The Impact of the Covid Pandemic on Consumer Ethics and Corporate Responsibility

The corona crisis so far has had among many other things an enormous impact on consumer behaviour and corporate responsibility alike. Consumers were especially affected by the crisis as stationary shops were closed during long times of a national lockdown and during these phases online shopping became the norm. Although this trend has definitely started many years before COVID-19 the pandemic has clearly reinforced certain developments. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Digital Transformation of Teaching and Perception at TU Graz from the Students' Perspective: Developments from the Last 17 Years

The use of digital technologies in teaching to make it more varied, better, more diverse, or even more accessible is being pursued systematically at many universities. This article shows the developments in the digital transformation of teaching at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) over the last 17 years. In the process, the various activities of Graz University of Technology and of the central department of teaching and learning technologies about the digital transformation of teaching and its focus and change during this period are described in the form of a workshop report. The consequences and developments of the Covid-19 pandemic on digital transformation efforts are also addressed. This is contrasted with results of two students' surveys from 2014 (N = 1,502 complete questionnaires) and 2021 (N = 1,386 complete questionnaires). Within this contribution, the authors use the survey's data to assess how students' attitudes towards technology-enhanced teaching were changing at TU Graz. Mean indices were created to be able to compare the two surveys. This shows that despite the less good experience with teaching at TU Graz during the pandemic the attitude towards digital teaching is relatively satisfying. Nevertheless, the authors point out that the students clearly indicate that digital (distance) learning has a negative impact on communication between students and teachers as well as between students themselves, and that measures would be desirable here. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The relationship between telework and job characteristics: A latent change score analysis during the COVID-19 pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a sizable proportion of employees conducted home-based telework to contain virus spreading. This situation made it possible to investigate the relationship between telework and job characteristics. Many positive and negative associations between telework and job characteristics have been proposed in the literature, but most studies relied on cross-sectional data as well as narrow samples (e.g. employees voluntarily choosing to telework). Repeated measures designs investigating the association between telework intensity and job characteristics using less selective samples are currently rare. To address this research gap, we collected data at two time points in Germany during the COVID-19 pandemic (n = 479) and investigated if change in telework intensity was associated with change in 19 job characteristics using structural equation modeling. Our analyses showed that—in contrast to several prior cross-sectional studies—telework intensity had a small to moderate association with only two out of the 19 job characteristics: Work scheduling and decision-making autonomy. Hence, the study challenges the previously assumed manifold positive and negative associations between telework intensity and job characteristics and adds to the debate about the role of telework intensity as an antecedent of work design. Future studies should investigate the generalizability of the findings to non-pandemic work contexts. © 2023 The Authors. Applied Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of International Association of Applied Psychology.

ImageCLEF 2023 Highlight: Multimedia Retrieval in Medical, Social Media and Content Recommendation Applications

In this paper, we provide an overview of the upcoming ImageCLEF campaign. ImageCLEF is part of the CLEF Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum since 2003. ImageCLEF, the Multimedia Retrieval task in CLEF, is an ongoing evaluation initiative that promotes the evaluation of technologies for annotation, indexing, and retrieval of multimodal data with the aim of providing information access to large collections of data in various usage scenarios and domains. In its 21st edition, ImageCLEF 2023 will have four main tasks: (i) a Medical task addressing automatic image captioning, synthetic medical images created with GANs, Visual Question Answering for colonoscopy images, and medical dialogue summarization;(ii) an Aware task addressing the prediction of real-life consequences of online photo sharing;(iii) a Fusion task addressing late fusion techniques based on the expertise of a pool of classifiers;and (iv) a Recommending task addressing cultural heritage content-recommendation. In 2022, ImageCLEF received the participation of over 25 groups submitting more than 258 runs. These numbers show the impact of the campaign. With the COVID-19 pandemic now over, we expect that the interest in participating, especially at the physical CLEF sessions, will increase significantly in 2023. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Married at first sight: the process of trust formation throughout the venture capital process during the time of the COVID-19 crisis

A high level of uncertainty accompanies investment decisions, hence, VCs attempt to reduce their risk through a thorough examination of potential investment cases. Especially during the seed and start-up phases of a new venture, when detailed reports and historical track records are still lacking, the investment manager's trust in the entrepreneurial team has a major impact on investment decisions. To explore the process of trust formation, we conducted 11 semi-structured in-depth expert interviews with VC investment managers. Thereby, the COVID-19 crisis provided unique circumstances of exclusively digital communication and allowed us to develop a fine-grained understanding of trust within the VC context. Building on previous research about organizational trust and 674 interview minutes, we found that trustworthiness develops to trust over time as the vulnerability of both parties increases. Furthermore, our results reveal that the VCs' perception of the founders' trustworthiness is mainly influenced by examining the founders' work environment, a founders' reputation in the VCs' network, and face-to-face communication. Such personal meetings allow VCs to assess founders, shape the investor's gut feeling, and develop an interpersonal relationship as they allow for more room talking about personal information rather than business talk. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the treatment of cervical cancer in Hessian hospitals- a population-based study

