scholarly journals Sex Differences in Spatial Activity and Anxiety Levels in the COVID-19 Pandemic from Evolutionary Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 1110
Author(s):  
Olga Semenova ◽  
Julia Apalkova ◽  
Marina Butovskaya

Despite the enforced lockdown regime in late March 2020 in Russia, the phenomenon of the continued virus spreading highlighted the importance of studies investigating the range of biosocial attributes and spectrum of individual motivations underlying the permanent presence of the substantial level of spatial activity. For this matter, we conducted a set of surveys between March and June 2020 (N = 492). We found that an individual’s health attitude is the most consistent factor explaining mobility differences. However, our data suggested that wariness largely determines adequate health attitudes; hence, a higher level of wariness indirectly reduced individual mobility. Comparative analysis revealed the critical biosocial differences between the two sexes, potentially rooted in the human evolutionary past. Females were predisposed to express more wariness in the face of new environmental risks; therefore, they minimize their mobility and outdoor contacts. In contrast to them, the general level of spatial activity reported by males was significantly higher. Wariness in the males’ sample was less associated with the novel virus threat, but to a great extent, it was predicted by the potential economic losses variable. These findings correspond to the evolutionary predictions of sexual specialization and the division of family roles.

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 055-059
Author(s):  
Abd El-Aziz Mahmoud Hamdy ◽  
Khalil Mohamed Salah

For many years, chemical pesticides have been performed to control different pests and diseases and this may be due to their broad spectrum of action, easy of application and the relatively low cost. But these chemicals have environmental risks, thus alternative control agents are needed. Chitosan is one of the novel suggested solutions to reduce the economic losses associated with chemical pesticides. Chitosan is naturally-occurring compound, as well as safe and biodegradable which obtained from certain natural sources. Chitosan have unique properties which help to control viruses, bacteria, fungi, insects, plant nematodes and other pests locally and systemically.


2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-109
Author(s):  
Kristen Marangoni

The enigmatic setting of Beckett's novel Watt has been compared to places as diverse as an insane asylum, a boarding school, a womb, and a concentration camp. Watt's experience at Knott's house does seem suggestive of all of these, and yet it may more readily conform to the setting of a monastery. The novel is filled with chants, meditations, choral arrangements, hierarchical classifications, and even silence, all highly evocative of a monastic lifestyle. Some of Watt's dialogue (such as his requests for forgiveness or reflections on the nature of mankind) further echoes various Catholic liturgies. Watt finds little solace in these activities, however. He feels that they are largely rote and purposeless as they are focused on Knott, a figure who in many ways defies linguistic description and physical know-ability. Watt's meditations and rituals become, then, empty catechisms without answers, something that is reflected in the extreme difficulty that Watt has communicating. In the face of linguistic and liturgical instability, the Watt notebooks present a counter reading that can be found in the thousand plus doodles that line its pages. The drawings reinforce as well as subvert their textual counterpart, and they function in many ways as the images in medieval illuminated manuscripts. The doodles in Watt often take the form of decorative letters, elaborate marginal drawings, and depictions of a variety of people and animals, and many of its doodles offer uncanny resemblances in form or theme to those in illuminated manuscripts like The Book of Kells. Doodles of saints, monks, crosses, and scribes even give an occasional pictorial nod to the monastic setting in which illuminated manuscripts were usually produced (and remind us of the monastic conditions in which Beckett found himself writing much of Watt). Beckett's doodles not only channel this medium of illuminated manuscripts, they also modernize its application. Instead of neat geometric shapes extending down the page, his geometric doodle sequences are often abstracted, fragmented, and nonlinear. Beckett also occasionally modernized the content of illuminated manuscripts: instead of the traditional sacramental communion table filled with candles, bread and wine, Beckett doodles a science lab table where Bunsen burners replaces candles and wine glasses function as beakers. It is through these modernized images that Watt attempts to draw contemporary relevance from a classic art form and to restore (at least partial) meaning to rote traditions.


