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Globally known as Amma, meaning \"Mother,\" Mata Amritanandamayi has developed a massive transnational humanitarian organization based in hugs. She is familiar to millions as the “hugging saint,” a moniker that derives from her elaborate darshan programs wherein nearly every day ten thousand people are embraced by the guru one at a time, events that routinely last ten to twenty hours without any rest for her. Although she was born in 1953 as a low-caste girl in a South Indian fishing village, today millions revere her as guru and goddess, a living embodiment of the divine on earth. Reflections of Amma focuses on communities of Amma's devotees in the United States, showing how they endeavor to mirror their guru’s behaviors and transform themselves to emulate the ethos of the movement. This study argues that “inheritors” and “adopters” of Hindu traditions differently interpret Hindu goddesses, Amma, and her relation to feminism and women's empowerment because of their inherited religious, cultural, and political dispositions. In this insightful ethnographic analysis, Amanda J. Lucia discovers how the politics of American multiculturalism reifies these cultural differences in “de facto congregations,” despite the fact that Amma's embrace attempts to erase communal boundaries in favor of global unity.

I admit, I am a pioneer, almost too far ahead of my time – I have not yet met another person who intentionally develops a global life design like me. Yet I am sure that many more people would derive great joy from trying my path.

HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 co-infection is a common global health and socio-economic problem. In this paper, a mathematical model for the transmission dynamics of HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 co-infection that incorporates protection and treatment for the infected (and infectious) groups is formulated and analyzed. Firstly, we proved the non-negativity and boundedness of the co-infection model solutions, analyzed the single infection models steady states, calculated the basic reproduction numbers using next generation matrix approach and then investigated the existence and local stabilities of equilibriums using Routh-Hurwiz stability criteria. Then using the Center Manifold criteria to investigate the proposed model exhibited the phenomenon of backward bifurcation whenever its effective reproduction number is less than unity. Secondly, we incorporate time dependent optimal control strategies, using Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle to derive necessary conditions for the optimal control of the disease. Finally, we carried out numerical simulations for both the deterministic model and the model incorporating optimal controls and we found the results that the model solutions are converging to the model endemic equilibrium point whenever the model effective reproduction number is greater than unity, and also from numerical simulations of the optimal control problem applying the combinations of all the possible protection and treatment strategies together is the most effective strategy to drastically minimizing the transmission of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 co-infection in the community under consideration of the study.

Currently, outdoor navigation systems have widely been used around the world on smartphones. They rely on GPS (Global Positioning System). However, indoor navigation systems are still under development due to the complex structure of indoor environments, including multiple floors, many rooms, steps, and elevators. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of the Indoor Navigation System using Unity and Smartphone (INSUS). INSUS shows the arrow of the moving direction on the camera view based on a smartphone’s augmented reality (AR) technology. To trace the user location, it utilizes the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) technique with a gyroscope and a camera in a smartphone to track users’ movements inside a building after initializing the current location by the QR code. Unity is introduced to obtain the 3D information of the target indoor environment for Visual SLAM. The data are stored in the IoT application server called SEMAR for visualizations. We implement a prototype system of INSUS inside buildings in two universities. We found that scanning QR codes with the smartphone perpendicular in angle between 60∘ and 100∘ achieves the highest QR code detection accuracy. We also found that the phone’s tilt angles influence the navigation success rate, with 90∘ to 100∘ tilt angles giving better navigation success compared to lower tilt angles. INSUS also proved to be a robust navigation system, evidenced by near identical navigation success rate results in navigation scenarios with or without disturbance. Furthermore, based on the questionnaire responses from the respondents, it was generally found that INSUS received positive feedback and there is support to improve the system.

The re-emergence of syphilis has become a global public health issue, and more persons are getting infected, especially in developing countries. This has also led to an increase in the incidence of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infections as some studies have shown in the recent decade. This paper investigates the synergistic interaction between HIV and syphilis using a mathematical model that assesses the impact of syphilis treatment on the dynamics of syphilis and HIV co-infection in a human population where HIV treatment is not readily available or accessible to HIV-infected individuals. In the absence of HIV, the syphilis-only model undergoes the phenomenon of backward bifurcation when the associated reproduction number (RT) is less than unity, due to susceptibility to syphilis reinfection after recovery from a previous infection. The complete syphilis–HIV co-infection model also undergoes the phenomenon of backward bifurcation when the associated effective reproduction number (RC) is less than unity for the same reason as the syphilis-only model. When susceptibility to syphilis reinfection after treatment is insignificant, the disease-free equilibrium of the syphilis-only model is shown to be globally asymptotically stable whenever the associated reproduction number (RT) is less than unity. Sensitivity and uncertainty analysis show that the top three parameters that drive the syphilis infection (with respect to the associated response function, RT) are the contact rate (βS), modification parameter that accounts for the increased infectiousness of syphilis-infected individuals in the secondary stage of the infection (θ1) and treatment rate for syphilis-only infected individuals in the primary stage of the infection (r1). The co-infection model was numerically simulated to investigate the impact of various treatment strategies for primary and secondary syphilis, in both singly and dually infected individuals, on the dynamics of the co-infection of syphilis and HIV. It is observed that if concerted effort is exerted in the treatment of primary and secondary syphilis (in both singly and dually infected individuals), especially with high treatment rates for primary syphilis, this will result in a reduction in the incidence of HIV (and its co-infection with syphilis) in the population.

