CT-FC: more Comprehensive Traversal Focused Crawler

 In today’s world, people depend more on the WWW information, including professionals who have to analyze the data according their domain to maintain and improve their business. A data analysis would require information that is comprehensive and relevant to their domain. Focused crawler as a topical based Web indexer agent is used to meet this application’s information need. In order to increase the precision, focused crawler face the problem of low recall. The study on WWW hyperlink structure characteristics indicates that many Web documents are not strong connected but through co-citation & co-reference. Conventional focused crawler that uses forward crawling strategy could not visit the documents in these characteristics. This study proposes a more comprehensive traversal framework. As a proof, CT-FC (a focused crawler with the new traversal framework) ran on DMOZ data that is representative to WWW characteristics. The results show that this strategy can increase the recall significantly

Environmental Conditions and COVID-19 Incident

COVID-19 is a new infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus and was designated as a pandemic since March 12, 2020, because there are a lot of case in several countries. On February 1, 2021, the total number of COVID-19 cases reached 103 million in the world, and in Indonesia it reached 1.09 million. Many factors influence the transmission and death of COVID-19, for example environmental conditions. This study aims to provide an overview of environmental conditions that can be a factor for transmission and death due to COVID-19. The method in this research is literature review, which is a literature review with secondary data obtained through research journals which are then synthesized and obtained 23 articles as a reference for preparing literature reviews. COVID-19 and environmental degradation have decreased air, water, noise and marine pollution due to the lockdown, but there has been an increase in the volume of hazardous and toxic waste from COVID-19 patients. Then from air pollution, the results of decreases in CO, NO2, and PM10 during lockdown. Meanwhile, for climatology and meteorology, the result is that every 1oC increase in temperature from the average temperature can reduce daily cases of COVID-19 by 36% and 57% when the average humidity is at 67% and 85.5%. Likewis,e humidity each 1oC increase relatively reduces daily cases of COVID-19 by 11% to 22% with a temperature range of 5.04oC to 8.2oC. The conclusion of this research is that the environmental conditions during a pandemic had their own polemic. However, several pollutants such as CO, NO2, O3, PM2,5, and PM10  is closely related to the spread of COVID-19. This literature review can provide recommendations for an overall global government demonstration policy in the prevention and control of environmental pollution and recycling of medical waste

May Measurement Month 2018: a pragmatic global screening campaign to raise awareness of blood pressure by the International Society of Hypertension

Aims Raised blood pressure (BP) is the biggest contributor to mortality and disease burden worldwide and fewer than half of those with hypertension are aware of it. May Measurement Month (MMM) is a global campaign set up in 2017, to raise awareness of high BP and as a pragmatic solution to a lack of formal screening worldwide. The 2018 campaign was expanded, aiming to include more participants and countries. Methods and results Eighty-nine countries participated in MMM 2018. Volunteers (≥18 years) were recruited through opportunistic sampling at a variety of screening sites. Each participant had three BP measurements and completed a questionnaire on demographic, lifestyle, and environmental factors. Hypertension was defined as a systolic BP ≥140 mmHg or diastolic BP ≥90 mmHg, or taking antihypertensive medication. In total, 74.9% of screenees provided three BP readings. Multiple imputation using chained equations was used to impute missing readings. 1 504 963 individuals (mean age 45.3 years; 52.4% female) were screened. After multiple imputation, 502 079 (33.4%) individuals had hypertension, of whom 59.5% were aware of their diagnosis and 55.3% were taking antihypertensive medication. Of those on medication, 60.0% were controlled and of all hypertensives, 33.2% were controlled. We detected 224 285 individuals with untreated hypertension and 111 214 individuals with inadequately treated (systolic BP ≥ 140 mmHg or diastolic BP ≥ 90 mmHg) hypertension. Conclusion May Measurement Month expanded significantly compared with 2017, including more participants in more countries. The campaign identified over 335 000 adults with untreated or inadequately treated hypertension. In the absence of systematic screening programmes, MMM was effective at raising awareness at least among these individuals at risk

Diabetes Alters Intracellular Calcium Transients in Cardiac Endothelial Cells

Diabetic cardiomyopathy (DCM) is a diabetic complication, which results in myocardial dysfunction independent of other etiological factors. Abnormal intracellular calcium ([Ca2+]i) homeostasis has been implicated in DCM and may precede clinical manifestation. Studies in cardiomyocytes have shown that diabetes results in impaired [Ca2+]i homeostasis due to altered sarcoplasmic reticulum Ca2+ ATPase (SERCA) and sodium-calcium exchanger (NCX) activity. Importantly, altered calcium homeostasis may also be involved in diabetes-associated endothelial dysfunction, including impaired endothelium-dependent relaxation and a diminished capacity to generate nitric oxide (NO), elevated cell adhesion molecules, and decreased angiogenic growth factors. However, the effect of diabetes on Ca2+ regulatory mechanisms in cardiac endothelial cells (CECs) remains unknown. The objective of this study was to determine the effect of diabetes on [Ca2+]i homeostasis in CECs in the rat model (streptozotocin-induced) of DCM. DCM-associated cardiac fibrosis was confirmed using picrosirius red staining of the myocardium. CECs isolated from the myocardium of diabetic and wild-type rats were loaded with Fura-2, and UTP-evoked [Ca2+]i transients were compared under various combinations of SERCA, sarcoplasmic reticulum Ca2+ ATPase (PMCA) and NCX inhibitors. Diabetes resulted in significant alterations in SERCA and NCX activities in CECs during [Ca2+]i sequestration and efflux, respectively, while no difference in PMCA activity between diabetic and wild-type cells was observed. These results improve our understanding of how diabetes affects calcium regulation in CECs, and may contribute to the development of new therapies for DCM treatment