Saturday Night Seder (SNS) was broadcast online on 11 April 2020 as a public celebration of Passover and as a benefit for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Foundation. Part seder, part telethon, and part Broadway theatrical performance, SNS was the first online event to create a national Jewish communal gathering space in the context of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and has since been viewed over 1.5 million times. This article examines SNS as a uniquely situated manifestation of COVID-19, and draws attention to the various affordances engendered by SNS for Jewish gathering, learning, and exchange. It draws upon interviews with members of the production team, featured participants, and expert informants, as well as viewer responses from Twitter and YouTube a dataset that includes 2000 tweets and over 1800 YouTube comments. Collectively, these data suggest that cultural arts productions such as SNS have afforded an expansive network of online Jewish conversations during COVID-19, and have invited a broad audience of Jews and non-Jews into dialogue over Jewish themes and content.The current paper focuses on the circumstances that have led to the high COVID-19 infection rates amongst the ultra-Orthodox population in Israel. The current study utilizes a qualitative design and is based on in-depth interviews, email correspondence and online records of 25 ultra-Orthodox individuals who either tested positive for COVID-19 or had contact with a verified COVID-19 patient. The data were analyzed through identification of main themes and an interpretation of their meanings. The findings showed that a wide range of causes led to the high infection rate, including aspects that derive from a structural element, a religious element and a social-ideological element-all of which are directly or indirectly connected to religion. These findings demonstrate the central role of religion in health outcomes among the ultra-Orthodox community in general and during pandemics in particular, and they shed light on the central role of religion in health outcomes among closed-religious communities. The findings further reveal the importance of cooperation between the state authorities and the religious ones, and of providing culturally adapted health service solutions in the fight against COVID-19 and promoting health more generally. Study limitations are discussed and recommendations for future research are provided.The self-isolation and social distancing associated with the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic added a new dimension to a multifaceted and transnational secular Yiddish social landscape. The widespread use of digital communication technologies facilitated new forms of virtual participation in a heterotopic Yiddishland via lectures, concerts, classes and conversation groups. https://www.selleckchem.com/products/bsj-4-116.html This study examines engagement with secular Yiddish mediated by digital technologies during the early lockdowns and restrictions from March to May 2020. link2 It investigates the expansion of a cybervernacular mode of Yiddish in a virtual secular Yiddishland encompassing learners, speakers, activists and performers worldwide, and the roles that secular Yiddish social spaces played for their participants during the crisis.This article looks at the first 50 years of the Association for the Sociological Study of Jewry and finds that much of its subject matter remained constant. However, there have been significant changes in perspectives. Two cases in point are the perspectives on the impact of intermarriage and on the relationship of American Jewry with Israel. A number of the reasons for the changes in perspectives are suggested.Pancreatic cancer has one of the worst survival rates of all major cancers, with pancreatic cystic lesions accounting for one in three pancreatic surgeries. The current gold-standard for diagnosis of pancreatic cyst malignancy is based on the endoscopic ultrasound guided fine-needle aspiration (EUS-FNA) procedure, which suffers from a low accuracy in detecting malignancy. Here we present the design and two-photon polymerization based fabrication of refractive and reflective non-contact probes, capable of rapid surveillance of the entire internal cyst surface-an advance over the contact probe we recently developed that allowed, for the first time, reliable evaluation of pancreatic cyst malignant potential in vivo. We employed a novel two-photon polymerization technique, which allows direct laser-writing to an accuracy of tens of nanometers, to fit the probe within the 540 micrometer internal diameter EUS-FNA needle. The newly constructed probes show excellent separation of the illumination and collection beams, essential for proper operation of the spatial gating method. These probes can be used clinically to perform rapid "optical biopsy", ultimately eliminating unnecessary pancreatic surgeries on benign cysts and dangerous delays in surgical removal of malignant cysts, improving patient prognosis and quality of life.Children with autism situated in lower income families often receive intensive educational interventions as their primary form of treatment, due to financial barriers for community interventions. However, the continuity of care can be disrupted by school transitions. The quality of social relationships during the transition to a new school among parents, school staff and community providers, called the team-around-the-child (TAC), can potentially buffer a child with autism from the adverse effects caused by care disruptions. Qualities of social relationships, including trust and collaborative problem solving, can be measured using social network analysis. This study investigates if two different types of TAC relationships, defined as (1) the level of trust among team members and (2) the degree of collaborative problem solving among team members, are associated with perceived successful transitions for children with autism from lower income families. Findings suggested that TAC trust is significantly associated with the outcome of transition success for children with autism immediately post-transition.The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has been affecting the world, causing severe pneumonia and acute respiratory syndrome, leading people to death. Therefore, the search for anti-SARS-CoV-2 compounds is pivotal for public health. Natural products may present sources of bioactive compounds; among them, flavonoids are known in literature for their antiviral activity. Siparuna species are used in Brazilian folk medicine for the treatment of colds and flu. This work describes the isolation of 3,3',4'-tri-O-methyl-quercetin, 3,7,3',4'-tetra-O-methyl-quercetin (retusin), and 3,7-di-O-methyl-kaempferol (kumatakenin) from the dichloromethane extract of leaves of Siparuna cristata (Poepp. & Endl.) A.DC., Siparunaceae, using high-speed countercurrent chromatography in addition to the investigation of their inhibitory effect against SARS-CoV-2 viral replication. Retusin and kumatakenin inhibited SARS-CoV-2 replication in Vero E6 and Calu-3 cells, with a selective index greater than lopinavir/ritonavir and chloroquine, used as control. Flavonoids and their derivatives may stand for target compounds to be tested in future clinical trials to enrich the drug arsenal against coronavirus infections.
