Altered immune response to vaccination in patients with plasma cell premalignancy

Introduction Patients with hematological malignancies, including multiple myeloma (MM), experience suboptimal responses to SARS-CoV-2 vaccination. Monoclonal Gammopathy of Undetermined Significance (MGUS) and Smoldering Multiple Myeloma (SMM) are precursors to MM and exhibit altered immune cell composition and function. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and the subsequent population-wide vaccination represent an opportunity to study the real-life immune response to a common antigen. Here, we present updated results from the IMPACT study, a study we launched in November 2020 to characterize the effect of plasma cell premalignancy on response to SARS-CoV2 vaccination (vx). Methods We performed: (i) ELISA for SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies on 1,887 peripheral blood (PB) samples (237 healthy donors (HD), and 550 MGUS, 947 SMM, and 153 MM patients) drawn preand post-vx;(ii) single-cell RNA, T cell receptor (TCR), and B cell receptor (BCR) sequencing (10x Genomics) on 224 PB samples (26 HD, and 20 MGUS, 48 SMM, and 24 MM patients) drawn preand post-vx;(iii) plasma cytokine profiling (Olink) on 106 PB samples (32 HD, and 38 MGUS and 36 SMM patients) drawn pre- and post-vx;and (iv) bulk TCR sequencing (Adaptive Biotechnologies) on 8 PB samples from 4 patients (2 MGUS, 2 SMM) drawn pre- and post-vx. Results Patients with MGUS and SMM achieved comparable antibody titers to HD two months post-vx. However, patient titers waned significantly faster, and 4 months post-vx we observed significantly lower titers in both MGUS (Wilcoxon rank-sum, p=0.030) and SMM (p=0.010). These results indicate impaired humoral immune response in patients with MGUS and SMM.At baseline, the TCR repertoire was significantly less diverse in patients with SMM compared to HD (Wilcoxon rank-sum, p=0.039), while no significant difference was observed in the BCR repertoire (p=0.095). Interestingly, a significant increase in TCR repertoire diversity was observed post-vx in patients with SMM (paired t-test, p=0.014), indicating rare T cell clone recruitment in response to vaccination. In both HD and patients, recruited clones showed upregulation of genes associated with CD4+ naive and memory T cells, suggesting preservation of the T cell response in SMM, which was confirmed by bulk TCR-sequencing in 4 patients.Lastly, by cytokine profiling, we observed a defect in IL-1beta and IL-18 induction post-vx in patients with SMM compared to HD (Wilcoxon rank-sum, p=0.047 and p=0.015, respectively), two key monocyte-derived mediators of acute inflammation, suggesting an altered innate immune response as well. Conclusion Taken together, our findings highlight that despite the absence of clinical manifestations, plasma cell premalignancy is associated with defects in both innate and adaptive immune responses. Therefore, patients with plasma cell premalignancy may require adjusted vaccination strategies for optimal immunization.

Police Social Capital and the Effectiveness of Emergency Policing in China During COVID-19

Emergency policing has played a significant role in controlling the spread of COVID-19 in various countries. China is one of the few countries that has successfully controlled the pandemic. What are the factors that determine the effectiveness of emergency policing in China? This study argues that the social capital played a supportive role in emergency policing during COVID-19. Based on the data analysis, we construct a theoretical framework to explain why pandemic control in China has been effective. The effectiveness of the police response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Zhejiang, China, displays the importance of all three types of social capital for emergency policing, including interaction-assisted social capital represented by 'grid-governance', technology-driven social capital represented by 'data sharing', and service-assisted social capital represented by 'safety construction'.

Teaching Effect after Changing Mode of Continuing Medical Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Objective To explore the teaching effect of the teaching mode changed from traditional teaching to online teaching after the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Methods Relying on the Beijing Women's Health Care Technology Improvement Project, the online and offline continuing medical education was carried out, to train the obstetrician and gynecologist working in 16 maternal and child health care hospitals in 16 administrative regions of Beijing, which was planned from September 2020 to December 2025. This study retrospectively collected the assessment results of the two teaching modes from March 2021 to December 2021 (the first year of the teaching plan), and compared the teaching effects. Results Online teaching completed three sessions of 30 live online conference courses, with about 25 000 participants, including 4757 obstetricians and gynecologists from 16 maternal and child health care hospitals in Beijing. A total of 82 on-site teaching courses were held for offline teaching, and 1771 gynecologists and obstetricians from 16 maternity and child care hospitals in Beijing participated in the study. The scores of online teaching and offline teaching were 90.88+/-4.88 and 88.65+/-4.35, respectively. Conclusions Online teaching maybe has similar teaching effects as offline teaching. Compared with offline teaching, online teaching has more advantages, such as convenience, efficiency and economy, which is worthy of promotion and application in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.Copyright © 2022, Peking Union Medical College Hospital. All rights reserved.