Author(s):  
Jane Austen ◽  
Jane Stabler

‘Me!’ cried Fanny … ‘Indeed you must excuse me. I could not act any thing if you were to give me the world. No, indeed, I cannot act.’ At the age of ten, Fanny Price leaves the poverty of her Portsmouth home to be brought up among the family of her wealthy uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, in the chilly grandeur of Mansfield Park. There she accepts her lowly status, and gradually falls in love with her cousin Edmund. When the dazzling and sophisticated Henry and Mary Crawford arrive, Fanny watches as her cousins become embroiled in rivalry and sexual jealousy. As the company starts to rehearse a play by way of entertainment, Fanny struggles to retain her independence in the face of the Crawfords’ dangerous attractions; and when Henry turns his attentions to her, the drama really begins… This new edition does full justice to Austen’s complex and subtle story, placing it in its Regency context and elucidating the theatrical background that pervades the novel.


2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Adrian J. Wallbank

Adrian J. Wallbank, "Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending 'Critical Attitudes' in the Face of Societal Ruination" (pp. 1–36) In the aftermath of the French "Revolution Controversy," middle-class evangelical writers made a concerted effort to rehabilitate the moral fabric of British society. Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–98) are recognized as pivotal within this program, but in this essay I question whether they were really as influential as has been supposed. I argue that autobiographical evidence from the period demonstrates an increasing skepticism toward overt didacticism, and that despite their significant and undeniable penetration within working-class culture, the Cheap Repository Tracts, if not all "received ideologies," were increasingly being rejected by their readers. This essay examines the important contribution that Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues (1801) made to this arena. Hill, like many of his contemporaries, felt that British society was facing ruination, but he also recognized that overt moralizing and didacticism was no longer palatable or effective. I argue that Hill thus experimented with an array of literary techniques—many of which closely intersect with developments occurring within the novel and sometimes appear to contradict or undermine the avowed seriousness of evangelicalism—that not only attempt to circumvent what Jonathan Rose has described as the "critical attitudes" of early-nineteenth-century readers, but also effectively map the "transitional" nature of the shifting literary and social terrains of the period. In so doing, Hill contributed signally to the evolution of the dialogue form (which is often synonymous with mentoring and didacticism), since his use of conversational mimesis and satire predated the colloquialism of John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae (1822–35) and Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations (1824–29).


2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-103
Author(s):  
Peter Leman
Keyword(s):  
Old Age ◽  

Abstract This article examines Nuruddin Farah's 1979 novel Sweet and Sour Milk, asking how we read representations of postcolonial mourning and living death in the context of global authoritarianism. The first novel in Farah's influential dictatorship trilogy, Sweet and Sour Milk introduces us to “the General,” a fictionalized version of Siyad Barre, who ruled Somalia from 1969 to 1991. Like Barre's, the General's power exemplifies what Achille Mbembe calls “necropolitics,” or “the contemporary subjugation of life to the power of death.” The General's necropower manifests, peculiarly, as a politics of substitution—that is, when he takes a life, he leaves something in its place. Rebels do not simply disappear; they are killed and then given sycophantic zombie afterlives in the General's propaganda. In response to this politics of substitution, Farah explores a politics of mourning, which insists upon the irreplaceability of lost love objects and thereby broadly reveals what truly can and cannot be substituted. The General insists on the uniqueness of his power, for example, but Farah reveals it to be a cliché, easily substituted by that of other dictators throughout history. Cliché becomes revolutionary in this way, suggesting that dictators share a common fate: they will be deposed or, eventually, die of old age. However, like a horde of the living dead, others like them will return. The article concludes with analysis of the apparent pessimism of this point and the global implications of Farah's ideas about both necropolitics and the limits of the novel form in the face of authoritarian power.


2021 ◽  
pp. 21-34
Author(s):  
PU JINGXIN

Abstract: The danger of the novel coronavirus has not yet come to an end, and new variants have begun to attack the world. What philosophy should humankind’s strategy be based on when human society as a group is fighting against Covid-19, as the pandemic ravages the world? Unfortunately, political leaders of various countries have failed to achieve the overall awareness of attacking the pandemic for a shared future for mankind so far. In the face of the pandemic, mankind as a whole urgently needs to break through the narrow nation-oriented ideology of seeking only self-protection. The International Community should establish a new type of international cooperation featuring the concept of harmony of "all things under heaven as a unity". The international relations system dominated by the power ofwestern discourse is now in a bottleneck. The main aim of this article is to study the ancient Chinese wisdom of "the Unity of Man and Heaven" philosophy and build a global harmonious community. The author argues that the “export” of the aforementioned wisdom must be a priority for Chinese scholars. Keywords: Tao; Unity of Man and Heaven; Novel Coronavirus; Anthropocentrism; Harmony.


