Given the recent number of hate-related incidents that have come to public attention, there is a significant need to collect and track these incidents in order to capture and share trends with the ...wider public. Outside of official hate crime data (such as annual government reports), incidents fueled by hate (but that are not crimes) often go undocumented. To address this gap, the Alberta Hate Crimes Committee – a Canadian coalition of law enforcement, government, and non-governmental organizations – developed the StopHateAB.ca website. The purpose of the StopHateAb.ca website is to fill this gap by creating a space to capture hate incidents to document and make accessible information related to hate incidents. This article will describe the development of the online hate incident reporting tool StopHateAB.ca. Through a discussion of the strengths and challenges of creating an online hate incident reporting platform, this paper will highlight the importance of innovative responses to counter hate and bias by making hate visible. As this article highlights, making hate visible forces communities to engage in joint conversations about hate and bias to support strategies that foster a public social environment of justice, equity, and human rights.
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the cause of an ongoing pandemic, with increasing deaths worldwide. To date, documentation of the histopathological features in fatal ...cases of the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) has been scarce due to sparse autopsy performance and incomplete organ sampling. We aimed to provide a clinicopathological report of severe COVID-19 cases by documenting histopathological changes and evidence of SARS-CoV-2 tissue tropism.
In this case series, patients with a positive antemortem or post-mortem SARS-CoV-2 result were considered eligible for enrolment. Post-mortem examinations were done on 14 people who died with COVID-19 at the King County Medical Examiner's Office (Seattle, WA, USA) and Snohomish County Medical Examiner's Office (Everett, WA, USA) in negative-pressure isolation suites during February and March, 2020. Clinical and laboratory data were reviewed. Tissue examination was done by light microscopy, immunohistochemistry, electron microscopy, and quantitative RT-PCR.
The median age of our cohort was 73·5 years (range 42–84; IQR 67·5–77·25). All patients had clinically significant comorbidities, the most common being hypertension, chronic kidney disease, obstructive sleep apnoea, and metabolic disease including diabetes and obesity. The major pulmonary finding was diffuse alveolar damage in the acute or organising phases, with five patients showing focal pulmonary microthrombi. Coronavirus-like particles were detected in the respiratory system, kidney, and gastrointestinal tract. Lymphocytic myocarditis was observed in one patient with viral RNA detected in the tissue.
The primary pathology observed in our cohort was diffuse alveolar damage, with virus located in the pneumocytes and tracheal epithelium. Microthrombi, where observed, were scarce and endotheliitis was not identified. Although other non-pulmonary organs showed susceptibility to infection, their contribution to the pathogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 infection requires further examination.
None.
This article examines the discursive practices of Facebook users who use the platform to express racist views. We analyzed 51,991 public comments posted to 119 news stories about race, racism, or ...ethnicity on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News Facebook page. We examined whether users who hold racist viewpoints (the vocal minority) are less likely to express views that go against the majority view for fear of social isolation. According to the “spiral of silence” theory, the vocal minority would presumably fear this isolation effect. However, our analysis shows that on Facebook, a predominantly nonanonymous and moderated platform, the vocal minority are comfortable expressing unpopular views, questioning the explanatory power of this popular theory in the online context. Based on automated analysis of 8,636 comments, we found 64 percent mentioned race or ethnicity, and 18 percent exhibited some form of othering. A manual coding of 1,161 comments showed that 18 percent exhibited some form of othering, and 25 percent countered the racist discourse. In sum, while Facebook provides space to express racist discourse, users also turn to this platform to counter the hateful narratives.
This paper considers three different projects that have used Twitter to track racist language: 1) Racist Tweets in Canada (the author’s original work); 2) Anti-social media (a 2014 study by U.K. ...think tank DEMOS); and, 3) The Geography of Hate Map (created by researchers at Humboldt University) in order to showcase the ability to track racism online using Twitter. As each of these projects collected racist language on Twitter using very different methods, a discussion of each data collection method used as well as the strengths and challenges of each method is provided. More importantly, however, this paper highlights why Twitter is an important data collection tool for researchers interested in studying race and racism.
