This exploratory research examines how the COVID-19 pandemic led to increases in consumers' social media marketing behaviors in the United States (U.S.). Previous research on the impact of a pandemic ...has focused on behavior for preventive health, however, little attention has been given to the impact of a pandemic on consumer behaviors. To bridge this gap, the Consumer Decision-Making Model was used as a framework to investigate changes in consumers' social media behaviors as they preform various consumer decision-making processes. More specifically, a questionnaire was used to collect survey data from 327 U.S. consumers. Analysis of Variance tests were performed to examine mean differences in consumers' use of social media as a consumer decision-making tool. The findings showed that consumers have increased their utilization of social media as a tool for identifying products, collecting information on products, evaluating products, and making product purchases. Thus, the findings demonstrate the growing importance of social media marketing since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Given that the COVID-19 pandemic is a global phenomenon, the findings likely can be extrapolated across many nations. Suggestions are provided to help businesses adopt to changes in consumers' social media behaviors as they relate to the consumer decision-making processes.
Soil sensors and plant wearables play a critical role in smart and precision agriculture via monitoring real‐time physical and chemical signals in the soil, such as temperature, moisture, pH, and ...pollutants and providing key information to optimize crop growth circumstances, fight against biotic and abiotic stresses, and enhance crop yields. Herein, the recent advances of the important soil sensors in agricultural applications, including temperature sensors, moisture sensors, organic matter compounds sensors, pH sensors, insect/pest sensors, and soil pollutant sensors are reviewed. Major sensing technologies, designs, performance, and pros and cons of each sensor category are highlighted. Emerging technologies such as plant wearables and wireless sensor networks are also discussed in terms of their applications in precision agriculture. The research directions and challenges of soil sensors and intelligent agriculture are finally presented.
Recent advances of soil sensors for monitoring soil moisture, temperature, nutrition, pH value, insects/pests, and pollutants, as well as emerging plant wearables are reviewed. The designs, performance, and pros and cons of each sensor, manufacturing technology, and wireless sensor network for smart and precision agriculture are discussed. The research trends and challenges of smart agriculture systems are also presented.
Modern biosensors play a critical role in healthcare and have a quickly growing commercial market. Compared to traditional optical-based sensing, electrochemical biosensors are attractive due to ...superior performance in response time, cost, complexity and potential for miniaturization. To address the shortcomings of traditional benchtop electrochemical instruments, in recent years, many complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) instrumentation circuits have been reported for electrochemical biosensors. This paper provides a review and analysis of CMOS electrochemical instrumentation circuits. First, important concepts in electrochemical sensing are presented from an instrumentation point of view. Then, electrochemical instrumentation circuits are organized into functional classes, and reported CMOS circuits are reviewed and analyzed to illuminate design options and performance tradeoffs. Finally, recent trends and challenges toward on-CMOS sensor integration that could enable highly miniaturized electrochemical biosensor microsystems are discussed. The information in the paper can guide next generation electrochemical sensor design.
This paper introduces a CMOS-microfluidics integration scheme for electrochemical microsystems. A CMOS chip was embedded into a micro-machined silicon carrier. By leveling the CMOS chip and carrier ...surface to within 100 nm, an expanded obstacle-free surface suitable for photolithography was achieved. Thin film metal planar interconnects were microfabricated to bridge CMOS pads to the perimeter of the carrier, leaving a flat and smooth surface for integrating microfluidic structures. A model device containing SU-8 microfluidic mixers and detection channels crossing over microelectrodes on a CMOS integrated circuit was constructed using the chip-carrier assembly scheme. Functional integrity of microfluidic structures and on-CMOS electrodes was verified by a simultaneous sample dilution and electrochemical detection experiment within multi-channel microfluidics. This lab-on-CMOS integration process is capable of high packing density, is suitable for wafer-level batch production, and opens new opportunities to combine the performance benefits of on-CMOS sensors with lab-on-chip platforms.
Lab-on-CMOS: a device integrating multi-channel microfluidics and electrochemical sensors on CMOS.
•The first free and open-source ambulance simulation and optimisation package.•Code written in Julia programming language for speed and flexibility.•Useful for testing different operational policies ...and algorithms.•Includes a growing number of city models for easy comparison of results.
