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Did the Covid-19 pandemic have an impact on innovation? Past economic disruptions, anecdotal evidence, and the previous literature suggest a decline with substantial differences between industries. We leverage USPTO patent application data to investigate and quantify the disturbance. We assess differences by field of technology (at the CPC subclass level) as well as the impact of direct and indirect relevance for the management of the pandemic. Direct Covid-19 relevance is identified from a keyword search of the patent application fulltexts; indirect Covid-19 relevance is derived from past CPC subclass to subclass citation patterns. We find that direct Covid-19 relevance is associated with a strong boost to the growth of the number of patent applications in the first year of the pandemic at the same order of magnitude (in percentage points) as the percentage of patents referencing Covid-19. We find no effect for indirect Covid-19 relevance, indicating a focus on applied research at the expense of more basic research. Fields of technology (CPC mainsections) have an additional significant impact, with, e.g., mainsections A (human necessities) and C (chemistry, metallurgy) having a strong performance. Comment: 23 pages, 7 figures

Continuous viral evolution of SARS-CoV-2 has resulted in variants capable of immune evasion, vaccine breakthrough infections and increased transmissibility. New vaccines that invoke mucosal immunity may provide a solution to reducing virus transmission. Here, we evaluated the immunogenicity of intranasally administered subunit protein vaccines composed of a stabilized SARS-CoV-2 spike trimer or the receptor binding domain (RBD) adjuvanted with either cholera toxin (CT) or an archaeal lipid mucosal adjuvant (AMVAD). We show robust induction of immunoglobulin (Ig) G and IgA responses in plasma, nasal wash and bronchoalveolar lavage in mice only when adjuvant is used in the vaccine formulation. While the AMVAD adjuvant was more effective at inducing systemic antibodies against the RBD antigen than CT, CT was generally more effective at inducing overall higher IgA and IgG titers against the spike antigen in both systemic and mucosal compartments. Furthermore, vaccination with adjuvanted spike led to superior mucosal IgA responses than with the RBD antigen and produced broadly targeting neutralizing plasma antibodies against ancestral, Delta and Omicron variants in vitro; whereas adjuvanted RBD elicited a narrower antibody response with neutralizing activity only against ancestral and Delta variants. Our study demonstrates that intranasal administration of an adjuvanted protein subunit vaccine in immunologically naïve mice induced both systemic and mucosal neutralizing antibody responses that were most effective at neutralizing SARS-CoV-2 variants when the trimeric spike was used as an antigen compared to RBD.

Geological (Engineering) Field Methods (GEOE/L 221) is a core course for two programs at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, where students learn foundational knowledge, skills, and methods to conduct fieldwork that is used to investigate geological and geological engineering aspects of the Earth. Typically, this fall-term course involves weekly field trips in the Kingston area to visit a variety of rock outcrops to learn and practice methods of field navigation, observation, and measurement. Remote delivery of this course in fall 2020 due to COVID-19, without in-person field trips, required a significant transformation, which included creating field and demonstration instructional videos, using 3D digital photogrammetry models of rock samples and outcrops, developing independent outdoor activities for pace and compass navigation, manual sketching, and graphical measurements on paper, and utilizing a culminating immersive 3D video-game-style geological field mapping exercise. This paper examines these new course elements, how well the course learning objectives were achieved in a remote setting, and the successes and limitations of remote delivery. Although many new virtual elements enhance the course, and some have been incorporated into subsequent in-person offerings, a return to in-person teaching for geological sciences and geological engineering field methods courses is strongly recommended.

