The COVID-19 pandemic has been the largest global health crisis in decades. Apart from the unprecedented number of deaths and hospitalizations, the pandemic has resulted in economic slowdowns, ...widespread business disruptions, and significant hardships. This study focused on investigating the early impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the U.S. construction industry since the declaration of the national emergency on 13 March 2020. The study objectives were achieved through 34 telephone interviews with project managers, engineers, designers, and superintendents that represented different states and distinct industry sectors in the United States (U.S.). The interviewees offered information on their experience with the pandemic, including the general and adverse effects experienced, new opportunities created, and risk management efforts being undertaken. The reported adverse effects included significant delays on projects, inability to secure materials on time, reduction in productivity rates, material price escalations, and others. The new opportunities that were created included projects involving the fast-track construction of medical facilities, construction of residential buildings, transportation-related work, and opportunities to recruit skilled workers. The risk management measures that were widely adopted included measures to enhance safety and reduce other project risks. The safety measures adopted included requiring employees to wear cloth face masks, adoption of social distancing protocols, staggering of construction operations, offering COVID-19-related training, administering temperature checks prior to entry into the workplace, and others. Measures to manage other project risks included the formation of a task force team to review the evolving pandemic and offer recommendations, advocating that construction businesses be deemed essential to combat delays and taking advantage of government relief programs. The study findings will be useful to industry stakeholders interested in understanding the early impacts of the pandemic on the construction industry. Industry stakeholders may also build upon the reported findings and establish best practices for continued safe and productive operations.
Contemporary data on the prevalence of e-cigarette use in the United States are limited.
To report the prevalence and distribution of current e-cigarette use among U.S. adults in 2016.
...Cross-sectional.
Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 2016.
Adults aged 18 years and older.
Prevalence of current e-cigarette use by sociodemographic groups, comorbid medical conditions, and states of residence.
Of participants with information on e-cigarette use (n = 466 842), 15 240 were current e-cigarette users, representing a prevalence of 4.5%, which corresponds to 10.8 million adult e-cigarette users in the United States. Of the e-cigarette users, 15% were never-cigarette smokers. The prevalence of current e-cigarette use was highest among persons aged 18 to 24 years (9.2% 95% CI, 8.6% to 9.8%), translating to approximately 2.8 million users in this age range. More than half the current e-cigarette users (51.2%) were younger than 35 years. In addition, the age-standardized prevalence of e-cigarette use was high among men; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons; current combustible cigarette smokers; and those with chronic health conditions. The prevalence of e-cigarette use varied widely among states, with estimates ranging from 3.1% (CI, 2.3% to 4.1%) in South Dakota to 7.0% (CI, 6.0% to 8.2%) in Oklahoma.
Data were self-reported, and no biochemical confirmation of tobacco use was available.
E-cigarette use is common, especially in younger adults, LGBT persons, current cigarette smokers, and persons with comorbid conditions. The prevalence of use differs across states. These contemporary estimates may inform researchers, health care policymakers, and tobacco regulators about demographic and geographic distributions of e-cigarette use.
American Heart Association Tobacco Regulation and Addiction Center, which is funded by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
The solar energy generation has grown significantly in the past years. The importance of PV penetration in power system as a major element of renewable energy source has seen it being widely used on ...a global scale. Despite its promising success, PV penetration presents various issues and its impact on the distribution system has to address for seamless integration in the power system. In this paper, a comprehensive overview on important issues affecting the distribution system as a result of PV penetration is presented. Pertinent issues such as voltage fluctuation, voltage rise, voltage balance, and harmonics and their effect on the system are discussed in details. The islanding issues, which are of critical importance to the stability and integrity of the system, are also thoroughly reviewed. Details on different islanding techniques – remote and local techniques and their advantage and disadvantages are shown. Therefore, this paper can provide useful information and serve as a reference for researchers and utility engineers on issues to be considered with regards to PV penetration.
The association between e-cigarette use and chronic bronchitis, emphysema, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease has not been studied thoroughly, particularly in populations defined by ...concomitant combustible smoking status.
Using pooled 2016 and 2017 data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, investigators studied 705,159 participants with complete self-reported information on e-cigarette use, combustible cigarette use, key covariates, and chronic bronchitis, emphysema, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Current e-cigarette use was the main exposure, with current use further classified as daily or occasional use. The main outcome was defined as reported ever having a diagnosis of chronic bronchitis, emphysema, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. For all the analyses, multivariable adjusted logistic regression was used, with the study population stratified by combustible cigarette use status (never, former, or current). All the analyses were conducted in 2019.
Of 705,159 participants, 25,175 (3.6%) were current e-cigarette users, 64,792 (9.2%) current combustible cigarette smokers, 207,905 (29.5%) former combustible cigarette smokers, 432,462 (61.3%) never combustible cigarette smokers, and 14,036 (2.0%) dual users of e-cigarettes and combustible cigarettes. A total of 53,702 (7.6%) participants self-reported chronic bronchitis, emphysema, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Among never combustible cigarette smokers, current e-cigarette use was associated with 75% higher odds of chronic bronchitis, emphysema, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease compared with never e-cigarette users (OR=1.75, 95% CI=1.25, 2.45), with daily users of e-cigarettes having the highest odds (OR=2.64, 95% CI=1.43, 4.89). Similar associations between e-cigarette use and chronic bronchitis, emphysema, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease were noted among both former and current combustible cigarette smokers.
The results suggest possible e-cigarette–related pulmonary toxicity across all the categories of combustible cigarette smoking status, including those who had never smoked combustible cigarettes.
