Claudia Fantuzzi

Introduction: The World Health Organization states that suicide is the second leading cause of death among youngs, and racism has been proven to have detrimental effects on both physical and mental health. These two plagues represent a public health priority, especially for susceptible minorities. Method: This systematic review analyzed 23 studies from multiple database searches, to understand the relationship between racism and suicidality in young minority groups. Results: The review demonstrated the correlation between racism and suicidality with the consequent development of mental disorders. There is strong evidence that the main suicide risk factor is acculturation, interpreted as the assimilation of the dominant culture with the loss of values from one’s cultural background. Discussion: Health care professionals should not underestimate the risk of suicidality associated with racism. Prevention is crucial and it should be implemented from a young age, in schools, through a joint intervention with children and their families, aiming toward integration without acculturation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 01-17
Author(s):  
Ahmed Fahim Elgendi ◽  
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Currently, the world encounters the outbreak of an unprecedented epidemic named novel coronavirus COVID -19. World Health Organization (WHO) advises maintaining social distancing, preserving personal hygiene, and staying informed with the latest guidelines. WHO also reports the patients with robust immunity can combat the virus. However, the workers in the construction industry work and live in a crowded and non-hygiene environment. Moreover, they are characterized by illiteracy, a dearth of awareness, and chronic health problems that prove weak immunity. Therefore, this study aims to find the relationship between the virus and the prevailing conditions and the environment of the construction industry, under focus, and study so that the construction industry is not a vulnerability gap that may exacerbate the crisis. An extensive literature exploration for the latest research deals with coronavirus, the construction industry ergonomics, and its relevant diseases. This study makes robust alerts to motivate the governments, organizations, and individuals to collaborate to find solutions to close the gap between the current situation in the construction of ergonomics and the required precaution to avoid the outbreak of the virus. This study makes a crucial and novel contribution by paving the way for providing solutions to save humanity worldwide. The management system should review the conventional risk assessment procedures, and developed criteria must be introduced and become an everyday practice of all construction projects. This will help identify the gaps within the safety procedures associated with the COVID – 19 protection aspects. This article also introduces a framework in this regard.


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