Social inequities such as poverty and homelessness are intersectional and complex; they are persistent, wicked and their solutions are elusive. Building capacity for innovation in the social sector, i.e., encouraging the adoption of practices and processes designed for radical solutions to social problems, is an increasingly widespread strategy. Because innovation and change in the social sector are driven by knowledge processes, universities as anchor institutions would seem to have a natural role to play in the social impact ecosystem. Campus-community knowledge collaborations and innovation partnerships can be a vector of impact and, if the conditions are right, academic engagement can increase capacity in the social impact ecosystem. We wanted to better understand the needs of social sector organizations (SSO) in relation to their capacity, interests and experience with innovation and, along the way, assess how these needs had been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our team collected input through a survey from 180 social service organizations across Canada and analyzed responses for trends, themes, and sentiments. Mitacs

For decades, farming has been recognized as a highly stressful occupation globally. In 2016, a national survey investigating mental health outcomes among farmers in Canada found increased levels of mental distress among this population compared to the general public. Farmers are known to face a unique host of occupational stressors, and the COVID-19 pandemic introduced additional challenges for farmers in Canada. Hence, the second wave of the national, online, cross-sectional survey of mental health outcomes among farmers in Canada was conducted early 2021. The survey results showed increased levels of anxiety, depression, perceived stress, emotional exhaustion, and cynicism among farmers compared to the Canadian public, particularly among farming women. This justified action towards identifying opportunities to reduce stress and increase well-being in this population. A mixed-methods investigation provided a comprehensive understanding of chronic and episodic farming stressors in Canada and identified promising areas for stress-reduction and well-being promotion efforts. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada

In conventional randomized controlled trials, adjustment for baseline values of covariates known to be at least moderately associated with the outcome increases the power of the trial. Recent work has shown particular benefit for more flexible frequentist designs, such as information adaptive and adaptive multi-arm designs. However, covariate adjustment has not been characterized within the more flexible Bayesian adaptive designs, despite their growing popularity. We focus on a subclass of these which allow for early stopping at an interim analysis given evidence of treatment superiority. We consider both collapsible and non-collapsible estimands, and show how to obtain posterior samples of marginal estimands from adjusted analyses. We describe several estimands for three common outcome types. We perform a simulation study to assess the impact of covariate adjustment using a variety of adjustment models in several different scenarios. This is followed by a real world application of the compared approaches to a COVID-19 trial with a binary endpoint. For all scenarios, it is shown that covariate adjustment increases power and the probability of stopping the trials early, and decreases the expected sample sizes as compared to unadjusted analyses. Comment: 17 pages, 5 tables, 4 figures

Nitrogen dioxide (NOx) is an important primary air pollutant, dominantly produced by anthropogenic, mostly combustion based, activities from sectors such as industry, traffic and transport. NOx is directly linked to negative health and environmental impacts. Currently, the construction of emission inventories to keep track of NOx emissions is based on official national reported emissions and proxies such as activity data as well as direct measurements. The effort to properly construct an accurate inventory is significant and time consuming which causes a reporting offset between one and five years with respect to the current date. Next to this temporal lag difficulties in composed inventories can arise from legislative and protocol differences between countries and over time in reporting of emissions. Satellite based atmospheric composition measurements provide a unique opportunity to fill this gap and independently estimate emissions on a large scale in a consistent, transparent and comprehensible way. They give the possibility to check for compliance with emission reduction targets in a timely manner as well as to observe rapid emission reductions such as experienced during the COVID-19 lock-downs. In this study we apply a consistent methodology to derive NOx emissions over Germany for the years of 2019–2021. For the years where reporting is available differences between satellite estimates and inventory totals were within 100 kt. The large reduction of NOx emissions related to the COVID-19 lock-downs were observed in both the inventory and satellite derived emissions. The recent projections for the inventory emissions pointed to a recovery of the emissions towards pre-COVID19 levels this increase was not observed. While emissions from the larger power-plants did rebound to earlier levels, others sectors such as road transport and shipping did not and could be linked to a reduction in the number of heavier transport trucks. This again illustrates the value of having a consistent satellite based methodology for faster projections to guide and check the conventional emission inventory reporting. The method described in this manuscript also meet the demand for independent verification of the official emission inventories, which will enable inventory compilers to detect potentially problematic reporting issues. Transparency and comparability, two key values for emission reporting, are thus bolstered by this technique.