The prevalence of e-cigarette use in the United States has increased rapidly. However, the association between e-cigarette use and cardiovascular disease remains virtually unknown. Therefore, we ...aimed to examine the association between e-cigarette use and cardiovascular disease among never and current combustible-cigarette smokers.
We pooled 2016 and 2017 data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), a large, nationally representative, cross-sectional telephone survey. We included 449,092 participants with complete self-reported information on all key variables. The main exposure, e-cigarette use, was further divided into daily or occasional use, and stratified by combustible-cigarette use (never and current). Cardiovascular disease, the main outcome, was defined as a composite of self-reported coronary heart disease, myocardial infarction, or stroke.
Of 449,092 participants, there were 15,863 (3.5%) current e-cigarette users, 12,908 (2.9%) dual users of e-cigarettes + combustible cigarettes, and 44,852 (10.0%) with cardiovascular disease. We found no significant association between e-cigarette use and cardiovascular disease among never combustible-cigarette smokers. Compared with current combustible-cigarette smokers who never used e-cigarettes, dual use of e-cigarettes + combustible cigarettes was associated with 36% higher odds of cardiovascular disease (odds ratio 1.36; 95% confidence interval, 1.18-1.56); with consistent results in subgroup analyses of premature cardiovascular disease in women <65 years and men <55 years old.
Our results suggest significantly higher odds of cardiovascular disease among dual users of e-cigarettes + combustible cigarettes compared with smoking alone. These data, although preliminary, support the critical need to conduct longitudinal studies exploring cardiovascular disease risk associated with e-cigarette use, particularly among dual users.
The e-cigarette or vaping product-use-associated lung injury (EVALI) epidemic was primarily associated with the use of e-cigarettes containing tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)- the principal psychoactive ...substance in cannabis, and vitamin-E-acetate- an additive sometimes used in informally sourced THC-containing e-liquids. EVALI case burden varied across states, but it is unclear whether this was associated with state-level cannabis vaping prevalence. We, therefore, used linear regression models to assess the cross-sectional association between state-level cannabis vaping prevalence (obtained from the 2019 behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System) and EVALI case burden (obtained from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) adjusted for state cannabis policies. Cannabis vaping prevalence ranged from 1.14%(95%CI, 0.61%-2.12%) in Wyoming to 3.11%(95%CI, 2.16%-4.44%) in New Hampshire. EVALI cases per million population ranged from 1.90(0.38–3.42) in Oklahoma to 59.10(19.70–96.53) in North Dakota. There was no significant positive association but an inverse association between state cannabis vaping prevalence and EVALI case burden (Coefficient, -18.6; 95%CI, -37.5–0.4; p-value, 0.05). Thus, state-level cannabis vaping prevalence was not positively associated with EVALI prevalence, suggesting that there may not be a simple direct link between state cannabis vaping prevalence and EVALI cases, but rather the relationship is likely more nuanced and possibly reflective of access to informal sources of THC-containing e-cigarettes.
Unsupervised Deep Event Stereo for Depth Estimation Uddin, S. M. Nadim; Ahmed, Soikat Hasan; Jung, Yong Ju
IEEE transactions on circuits and systems for video technology,
11/2022, Volume:
32, Issue:
11
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Bio-inspired event cameras have been considered effective alternatives to traditional frame-based cameras for stereo depth estimation, especially in challenging conditions such as low-light or ...high-speed environments. Recently, deep learning-based supervised event stereo matching methods have achieved significant performance improvements over the traditional event stereo methods. However, the supervised methods depend on ground-truth disparity maps for training, and it is difficult to secure a large amount of ground-truth disparity maps. A feasible alternative is to devise an unsupervised event stereo method that can be trained without ground-truth disparity maps. To this end, we propose the first unsupervised event stereo matching method that can predict dense disparity maps, and is trained by transforming the depth estimation problem into a warping-based reconstruction problem. We propose a novel unsupervised loss function that enforces the network to minimize the feature-level epipolar correlation difference between the ground-truth intensity images and warped images. Moreover, we propose a novel event embedding mechanism that utilizes both temporal and spatial neighboring events to capture spatio-temporal relationships among the events for stereo matching. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method outperforms the baseline unsupervised methods by significant margins (e.g., up to 16.88% improvement) and achieves comparable results with the existing supervised methods. Extensive ablation studies validate the efficacy of the proposed modules and architectural choices.
High-dynamic-range (HDR) image reconstruction methods are designed to fuse multiple Low-dynamic-range (LDR) images captured with different exposure values into a single HDR image. Recent CNN-based ...methods mostly perform local attention- or alignment-based fusion of multiple LDR images to create HDR contents. Depending on a single attention mechanism or alignment causes failure in compensating ghosting artifacts, which can arise in the synthesized HDR images due to the motion of objects or camera movement across different LDR image inputs. In this study, we propose a multi-scale attention-guided non-local network called MSANLnet for efficient HDR image reconstruction. To mitigate the ghosting artifacts, the proposed MSANLnet performs implicit alignment of LDR image features with multi-scale spatial attention modules and then reconstructs pixel intensity values using long-range dependencies through non-local means-based fusion. These modules adaptively select useful information that is not damaged by an object’s movement or unfavorable lighting conditions for image pixel fusion. Quantitative evaluations against several current state-of-the-art methods show that the proposed approach achieves higher performance than the existing methods. Moreover, comparative visual results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in restoring saturated information from original input images and mitigating ghosting artifacts caused by large movement of objects. Ablation studies show the effectiveness of the proposed method, architectural choices, and modules for efficient HDR reconstruction.
PDF