2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 284-307
Author(s):  
Giovanni Comandè ◽  
Giulia Schneider

Abstract Health data are the most special of the ‘special categories’ of data under Art. 9 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The same Art. 9 GDPR prohibits, with broad exceptions, the processing of ‘data concerning health’. Our thesis is that, through data mining technologies, health data have progressively undergone a process of distancing from the healthcare sphere as far as the generation, the processing and the uses are concerned. The case study aims thus to test the endurance of the ‘special category’ of health data in the face of data mining technologies and the never-ending lifecycles of health data they feed. At a more general level of analysis, the case of health data shows that data mining techniques challenge core data protection notions, such as the distinction between sensitive and non-sensitive personal data, requiring a shift in terms of systemic perspectives that the GDPR only partly addresses.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Changsheng Li ◽  
Xiaoyi Gu ◽  
Xiao Xiao ◽  
Chwee Ming Lim ◽  
Xingguang Duan ◽  
...  

There are high risks of infection for surgeons during the face-to-face COVID-19 swab sampling due to the novel coronavirus’s infectivity. To address this issue, we propose a flexible transoral robot with a teleoperated configuration for swab sampling. The robot comprises a flexible manipulator, an endoscope with a monitor, and a master device. A 3-prismatic-universal (3-PU) flexible parallel mechanism with 3 degrees of freedom (DOF) is used to realize the manipulator’s movements. The flexibility of the manipulator improves the safety of testees. Besides, the master device is similar to the manipulator in structure. It is easy to use for operators. Under the guidance of the vision from the endoscope, the surgeon can operate the master device to control the swab’s motion attached to the manipulator for sampling. In this paper, the robotic system, the workspace, and the operation procedure are described in detail. The tongue depressor, which is used to prevent the tongue’s interference during the sampling, is also tested. The accuracy of the manipulator under visual guidance is validated intuitively. Finally, the experiment on a human phantom is conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the robot preliminarily.


2017 ◽  
Vol 163 ◽  
pp. 401-414
Author(s):  
Albert Nowacki

Youth to old age: respect or depreciation? Namir! by Lubko DereshThis article deals the problem of old age in the novel Namir! by Ukrainian writer Lubko Deresh. To accomplish this research task, at the beginning of the presentation problem of how the elderly was presented in culture and literature over the centuries was analyzed, and then was analyzed the novel itself. Studies have shown that in his book the author raised the question of a confrontation of youth with an old age. Our analyzes of Namir! by Deresh turned out that it repeats the patterns of mass culture, showing atendency to devaluation the elderly. During the study revealed, however, achange in approach to the problems of old age, which is visible attitude of respect for the elderly linked to equality in the face of inevitable death.Молодість перед старістю: пошана чи зневага? Намір! Любка ДерешаМетою цієї статті є спроба показати проблему старості в романі українського пись­менника Любка Дереша Намір! Щоб успішно висвітлити так окреслене завдання, на по­чатку було звернено особливу вагу на те, як питання старості представлялося культурою та літературою протягом століть, і тільки тоді було звернено увагу на саму повість. Дослі­дження показали, що в своїй книзі автор використав питання конфронтації молодого віку із старістю. Під час аналізу нами було встановлено, що Намір! повторює схеми масової куль­тури та показує виразну схильність автора до девальвації літніх людей. Наше дослідження показало, однак, певну зміну в підході до проблеми старості, а саме, що зміна зневаги на ставлення з повагою до літніх людей пов’язана із рівністю всіх людей перед обличчям не­минучої смерті.


2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 564-568
Author(s):  
Sumit Chawla ◽  
Harinder Singh ◽  
Bharti Chawla

On 31st December 2019, China informed local WHO office of "cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology detected in Wuhan. As of 6th May 2020, there are nearly 3.6 million cases of corona virus infection and approximately 0.25 million deaths worldwide. The real-time data regarding the actual number of cases, as it originates from the epicenter is the key to the estimation of the case fatality rate, hospitalization rates, expected timeline of arrival of contagion, and other epidemiological data. The novel virus has no available literature pertaining to its epidemiological parameters, on which experts can base their estimates and hence the challenge in planning for epidemic management. Bolstering this challenge are the reports alleging under-reporting by Chinese authorities. Alleged toned down numbers could have led to erroneously low estimates contributing to inadequate public health response globally. We conducted a simulation on epidemiological model of COVID-19 to find out expected time off arrival of infections and mortality in different countries and compared this to actual data.


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