After COVID-19, tuberculosis (TB) is the leading cause of death by an infectious disease in the world. This work presents a data set based on data collected from the Brazilian Information System for Notifiable Diseases (SINAN) for the period from January 2001 to April 2020 relating to patients diagnosed with tuberculosis in Brazil. The data from SINAN was pre-processed to generate a new data set with two distinct treatment outcome classes: CURED and DIED. The data set comprises 37 categorical attributes (including socio-demographic, clinical, and laboratory data) as well as the target class. There are 927,909 records of patients classified as CURED and 36,190 classified as DIED, totaling 964,099 records.

Cloud-based Big Data Analytics (CBDA) is an emerging application of data analytics, and its successful adoption in the higher education sector leads to valuable outcomes that improve teaching, learning, research and policy-making. Yet, accepting and using CBDA as a promising innovation for informed decision-making in this sector is falling behind. Like any innovation, CBDA’s full capabilities can be reached only once the factors that facilitate or hinder its adoption are identified. This research proposes a CBDA adoption framework, based on a thorough literature review of cloud computing adoption by organizations. All technical and non-technical factors that affect the adoption of cloud technologies have been identified and classified according to the T.O.E. theoretical framework, which has been found to be the most suitable framework for this research. The context of Saudi Arabian universities has been chosen to empirically test and validate the proposed model, while solving a practical problem associated with the government’s efforts to shift the higher education sector to the cloud service paradigm. The government aims to cut costs and improve education policy, which has become more demanding during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. The results from this study indicate that top management support, a non-technical factor, is the main driver for CBDA adoption among Saudi universities, and that relative advantage is not the main predictor of CBDA adoption, which is contradictory to much of the literature. As a result of these investigations, suggestions were identified for future research, and recommendations were laid out to support decision makers toward successful CBDA adoption. Ministry of Education, KSA

Les experts de la bioéthique ont joué un rôle clé pour assurer une réponse éthique cohérente à la pandémie de COVID-19 dans les domaines de la santé, de la santé publique et de la recherche scientifique au Canada. Dans la province de Québec, un groupe de bioéthiciens académiques et praticiens s’est rencontré périodiquement au début de la pandémie pour discuter d’approches et de solutions aux dilemmes éthiques rencontrés durant la crise. Ces rencontres ont créé l’opportunité d’un sondage national des praticiens de la bioéthique de différents domaines pour conserver un témoignage de ces rencontres informelles. Le sondage avait aussi pour objectif d’éclairer la recherche en bioéthique sur les difficultés vécues par les bioéthiciens « sur le terrain ». Les auteurs ont recueilli les réponses de quarante-cinq bioéthiciens canadiens, visant à connaitre leurs préoccupations, défis et opportunités rencontrés durant la première vague de la pandémie. Les participants ont rapporté une augmentation de leurs niveaux de stress, une augmentation de leur charge de travail, ainsi qu’une plus grande part de leur travail étant consacrée à l’éthique en santé publique. La plupart de leurs préoccupations se concentrait sur des groupes autres qu’eux-mêmes, tels les professionnels de la santé, les patients, les participants à la recherche et les personnes en contexte de vulnérabilité socioéconomique. Un optimisme quant au futur de la bioéthique fut dénoté en raison d’une conscience accrue de l’importance de la bioéthique par le public et par les institutions de santé et de recherche. Bioethics experts played a key role in ensuring a coherent ethical response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the fields of healthcare, public health, and scientific research in Canada. In the province of Quebec, a group of academic and practicing bioethicists met periodically in the early months of the pandemic to discuss approaches and solutions to ethical dilemmas encountered during the crisis. These meetings created the opportunity for a national survey of bioethics practitioners from different fields. The survey, in which forty-five Canadian bioethics practitioners (clinical ethicists, ethicist members of REBs and government health policy ethicists, or any bioethicist practicing outside of academia) participated, explored their concerns, challenges and opportunities during the first wave of the pandemic, with the objective of informing bioethics research about the difficulties experienced by bioethicists “in the field”. Participants reported increased stress levels, increased workloads, and a greater proportion of their work being devoted to public health ethics. Most of their concerns focused on groups other than themselves, such as health professionals, patients, research participants, and people in vulnerable socio-economic situations. An optimism about the future of bioethics was noted due to an increased awareness of the importance of bioethics by the public and by health and research institutions.