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The Physical and Mental Impact of Substance Abuse

Immediate Consequences of Substance Abuse
Substance abuse can trigger a host of immediate physiological and psychological reactions. These short-term effects often include:

Elevated heart rate
Altered appetite
Sleep disturbances
Impaired speech
Loss of motor coordination
These immediate effects can also extend to an individual’s personal life, causing relationship strife, decreased work or school performance, heightened risk-taking behaviors, diminished interest in activities, and neglect of personal hygiene.

Long-Term Health Complications
Prolonged substance abuse can lead to significant alterations in brain structure and function, resulting in a range of mental health issues such as:

Persistent depression
Paranoia
Hallucinations
Aggressive behavior
Anxiety
Memory impairment
Concentration difficulties
The type of substance and the duration of abuse play a critical role in the severity of these long-term effects. Health professionals have identified several chronic conditions associated with extended substance use, including:

Cardiovascular disease: Stimulants like cocaine and methamphetamine can cause heart attacks, arrhythmias, and coronary artery disease. According to the American Heart Association, cocaine use, in particular, is a significant risk factor for heart attacks in young adults.
Respiratory problems: Opioids, for example, can depress breathing, leading to hypoxia and, in extreme cases, death.
Kidney damage: Substances like heroin and certain prescription drugs can cause kidney failure and other renal issues.
Liver disease: Alcohol and other hepatotoxic substances can lead to liver cirrhosis, hepatitis, and liver failure.
Short-Term Mental Effects
The mental health implications of substance abuse are not limited to long-term outcomes. In the short term, individuals may experience:

Aggression
Difficulty concentrating
Irritability
Hallucinations
Reduced inhibitions
Withdrawal symptoms can also manifest as tremors, respiratory distress, fatigue, and irritability when an individual tries to cut back or quit using substances.

Chronic Physical Effects of Prolonged Drug Abuse
Over time, the physical toll of substance abuse can be extensive, potentially leading to:

Kidney and liver damage
Lung disease
Cardiovascular issues
Increased risk of certain cancers
Dental problems
Skin infections
Seizures and strokes
Infertility
Premature death
Recognizing Signs of Addiction

Identifying substance addiction can be challenging, but certain signs may indicate a problem:

Mood swings
Increased aggression
Secretive behavior
Performance changes at work or school
Relationship difficulties
Sudden weight fluctuations
Unusual odors on clothing or body
Behavioral and psychosocial changes often accompany these signs, such as an inability to stop using the substance, a strong desire to use, and neglect of social and recreational activities.

Approaches to Treating Addiction
Effective treatment for substance addiction typically involves a combination of strategies:

Psychotherapy: Engaging with mental health professionals can help individuals understand and modify their thoughts and behaviors.
Medication: Drugs like naltrexone and methadone can alleviate withdrawal symptoms and cravings.
Behavioral therapy: This approach focuses on positive reinforcement and developing coping mechanisms.
Hospitalization: In some cases, medical detoxification and intensive therapy are necessary.
Support groups: Organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous provide community support and accountability.
Substance abuse can transform individuals, often leading to a shadow of their former selves. Tolerance development is a significant risk, as it requires higher doses to achieve the same effects, increasing the danger of overdose or death. For more information on the physical and mental effects of drug abuse, consulting a medical professional or a commercial testing laboratory is advisable.

Substance abuse is a global concern, with the World Drug Report 2021 by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) revealing that approximately 275 million people used drugs worldwide in the previous year, and over 36 million suffered from drug use disorders. The report also highlights the increasing complexity of the drug situation, with the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbating vulnerabilities and complicating the challenges faced by those with drug use disorders.

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Corporate Farming: Investment Opportunities

About 10,000 years ago, historians say, man began to domesticate grain yielding plants and settled down. Thus, agriculture is considered as the oldest of enterprises. It has undergone very many changes particularly in the last 100 years. Over the last century, technology has played the key role in restructuring agriculture and elevating it to the status of a modern, corporate business entity from what it was since the time of the earliest cultivation – the primary industry. Modern agricultural technology encouraged the participation of corporations in agriculture by bringing in investments, scale of economy and efficiency in resource use. Many believe that corporate farming destroys family farms because of the perceived effects on the rural agrarian economy. On the contrary, the proponents of corporate farming argue that corporatized agriculture leads to more efficient production and more social benefits. The numbers however speak for themselves. Since 1920s the number of farms in the U.S. has steadily dropped from around 6.5 million to 2 million. Similarly the proportion of population that lived on farms came down from 30 per cent to under 2 per cent.