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s43450-021-00162-5.
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s43450-021-00162-5.Rates of harmful alcohol use are high among justice-involved individuals and may contribute to violent recidivism. Robust treatments for alcohol-related violence in criminal justice systems are thus a public health priority. In this analysis of existing randomized controlled trial data (N = 105), we examined the impact of a brief motivational intervention (BMI) for harmful substance use on violent recidivism among individuals in a pretrial jail diversion program. Results indicated that, after controlling for violence history, the intervention's impact on violent recidivism was moderated by baseline harmful alcohol use. Specifically, among people with severe alcohol problems at baseline, the BMI + standard care group had less violent recidivism at a 1-year follow-up than participants randomized to standard care alone. This finding was unchanged when we accounted for psychopathic traits. Our study provides preliminary evidence that a BMI may be useful for decreasing violent recidivism among heavy drinkers in criminal justice systems.The left ventricle of the heart is a fundamental structure in the human cardiac system that pumps oxygenated blood into the systemic circulation. link3 Several valvular conditions can cause the aortic and mitral valves associated with the left ventricle to become severely diseased and require replacement. However, the clinical outcomes of such operations, specifically the postoperative ventricular hemodynamics of replacing both valves, are not well understood. This work uses computational fluid-structure interaction (FSI) to develop an improved understanding of this effect by modeling a left ventricle with the aortic and mitral valves replaced with bioprostheses. We use a hybrid Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian/immersogeometric framework to accommodate the analysis of cardiac hemodynamics and heart valve structural mechanics in a moving fluid domain. The motion of the endocardium is obtained from a cardiac biomechanics simulation and provided as an input to the proposed numerical framework. The results from the simulations in this work indicate that the replacement of the native mitral valve with a tri-radially symmetric bioprosthesis dramatically changes the ventricular hemodynamics. Most significantly, the vortical motion in the left ventricle is found to reverse direction after mitral valve replacement. This study demonstrates that the proposed computational FSI framework is capable of simulating complex multiphysics problems and can provide an in-depth understanding of the cardiac mechanics.This paper is concerned with the interplay between statistical asymmetry and spectral methods. Suppose we are interested in estimating a rank-1 and symmetric matrix M ⋆ ∈ ℝ n × n , yet only a randomly perturbed version M is observed. The noise matrix M - M ⋆ is composed of independent (but not necessarily homoscedastic) entries and is, therefore, not symmetric in general. This might arise if, for example, we have two independent samples for each entry of M ⋆ and arrange them in an asymmetric fashion. The aim is to estimate the leading eigenvalue and the leading eigenvector of M ⋆. We demonstrate that the leading eigenvalue of the data matrix M can be O ( n ) times more accurate (up to some log factor) than its (unadjusted) leading singular value of M in eigenvalue estimation. Moreover, the eigen-decomposition approach is fully adaptive to heteroscedasticity of noise, without the need of any prior knowledge about the noise distributions. In a nutshell, this curious phenomenon arises since the statistical asymmetry automatically mitigates the bias of the eigenvalue approach, thus eliminating the need of careful bias correction. Additionally, we develop appealing non-asymptotic eigenvector perturbation bounds; in particular, we are able to bound the perterbation of any linear function of the leading eigenvector of M (e.g. entrywise eigenvector perturbation). We also provide partial theory for the more general rank-r case. The takeaway message is this arranging the data samples in an asymmetric manner and performing eigen-decomposition could sometimes be quite beneficial.