This work presents a new mathematical model that investigates the impact of diagnosis and treatment of both latent tuberculosis infections and active cases on the transmission dynamics of the disease in a population. Mathematical analysis reveal that the model undergoes the phenomenon of backward bifurcation where a stable disease-free equilibrium co-exist with a stable endemic (positive) equilibrium when the associated reproduction number is less than unity. It is shown that this phenomenon does not exist in the absence of exogenous re-infection. In the absence of exogenous re-infection, the disease-free solution of the model is shown to be globally asymptotically stable when the associated reproduction number is less than unity. It is further shown that a special case of the model has a unique endemic equilibrium point, which is globally asymptotically stable when the associated reproduction number exceeds unity. Uncertainty and sensitivity analysis is carried out to identify key parameters that have the greatest influence on the transmission dynamics of TB in the population using the reproduction number of the model, incidence of the disease and the total number of infected individuals in the various infective classes as output responses. The analysis shows that the top three parameters of the model that have the most influence on the reproduction number of the model are the transmission rate, the fraction of fast disease progression and the rate of detection of active TB cases, with other key parameters influencing the outcomes of the other output responses. Numerical simulations of the model show that the treatment rates for latent and active TB cases significantly determines the impact of the fraction of new latent TB cases diagnosed (and the fraction of active TB cases that promptly receives treatment) on the burden of the disease in a population. The simulations suggest that, with availability of treatment for both latent and active TB cases, increasing the fraction of latent TB cases that are diagnosed and treated (even with a small fraction of active TB cases promptly receiving treatment) will result in a reduction in the TB burden in the population.

Current research in Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) focuses on eradicating virus reservoirs that prevent or dampen the effectiveness of antiretroviral treatment (ART). One such reservoir, the brain, reduces treatment efficacy via the blood-brain barrier (BBB), causing an obstacle to drug penetration into the brain. In this study, we develop a mathematical model to examine the impact of the BBB on ART effectiveness for mitigating brain HIV. A thorough analysis of the model allowed us to fully characterize the global threshold dynamics with the viral clearance and persistence in the brain for the basic reproduction number less than unity and greater than unity, respectively. Our model showed that the BBB has a significant role in inhibiting the effect of ART within the brain despite the effective viral load suppression in the plasma. The level of impact, however, depends on factors such as the CNS Penetration Effectiveness (CPE) score, the slope of the drug dose-response curves, the ART initiation timing, and the number of drugs in the ART protocol. These results suggest that reducing the plasma viral load to undetectable levels due to some drug regimen may not necessarily indicate undetectable levels of HIV in the brain. Thus, the effect of the BBB on viral suppression in the brain must be considered for developing proper treatment protocols against HIV infection.

The classical “university of reason”, the idea of which is defined in German classical philosophy and German romanticism as “preparation for knowledge”, and “mission” - as “the formation of goodwill”, i.e. the education of a citizen, has lost its foundation in modernity: the essential unity of culture, the nation, the state, and the university is removed and the named “elements” of this unity in modern reality, presented in the liberal version of the economic paradigm, mean something else: the article indicates their new meaning, and as such are no longer connected. The thing that has replaced the “university of reason” in modernity has other tasks: to guarantee globalization by producing technical, i.e. directly useful and standardized knowledge, and to participate in the formation of human capital. The products produced by the university are offered on the global market as a competitively priced commodity; the name “university” is still kept as a “technical term” to denote a “bureaucratically and commercially oriented corporation”. (B. Ridings). At the same time, a unified educational space as one of the areas of the global order needs the formation of a cosmopolitan worldview - the structure, the content of educational programs, the form of organization of the modern university-corporation (as now - “multicultural reality”) are aimed at fulfilling such a definite task. The concept of “sustainable development” and its stated agenda, by defining educational goals, represents a way of ’politicizing’ (W. Beck), which aims to limit total market logic and balance necessary inequalities to ensure the unity of the global order; the article asks what this means for a university that has lost its essential identity and is embedded in a global network.

This paper argues that the idea of global peace in early twentieth-century liberal international order was sutured together by the threat of race war. This understanding of racial peace was institutionalized in the League of Nations mandate system through its philosophical architect: Jan Smuts. I argue that the League figured in Smuts’s thought as the culmination of the creative advance of the universe: white internationalist unification and settler colonialism was the cosmological destiny of humanity that enabled a racial peace. In Smuts’s imaginary, the twin prospect of race war and miscegenation serves as the dark underside that both necessitates and threatens to undo this project. By reframing the problem of race war through his metaphysics, Smuts resolves the challenge posed by race war by institutionalizing indirect rule and segregation as a project of pacification that ensured that settlement and the creative advance of the cosmos could proceed.

In this paper, we propose a class of virus infection models with multitarget cells and study their global properties. We first study three models with specific forms of incidence rate function, then study a model with a more general nonlinear incidence rate. The basic model is a (2 n +1)-dimensional nonlinear ODEs that describes the population dynamics of the virus, n classes of uninfected target cells, and n classes of infected target cells. Model with exposed state and model with saturated infection rate are also studied. For these models, Lyapunov functions are constructed to establish the global asymptotic stability of the uninfected and infected steady states of these models. We have proven that if the basic reproduction number is less than unity then the uninfected steady state is globally asymptotically stable, and if the basic reproduction number is greater than unity then the infected steady state is globally asymptotically stable. For the model with general nonlinear incidence rate, we construct suitable Lyapunov functions and establish the sufficient conditions for the global stability of the uninfected and infected steady states of this model.