Racial equity which, at minimum, is defined as the state in which health, social, and economic outcomes are no longer predicted by race has become a critical issue for social workers who work with and advocate for the rights of marginalized communities. Despite its importance, it remains to be seen if field instructors and the agencies they work for understand racial equity as a human rights issue. Through an anonymous survey, we assessed field instructor's racial equity awareness, knowledge, and understanding and examined actions agencies have taken to address and advance racial equity. It was hypothesized that field instructors who view racial equity as a human right would report promoting and advancing these important concepts with their students and organizations. A total of 170 field instructors accessed the survey through an emailed link in this exploratory effort. Descriptive analyses found that field instructors believe that racial equity is a significant human rights issue and that their agency's culture views racial equity as important; however, issues with time, resources, funding, and expertise to promote racial equity initiatives create obstacles to bring about change. The discussion emphasizes the importance of building capacity among field educators to address racial equity through a human rights lens, which is integral to advancing the collective social work goals of social justice and dismantling systemic oppression.Contact networks provide insights on disease spread due to the duration of close proximity interactions. For systems governed by consensus dynamics, network structure is key to optimising the spread of information. For disease spread over contact networks, the structure would be expected to be similarly influential. However, metrics that are essentially agnostic to the network's structure, such as weighted degree (strength) centrality and its variants, perform near-optimally in selecting effective spreaders. These degree-based metrics outperform eigenvector centrality, despite disease spread over a network being a random walk process. This paper improves eigenvector-based spreader selection by introducing the non-linear relationship between contact time and the probability of disease transmission into the assessment of network dynamics. This approximation of disease spread dynamics is achieved by altering the Laplacian matrix, which in turn highlights why nodes with a high degree are such influential disease spreaders. From this approach, a trichotomy emerges on the definition of an effective spreader where, for susceptible-infected simulations, eigenvector-based selections can either optimise the initial rate of infection, the average rate of infection, or produce the fastest time to full infection of the network. Simulated and real-world human contact networks are examined, with insights also drawn on the effective adaptation of ant colony contact networks to reduce pathogen spread and protect the queen ant.India, the second-most populous country in the world is witnessing a daily surge in the COVID-19 infected cases. India is currently among the worst-hit nations worldwide due to the COVID-19 pandemic and ranks just behind Brazil and the USA. The prediction of the future course of the pandemic is thus of utmost importance in order to prevent further worsening of the situation. In this paper, we develop models for the past trajectory (March 01, 2020-July 25, 2020) and also make a month-long (July 26, 2020-August 24, 2020) forecast of the future evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic in India by using an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model. We determine the most optimal ARIMA model (ARIMA(7,2,2)) based on the statistical parameters viz. root-mean-squared error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and the coefficient of determination ( R 2 ). https://www.selleckchem.com/products/leupeptin-hemisulfate.html Subsequently, the developed model is used to obtain a one month-long forecast for the cumulative cases, active cases, recoveries, and the number of fatalities. According to our forecasting results, India is likely to have 3800,989 cumulative infected cases, 1634,142 cumulative active cases, 2110,697 cumulative recoveries, and 56,150 cumulative deaths by August 24, 2020, if the current trend of the pandemic continues to prevail. The implications of these forecasts are that in the upcoming month, the infection rate of COVID-19 in India is going to escalate, while the rate of recovery and the case-fatality rate is likely to reduce. In order to avert these possible scenarios, the administration and health-care personnel need to formulate and implement robust control measures, while the general public needs to be more responsible and strictly adhere to the established and newly formulated guidelines in order to slow down the spread of the pandemic and prevent it from transforming into a catastrophe. Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a well-established post-cardiac surgery complication. Orthotopic heart transplantation (OHT) represents a peculiar condition where surgical thoracic veins isolation and autonomic denervation occur. This study aims at investigating AF incidence in OHT in order to define its risk factors and to evaluate its prognostic impact. 278 patients affected by OHT were recruited in our Cardiac Surgery Unit and retrospectively analyzed, using clinical, surgical and instrumental data. The patients cohort showed 45 post-operative (16.5%) and 20 late AF cases (7.2%). Only paroxysmal AF episodes were observed. Elderly donors and acute rejection resulted as risk factors in patients with post-operative AF episodes, who presented higher all-cause mortality at 11years post-OHT (p<0.001, Kaplan Meier analysis). The majority of late AF episodes occurred during hospitalization, due to renal failure or infections and more frequently in male patients; no significant correlation was observed with acute or chronic rejection or other characteristics. Pulmonary vein isolation and vagal denervation lead to low AF incidence in OHT recipients. Acute rejection and graft status are the main risk factors for post-operative AF episodes, while other systemic conditions act as late AF triggers. The occurrence of AF episodes is associated with poor outcome and AF should be considered as a marker of clinical frailty. Pulmonary vein isolation and vagal denervation lead to low AF incidence in OHT recipients. Acute rejection and graft status are the main risk factors for post-operative AF episodes, while other systemic conditions act as late AF triggers. The occurrence of AF episodes is associated with poor outcome and AF should be considered as a marker of clinical frailty.