Pricing and Risk Management of Multi-Assets Financial Instruments to Natural Disasters

COVID-19 not only led to a significant loss of human lives but also brought indelible economic loss. To transfer the natural disaster risk, a variety of financial instruments written on the environmental phenomena have been developed and issued by financial institutions. The gamma distribution family is characterized by sparsity, heavy tail, and high skewness;thus, it has been widely used to model the data of environmental phenomena. To exploit the versatility of the gamma distribution, Vitiello and Poon propose the pricing model for financial instruments under the general equilibrium risk neutral valuation relationship (RNVR) framework. Though the VP model is capable of pricing financial instruments, their underlying is limited to a single asset. However, the vast majority of firms face various risks and prefer more efficient and cheaper ways to hedge these risks and maintain financial stability. To price multiple-asset financial instruments, this study extends the single-asset VP model to a multi-asset VP model (MVP) under the RNVR framework. Based on the MVP model, this study demonstrates two applications to price basket options and spread options. To manage the pricing of financial instruments that do not have closed-form pricing formulas, this study develops the Monte Carlo simulation method within the MVP model framework. For risk management, this study provides hedge ratios for market practitioners to manage their risk exposures. © 2023 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Reducing farmers' poverty vulnerability in China: The role of digital financial inclusion

This paper applies exogenous shocks to investigate the impact of digital financial inclusion (DFI) on farmers' poverty vulnerability in China. We find that farmers in highly developed DFI areas are less vulnerable to the poverty trap. The result is robust to various checks, including propensity score matching and difference-in-differences method and the instrumental variable approach. Moreover, we find that income diversification is the possible economic channel through which DFI affects farmers' poverty vulnerability. Further analyses show that DFI has a "targeting” effect on those who are poor and vulnerable, and a synergistic effect by working with medical insurance and informal finance in terms of reducing farmers' poverty vulnerability. Our research findings provide new theoretical insights and useful guidance in enhancing financial inclusiveness and sustainable development in the post-COVID-19 era. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Fusing hybrid attentive network with self-supervised dual-channel heterogeneous graph for knowledge tracing

Recently the large-scale influence of Covid-19 promoted the fast development of intelligent tutoring systems (ITS). As a major task of ITS, Knowledge Tracing (KT) aims to capture a student's dynamic knowledge state based on his historical response sequences and provide personalized learning assistance to him. However, most existing KT methods have encountered the data sparsity problem. In real scenarios, an online tutoring system usually has an extensive collection of questions while each student can only interact with a limited number of questions. As a result, the records of some questions could be extremely sparse, which degrades the performance of traditional KT models. To resolve this issue, we propose a Dual-channel Heterogeneous Graph Network (DHGN) to learn informative representations of questions from students' records by capturing both the high-order heterogeneous and local relations. As the supervised learning manner applied in previous methods is incapable of exploiting unobserved relations between questions, we innovatively integrate a self-supervised framework into the KT task and employ contrastive learning via the two channels of DHGN, supplementing as an auxiliary task to improve the KT performance. Moreover, we adopt the attention mechanism, which has achieved impressive performance in natural language processing tasks, to effectively capture students' knowledge state. But the standard attention network is inapplicable to the KT task because the current knowledge state of a student usually shows strong dependency on his recently interactive questions, unlike the situation of language processing tasks, which focus more on the long-term dependency. To avoid the inefficiency of standard attention networks in the KT task, we further devise a novel Hybrid Attentive Network (HAN), which produces both the global attention and the hierarchical local attention to model the long-term and short-term intents, respectively. Then, by the gating network, a student's long-term and short-term intents are combined for efficient prediction. We conduct extensive experiments on several real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed methods achieve significant performance improvement compared to existing state-of-the-art baselines, which validates the effectiveness of the proposed dual-channel heterogeneous graph framework and hybrid attentive network. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd

How does emotional labor influence restaurant employees' service quality during COVID-19? The roles of work fatigue and supervisor–subordinate Guanxi

