Various researchers have explored the adverse effects of walled buildings on human health. However, few of them have examined the relationship between walled buildings and private housing estates in Hong Kong. This study endeavors to fill the research gap by exploring the connections among walled-building effects, housing features, macroeconomic factors, and housing prices in private housing estates. Specifically, it reveals the relationship between walled buildings and housing prices. Eight privately owned housing estates are selected with a total of 11,365 observations. Results are analyzed to study the factors that affect the housing price. Firstly, unit root tests are carried out to evaluate if the time series variables follow the unit root process. Secondly, the relationship between walled buildings and housing price is examined by conducting an artificial neural network. We assumed that the housing price reduces due to walled-building effects, given that previous literature showed that heat island effect, and blockage of natural light and views, are common in walled-building districts. Moreover, we assume that housing price can also be affected by macroeconomic factors and housing features, and these effects vary among private housing estates. We also study these impacts by using the two models. Recommendations and possible solutions are suggested at the end of the research paper.

The Internet of things (IoT) is an active area in the current research community due to the improvement in mobile computing and wireless networks. Currently, the IoT is involved in many fields like smart cities, smart health monitoring, smart tracking, and smart factory; therefore, it is introducing new research opportunities and industrial revolutions. Smart health, in particular, is very important and trendy domain for researchers and practitioners due to its continuous monitoring of health of patients. The objective of smart health is to provide medical facilities to patients at anytime and anywhere. The smart health monitoring systems are mostly connected with the wireless network medium that is extremely vulnerable for threats. However various attacks are observed that can endanger these health monitoring applications and systems. These attacks include Denial of Service (DoS) Attack, Fingerprint and Timing-based Snooping, Router Attack, Select and Forwarding attack, Sensor attack and Replay Attack. In this paper, we discuss these attacks with their impact on health monitoring systems with some suggestive measures from our research findings.

The molecular mechanisms responsible for sepsis-induced endothelial dysfunction leading to an elevated risk of cardiovascular diseases remain undefined. Endotoxic or septic shock is a potentially lethal complication of systemic infection by Gram-negative bacteria. Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) is a critical glycolipid component of the outer wall of Gram-negative bacteria, and many of the sepsis-associated cellular signals by Gram-negative bacteria are attributed to LPS. Given that LPS has an established role in the pathophysiology of sepsis and long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been reported to critically regulate vascular homeostasis, a systematic transcriptional survey was conducted to evaluate the impact of LPS stimulation on human endothelial lncRNAs and protein-coding transcripts (mRNAs). LncRNAs and mRNAs from LPS-treated (100 ng/mL; 24 h) human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) were profiled with the Arraystar Human lncRNA Expression Microarray V3.0. Of the 30,584 lncRNAs screened, 871 were significantly upregulated and 1068 significantly downregulated (p < 0.05) in response to LPS. In the same HUVEC samples, 733 of the 26,106 mRNAs screened were upregulated and 536 were downregulated. Among the differentially expressed lncRNAs, AL132709.5 was the most upregulated (~70 fold) and CTC-459I6.1 the most downregulated (~28 fold). Bioinformatics analyses indicated that the differentially expressed upregulated mRNAs are primarily enriched in cytokine-cytokine receptor interaction, infectious diseases, TNF signaling pathway, FoxO signaling pathway, and pathways in cancer. This is the first lncRNA and mRNA transcriptome profile of LPS-mediated changes in human endothelial cells. These observations may reveal novel endothelial targets of LPS that may be involved in the vascular pathology of sepsis.

We argue that environmental legislation and regulation of more developed countries reflects significantly their moral values, but in less developed countries it differs significantly from their moral values. We examined this topic by using the keywords “sustainability” and “sustainable development”, studying web pages and articles published between 1974 to 2018 in Web of Science, Scopus and Google. Australia, Zimbabwe, and Uganda were ranked as the top three countries in the number of Google searches for sustainability. The top five cities that appeared in sustainability searches through Google are all from Africa. In terms of academic publications, China, India, and Brazil record among the largest numbers of sustainability and sustainable development articles in Scopus. Six out of the ten top productive institutions publishing sustainable development articles indexed in Scopus were located in developing countries, indicating that developing countries are well aware of the issues surrounding sustainable development. Our results show that when environmental law reflects moral values for betterment, legal adoption is more likely to be successful, which usually happens in well-developed regions. In less-developed states, environmental law differs significantly from moral values, such that changes in moral values are necessary for successful legal implementation. Our study has important implications for the development of policies and cultures, together with the enforcement of environmental laws and regulations in all countries.

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