Emergency Medical Service (EMS) providers make decisions such as selecting ambulance station locations and ambulance dispatch policies; these decisions can be made effectively with the aid of optimisation and simulation models. We have developed JEMSS – a Julia (programming language) package for Emergency Medical Services Simulation – to allow for performance evaluation and optimisation of decisions or policies for problems arising in EMS operations and strategic planning. To the best of our knowledge this is the first free and open-source EMS simulation and optimisation package, which incorporates integer programming optimisation, heuristic local search, and simulation capabilities. The decision protocols used for ambulance dispatch and dynamic redeployment during a simulation run are flexible and easy to customize. Analytical optimisation models relevant to EMS decision-making are included, such as for station location and ambulance deployment problems. The simulations run quickly, requiring less than a second to simulate 100 days for a realistic city model. Data to simulate Auckland, New Zealand is included in the package and other cities will be added to enable researchers to conduct a more varied and fair comparison of newly developed EMS strategies. The JEMSS package includes a visualisation tool to view the simulation as it is running. The simulation model has been validated by comparing the simulation trace and output of existing EMS simulation and analysis software BartSim. This paper details the JEMSS design and presents a case study showing how to apply integer programming, local search, and simulation optimisation using JEMSS.
•A new miniaturized planar electrochemical gas sensor was presented for rapid measurement of multiple gaseous hazards.•The microfabrication process was optimized for the gas sensor fabrication.•Four ...different gases including oxygen, methane, sulfur dioxide and ozone were measured.•The gas sensor presents good sensitivity, linearity and repeatability in gas measurements with fast response and miniaturized size.
The growing impact of airborne pollutants and explosive gases on human health and occupational safety has escalated the demand of sensors to monitor hazardous gases. This paper presents a new miniaturized planar electrochemical gas sensor for rapid measurement of multiple gaseous hazards. The gas sensor features a porous polytetrafluoroethylene substrate that enables fast gas diffusion and room temperature ionic liquid as the electrolyte. Metal sputtering was utilized for platinum electrodes fabrication to enhance adhesion between the electrodes and the substrate. Together with carefully selected electrochemical methods, the miniaturized gas sensor is capable of measuring multiple gases including oxygen, methane, ozone and sulfur dioxide that are important to human health and safety. Compared to its manually-assembled Clark-cell predecessor, this sensor provides better sensitivity, linearity and repeatability, as validated for oxygen monitoring. With solid performance, fast response and miniaturized size, this sensor is promising for deployment in wearable devices for real-time point-of-exposure gas pollutant monitoring.
The advent of next generation sequencing (NGS) has enabled investigations of the gut microbiome with unprecedented resolution and throughput. This has stimulated the development of sophisticated ...bioinformatics tools to analyze the massive amounts of data generated. Researchers therefore need a clear understanding of the key concepts required for the design, execution and interpretation of NGS experiments on microbiomes. We conducted a literature review and used our own data to determine which approaches work best. The two main approaches for analyzing the microbiome, 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) gene amplicons and shotgun metagenomics, are illustrated with analyses of libraries designed to highlight their strengths and weaknesses. Several methods for taxonomic classification of bacterial sequences are discussed. We present simulations to assess the number of sequences that are required to perform reliable appraisals of bacterial community structure. To the extent that fluctuations in the diversity of gut bacterial populations correlate with health and disease, we emphasize various techniques for the analysis of bacterial communities within samples (α-diversity) and between samples (β-diversity). Finally, we demonstrate techniques to infer the metabolic capabilities of a bacteria community from these 16S and shotgun data.
New estimates of economic flows by age combined with population projections show that in the coming decades (1) global GDP growth could be slower by about 1 percentage point per year, declining more ...sharply than population growth; (2) GDP will shift toward sub‐Saharan Africa more than population trends suggest; (3) living standards of working‐age adults may be squeezed by high spending on children and seniors; (4) changing population age distribution will raise living standards in many lower‐income nations; (5) changing economic life cycles will amplify the economic effects of population aging in many higher income economies; and (6) population aging will likely push public debt, private assets, and perhaps productivity higher. Population change will have profound implications for national, regional, and global economies.
High quality reference genomes have facilitated the study of endogenous retroviruses (ERVs). However, there are an increasing number of published works which assume the ERVs in reference genomes are ...universal; even those of evolutionarily recent integrations. Consequently, these studies fail to properly characterise polymorphic ERVs, and even propose biological functions for ERVs that may not actually be present in the genomes of interest. Here, I outline the pitfalls of three studies of chicken endogenous Avian Leukosis Viruses (ALVEs or "ev genes": the "original" ERVs), all confounded by the assumption that the reference genome provides a representative ALVE baseline.
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