Search

The Covid-19 has presented an unprecedented challenge to public health worldwide. However, residents in different countries showed diverse levels of Covid-19 awareness during the outbreak and suffered from uneven health impacts. This study analyzed the global Twitter data from January 1st to June 30th, 2020, to answer two research questions. What are the linguistic and geographical disparities of public awareness in the Covid-19 outbreak period reflected on social media? Does significant association exist between the changing Covid-19 awareness and the pandemic outbreak? We established a Twitter data mining framework calculating the Ratio index to quantify and track awareness. The lag correlations between awareness and health impacts were examined at global and country levels. Results show that users presenting the highest Covid-19 awareness were mainly those tweeting in the official languages of India and Bangladesh. Asian countries showed more disparities in awareness than European countries, and awareness in Eastern Europe was higher than in central Europe. Finally, the Ratio index had high correlations with global mortality rate, global case fatality ratio, and country-level mortality rate, with 21-31, 35-42, and 13–18 leading days, respectively. This study yields timely insights into social media use in understanding human behaviors for public health research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immersive technologies are transforming all aspects of daily life. In educational context, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) offer the promise of experiential learning, where the real world is enhanced with information and graphics or is completely simulated. The project described in this paper, builds on advances of these technologies to develop, implement, and test "Skope," a prototype immersive learning environment. Skope is designed to facilitate interdisciplinary education of architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) students for design and construction of environmentally sustainable buildings. The Skope learning environment is comprised of an AR and a VR visualization tool as well as learning modules that contain interdisciplinary content. Skope is implemented and tested in three interdisciplinary AEC classes. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of student performance in these classes suggest that Skope has a positive impact and increased students' motivation and understanding of building science principles, ultimately leading to an improvement of learning across domains. In addition, findings of this research indicate that using Skope improves students' attitude toward collaborative learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]