Corporate farming: Towards efficient agricultural production
Historically, agriculture has been a family firm structure. This is due to interdependence of certain operations of farming with others and their interplay and seasonality. This, to a great extent, limited its ability to specialize and promote efficiency. In the past three decades or so, there is a surge of corporate influence on farming. The family farms mostly carried out their businesses locally- procuring inputs and selling their produce from the local markets. Corporate farms procure their inputs and source their working capital from large suppliers at huge discounts. Corporate farms can also access most modern technology and vertically integrate the entire process of production, value addition and marketing. When economies move from businesses that are dependent on natural cycles to those that are independent on such cycles, factory-style corporate industry will take hold of most businesses. Agriculture is not an exception to this. For instance, livestock farmers have been able to earn steady returns as the production technology improved and drastically reduced dependence of livestock production on nature. This makes livestock farming a perfect investment option for corporations. The ability of corporate sector to extract the benefits of economies of scale by way of minimizing input costs and maximizing output while leveraging technology to keep the risks under check, makes corporate farming a good business sense.

Corporate farming: Road ahead
In the globalized economy corporate farming is better equipped to bring out the farm products at the right time, place, quality and price to meet the consumer demand. Traditional family farms would certainly have difficulty in responding to the global market. Keeping in view the role of nature in the current state of grain farming technologies, there are still many negative externalities for corporations to enter this sector unlike livestock sector. Once the technologies enable corporate farms to ensure gains outweighing externalities, which is very likely in the near future, corporate farming will offer huge investment opportunities.

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How to measure software quality

In Agile development, companies deploy code fast and often. It gives a company more profits and provides advantages. However, this approach may affect the quality of a product as sometimes companies sacrifice quality due to lack of time.

For many years companies measure software quality. Their goal is to estimate the product for compliance with quality requirements.

It helps release the product at a high-level quality, stand out among competitors and increase company revenue.

However, many companies failed to achieve software testing quality metrics. It happens due to poorly developed metrics that can’t prevent risks.

We will show you how to organize and measure the effectiveness of software testing activities and software testing types.

What is software quality?
Software quality focuses and provides meeting quality standards and requirements. Software quality metrics is a reliable tool to measure how close to established requirements you are or prove a theory. Every project requires metrics that measure a level of quality. But the problem is that company can’t implement all metrics in a project. Instead, they should develop their metrics depend on the project’s goals.

Why software quality measure matter?
Companies that created products according to high-quality standards are more successful than competitors. Implementing and following software quality metrics helps to speed up the development process. It gives insights into how to improve performance and evaluate the following progress.

How to measure software quality?
To create metrics for the project, you should develop quality factors for them. Each metric is associated with quality factors that represent how quantitative it is.

So, companies should create metrics for every quality factor to represent how quantitative it is.

According to Cem Kaner and Walter P. Bond, these metrics must meet validation criteria:

Correlation between metric and quality requirement
Consistency between quality requirement and metric. If quality changes, metric changes too.
If the quality factor changes in real-time, the metric changes equally too.
If we know the value of metrics at the moment, we can predict how to change the quality factor.
To measure software quality, we should compare quantitatively between quality factor and metric.

At this point, a problem emerges: how do we quantify quality factor to compare with its metric.

In software engineering, experts use two types of software quality metrics to solve the problem:

Direct metrics is “a metric that does not depend upon a measure of any other attribute.”
Indirect metrics or derived.
The difference between metrics is that direct metrics depend on one variable. Indirect metrics depend on various variables.

Examples of indirect metrics:

Programmer performance;
A number of bugs are identified during a specific period in one module (defect density). Many companies use defect density as software quality metrics. However, there is one problem associated with it. All failures and bugs aren’t equal and cause by different conditions.
Requirements stability
Total efforts spent on the project, fixing issues, etc.
Another problem consists that some experts name one metric direct when they not. For example, IEEE Standard names Mean time to failure (MTTF) as one of the direct metrics. However, MTTF depends on the various variable as particular time interval, type, and the number of failures.

To develop valuables direct metrics, they should provide:

definite goal (evaluating project status, estimation of reliability of the product)
the particular scope of work (one project, single task, year of the team’s work)
a determined attribute that measured
natural scale for this metric
We can highlight five quality software testing metrics.

Correlation between committed user stories and results that meet quality goals.
Number of failures during STLC. An increasing number of failures during deploys can signal problems in the DevOps process. The metric should reduce with growing team skills and increasing experience.
Test coverage. This metric shows how much of the code is covered by testing. Many experts argue about the efficiency of this metric. However,Google experts insist that the metric can be valuable information for evaluating risks and bottlenecks in a testing activity.
Defect Removal Efficiency (DRE). This metric evaluates the number of bugs after realizing the product and the number of bugs before release. It helps to track the increasing or reducing number of bugs.
Defect retest index. This metric shows how many new bugs are found after fixing bugs.

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