"Not So Black and White" Chaudhry, Irfan
Cultural studies, critical methodologies,
06/2016, Volume:
16, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Although Twitter may not be representative of the overall population, information gathered from Twitter can assist our understanding of what people think about certain social issues, particularly ...race. With this in mind, using Twitter as the main source for data collection, this study tracks the #Ferguson hashtag in the 4 days following the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, to examine how race was discussed in the aftermath of the event. A key question guiding this article is how do the tweets captured resonate with broader understandings about race in America?
When Vaping Isn't Actually Safer Ogburn, Timothy; Chaudhry, Irfan; Knight, Laura D.
The American journal of forensic medicine and pathology,
5/2024
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Abstract Vape juice is a diluent for e-cigarette active ingredients, nicotine or tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Lack of strict regulation in vape juice production is a concern as ingredients and their ...concentrations may vary widely from the labeling. A 43-year-old woman was transported via ambulance to the hospital after ingesting homemade vape juice, presenting unresponsive with decerebrate posturing. She reportedly made a tincture combining a vape juice purchased online (containing “ethylene glycol”) and THC for “endometriosis-related pain relief.” Laboratory evaluation revealed anion gap metabolic acidosis, elevated serum lactate, and high serum osmolality. Urine fluoresced under Wood's lamp, and fomepizole was administered as an ethylene glycol antidote, but she expired the following afternoon. Clinical serum toxicology results returned after death revealed 235 mg/dL of methanol, and no ethylene glycol. Autopsy findings included ischemic changes of the gastrointestinal tract and cerebral edema with herniation. Postmortem toxicology performed on hospital admission blood revealed methanol (220 mg/dL), propylene glycol (59 mg/dL), Δ-9 THC and metabolites, and medications administered during hospitalization. The medical examiner determined the cause of death to be methanol and propylene glycol toxicity. To our knowledge, this is the first report of accidental death from ingestion of vape juice contaminated with toxic alcohol.
Not So Black and White Chaudhry, Irfan
Cultural studies, critical methodologies,
06/2016, Volume:
16, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Although Twitter may not be representative of the overall population, information gathered from Twitter can assist our understanding of what people think about certain social issues, particularly ...race. With this in mind, using Twitter as the main source for data collection, this study tracks the #Ferguson hashtag in the 4 days following the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, to examine how race was discussed in the aftermath of the event. A key question guiding this article is how do the tweets captured resonate with broader understandings about race in America?
Serverless computing is becoming increasingly popular due to its ease of programming, fast elasticity, and fine-grained billing. However, the serverless provider still needs to provision, manage, and ...pay the IaaS provider for the virtual machines (VMs) hosting its platform. This ties the cost of the serverless platform to the cost of the underlying VMs. One way to significantly reduce cost is to use spare resources, which cloud providers rent at a massive discount. Harvest VMs offer such cheap resources: they grow and shrink to harvest all the unallocated CPU cores in their host servers, but may be evicted to make room for more expensive VMs. Thus, using Harvest VMs to run the serverless platform comes with two main challenges that must be carefully managed: VM evictions and dynamically varying resources in each VM.
In this work, we explore the challenges and benefits of hosting serverless (Function as a Service or simply FaaS) platforms on Harvest VMs. We characterize the serverless workloads and Harvest VMs of Microsoft Azure, and design a serverless load balancer that is aware of evictions and resource variations in Harvest VMs. We modify OpenWhisk, a widely-used open-source serverless platform, to monitor harvested resources and balance the load accordingly, and evaluate it experimentally. Our results show that adopting harvested resources improves efficiency and reduces cost. Under the same cost budget, running serverless platforms on harvested resources achieves 2.2x to 9.0x higher throughput compared to using dedicated resources. When using the same amount of resources, running serverless platforms on harvested resources achieves 48% to 89% cost savings with lower latency due to better load balancing.