Background: During the Covid-19 (Cov19) pandemic hospitals were assigned to four levels according their resources to manage the increased demand of intensive care treatments. This study aims to contribute towards quantifying the impact of the Cov19 pandemic on cancer care of patients with cervical cancer in Germany by investigating the diagnoses and treatments in Hessian hospitals of different Cov19 levels. Method(s): Data of patients with cervical cancer (C53) diagnosed from 2016 to 2020, were extracted from the database of the Hessian cancer registry. With regard to a continuously stable registration activity eleven hospitals were included in the analysis. Seven hospitals met the criteria for Cov19 level 1 (highest requirements) and four hospitals for level 2. Result(s): In 2020, 31% fewer patients with cervical cancer were diagnosed in eleven Hessian hospitals compared to previous years (n=124 vs. n=179). Primary tumor resections were reduced by 24%, whereas no difference could be detected in their relative amount or timespan from diagnosis. The patient cohort was younger with a median age of 46 vs. 50 years and with early stage I-II in 70% vs. 62%. The reduction in treatment was mostly seen in the Cov19 level 1 hospitals, while level 2 hospitals could increase the amount of diagnosed (14%) and treated (27%) patients. Discussion(s): Despite a reduction of diagnoses and treatments, primary surgery was not delayed. The patient characteristics imply that predominantly elder women with advanced stages omitted hospital treatment. The increased burden of care of Cov19 patients for the level 1 hospitals clearly had an impact on the care of cancer patients, which could be partially absorbed by level 2 hospitals. Conclusion(s): Reorganisation of hospitals according to Cov19 levels was an important tool to enable treatment of Cov19 patients while maintaining cancer care by shifting treatment to other hospitals. However, there is an impact on missed diagnoses and treatments of patients, that will result in a higher morbidity and mortality.

A Design Science Approach to Blood Donation Apps

The COVID-19 pandemic has put additional pressure on the healthcare systems worldwide. It also led to a significant shortage of blood products. Delaying surgeries resulted in an increased demand at peak times that aligned with a decrease in blood donations at the same time. While being crucial for many surgeries and also certain types of treatments, blood cannot be produced artificially, but healthcare systems rely on voluntary donations. The relatively short shelf-life of most products makes a close matching of demand and supply necessary. We argue that smartphone applications can help to motivate donors to donate blood when necessary, giving access to all relevant information and services. By applying the design science research methodology, we derived design principles for effective smartphone applications and present a conceptual model in the form of mock-ups. We performed two design cycles and evaluated the design principles and the conceptual model with regular, lapsed, first-time and non-donors from Germany in a focus group discussion. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

ImageCLEF 2022: Multimedia Retrieval in Medical, Nature, Fusion, and Internet Applications

ImageCLEF s part of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) since 2003. CLEF 2022 will take place in Bologna, Italy. ImageCLEF is an ongoing evaluation initiative which promotes the evaluation of technologies for annotation, indexing, and retrieval of visual data with the aim of providing information access to large collections of images in various usage scenarios and domains. In its 20th edition, ImageCLEF will have four main tasks: (i) a Medical task addressing concept annotation, caption prediction, and tuberculosis detection;(ii) a Coral task addressing the annotation and localisation of substrates in coral reef images;(iii) an Aware task addressing the prediction of real-life consequences of online photo sharing;and (iv) a new Fusion task addressing late fusion techniques based on the expertise of the pool of classifiers. In 2021, over 100 research groups registered at ImageCLEF with 42 groups submitting more than 250 runs. These numbers show that, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, there is strong interest in the evaluation campaign.

Measurement and processing of stress for physicians in hospitals providing basic and specialized care in Germany over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic

Background Several studies report on the stress experiences by hospital employees during the COVID-19 pandemic, but also before the pandemic many medical hospital employees felt emotionally exhausted due to a high workload or unclear guidelines. Methods Cognitive appraisal and stress experiences of physicians from six hospitals during COVID-19 pandemic were assessed. Additionally, to the German-language version of the Stress Appraisal Measure (SAM), COVID-19 patient occupancy and relative bed occupancy were queried. Correlations in cross-sectional and longitudinal design were calculated. Results Participants t1: 170, t2: 55, t3: 47 physicians. Although there was no experience of such a pandemic, SAM averages were not noticeably different over time. Higher local new infections were not accompanied by an increased rating of the situation as threatening or stressful. High positive correlations of the same SAM sub-scales in the longitudinal design could be an indication of a time stable personality trait, which influences cognitive appraisal. Conclusion The results provide initial indications that medical staff had a good coping strategy with the stressful experiences caused by the pandemic. A more differentiated analysis of the stress experiences by medical staff in general, and not only at particular times of the pandemic, could be carried out in the future. © 2022 Georg Thieme Verlag. All rights reserved.

The 2021 ImageCLEF Benchmark: Multimedia Retrieval in Medical, Nature, Internet and Social Media Applications

This paper presents the ideas for the 2021 ImageCLEF lab that will be organized as part of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum—CLEF Labs 2021 in Bucharest, Romania. ImageCLEF is an ongoing evaluation initiative (active since 2003) that promotes the evaluation of technologies for annotation, indexing and retrieval of visual data with the aim of providing information access to large collections of images in various usage scenarios and domains. In 2021, the 19th edition of ImageCLEF will organize four main tasks: (i) a Medical task addressing visual question answering, a concept annotation and a tuberculosis classification task, (ii) a Coral task addressing the annotation and localisation of substrates in coral reef images, (iii) a DrawnUI task addressing the creation of websites from either a drawing or a screenshot by detecting the different elements present on the design and a new (iv) Aware task addressing the prediction of real-life consequences of online photo sharing. The strong participation in 2020, despite the COVID pandemic, with over 115 research groups registering and 40 submitting over 295 runs for the tasks shows an important interest in this benchmarking campaign. We expect the new tasks to attract at least as many researchers for 2021. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Transplant center graz guidelines for liver transplantation during covid-19 pandemic

Introduction: The new coronavirus type 2 is responsible for severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV-2). The associated disease named Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread around the world within a few weeks. Its impact on solid organ transplantation is largely unknown. It can be only assumed that immunosuppression is related with an increase of COVID-19 related morbidity and mortality. Here we describe our Transplant Center Graz guidelines including all preventive measures taken to protect liver transplant recipients from infection during COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: COVID-19 evaluation of donors and recipients comprises epidemiological and clinical evaluation as well as nasal swab COVID-19-PCR testing. An important part of the in hospital recipient management is a special training of both the whole transplant team and the recipient on protective measures against COVID-19 infection. The recipient is isolated in a single bed overpressure room with airlock including private rest room with shower for the recipient. Furthermore, strict visit ban consists and a restricted number of persons is allowed to be in the same room with the patient after transplantation (n=2). Members of the transplant team and the recipient wear ffp2 masks when they are together. It is aimed for fast extubation, fast step down from ICU to IMC / normal ward and rapid hospital discharge. The outpatient care includes phone consulting, immunomonitoring with blood samples drawn at home and sent to our center and limited social contacts to an absolute minimum. Results: During COVID-19 pandemic, LT was safely performed based on our experience and none of the patients transplanted during this time (n=4) got sick from COVID-19. Conclusion: Requirements for a safe procedure during COVID-19 pandemic are (i) a low-risk setting (both donor and recipient COVID-19 negative), (ii) internal Transplant Center Graz guidelines (described above) in combination with (iii) low disease severity recipients (labMELD score 10-14) of a low donor risk index graft.

The poor of christ in the roman church: Role and relevance for today

A lay movement known as the Poor of Christ, incorrectly referred to as the Waldensians, started in the Roman Church in 1176 and rapidly spread through Europe despite severe persecution by the church. Through their values and methods, they impacted on the communities where they were present. This article aims to show their role and contributions indicating its impact on the 16th century Reformation and relevance for the church today. It does this by examining selected themes from the Poor of Christ: their life-transforming faith, the strengthening of laity, the equal role of women in ministry, the importance of teaching and living the faith, a focused rather than fenced theology and loyalty to the one Church of Christ. The article also draws reference to the COVID-19 pandemic and explores what we can learn from the Poor of Christ in addressing this situation. Contribution: This article puts the spotlight on an overlooked lay movement that contributed significantly in preparing the climate for the 16th Century Reformation. Their example shows that the real strength of church is through members empowered to holistically live their faith. The article shows the current relevance of their values and methods. © 2020. The Authors. Licensee: AOSIS.