Purpose: This study aims to test the relationship between emotional labor and service quality of the frontline employees of Chinese restaurants during the coronavirus disease pandemic (COVID-19). This study further investigated the mediating role of work fatigue (WF) and the moderating role of supervisor–subordinate Guanxi (SSG). Design/methodology/approach: The authors used a time-lag approach to gather data from a sample of 365 frontline staff members working in Chinese restaurants. All hypotheses were tested using SPSS and AMOS. Findings: First, restaurant frontline employees' deep acting was associated with higher service quality, whereas surface acting leads to lower service quality. Second, WF mediated the relationship between emotional labor and service quality. Third, SSG moderated the impact of emotional labor on WF during COVID-19. Research limitations/implications: All variables measured in this study were self-reported by restaurant frontline employees, which may increase the risk of common-method bias. However, this study enriches the literature on emotional labor, WF and SSG during COVID-19. Practical implications: COVID-19 has severely affected the hotel, restaurant and catering sector and especially the psychological state and the work performance of frontline employees. Restaurant managers should implement some measures to improve employees' service quality during COVID-19. Originality/value: The present findings show that restaurant frontline employees adopted various emotional labor strategies when they were faced with higher than usual job demands and the risk of infection during COVID-19. © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Hidden causality between oil prices and exchange rates

This work investigates the interactions between oil prices and exchange rates of 6 typical oil importers (China, Japan, and India) and exporters (Canada, Russia, and Saudi Arabia) from 2006 to 2022. We employ a novel method to capture their causal interactions, namely pattern causality, and compare the results to that based on the volatility spillover method. The empirical analysis supports most existing findings that oil prices are bidirectional correlated with exchange rates. However, unlike previous studies that only investigate positive and negative causalities, we highlight dark causality as a more complex interaction. Moreover, dark causality suggests that successive increases (decreases) in oil prices tend to drive the exchange rates of oil exporters to act in an oscillatory manner rather than in a purely positive or opposite trend, and vice versa. Furthermore, we also reveal that dark causality shows dominance during crises, e.g., the global financial crisis, the European debt crisis, the epidemic of COVID-19, and the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Revealing three types of causalities between oil prices and exchange rates helps policymakers develop more diversified macroeconomic policies. Moreover, the newly identified dark causality can be a useful indicator for investors to risk management. © 2023

Advances and challenges in intranasal vaccines development for respiratory infectious diseases

The great challenge to prevent transmission makes widespread of respiratory infectious diseases easily occur. Intranasal immunization is considered to be a promising route of vaccination to prevent it. Different from parenteral vaccines, intranasal vaccines can induce mucosal immune in respiratory tracts in addition to systemic immune, which provide the first line of defense against respiratory pathogen infection and further prevent transmission. Safe and effective intranasal spray flu vaccines have been licensed. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, intranasal administration has been applied in different vaccine platforms. This article has reviewed the progress of intranasal vaccines for respiratory infectious diseases that have been licensed or are under evaluation in the clinical trials, meanwhile discusses its unique advantages and challenges faced. © 2023, Publication Centre of Anhui Medical University. All rights reserved.

Time-frequency connectedness and cross-quantile dependence between carbon emission trading and commodity markets: Evidence from China

This paper aims to investigate the dynamic connectedness and the cross-quantile dependence structure between carbon emission trading and commodity markets in China. We employ both the Baruník and Křehlík (2018) connectedness method and the Baruník and Kley (2019) cross-quantile dependence method to provide time-frequency-quantile evidence. In addition, we use a daily dataset from September 2, 2013, to September 30, 2022, to gauge the macroeconomic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that Petrochemical is the biggest contributor and recipient in the carbon-commodities system, and the results show that carbon markets are more influenced by other commodity markets than the reverse. Furthermore, the total connectedness is stronger in the short term but can increase over the long term, especially during the onset of COVID-19. The dynamic pair-wise results show that the carbon market can impact other commodity markets, but the effects are diverse and varied. The quantile-varying dependence between the carbon market and commodities is detected, and the cross-quantile dependence gradually strengthens as the trading days increase. This paper concludes with fruitful policy implications for resource decision-makers. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd

The development of online instructional design for computational thinking to improve student problem-solving skill

Problem-solving skills are part of Critical Thinking which focuses on the student's abilities to face the 21st century. Recently, one technique to foster and improve problem-solving skills is by learning through Computational Thinking. Many previous studies have described that Computational Thinking is a problem-solving technique adopted from Computer Sciences. However, Computational Thinking learning had been carried out in class or asynchronous. The COVID-19 situation raises the challenges of how Computational Thinking can be taught online. Therefore, this study aims to develop an instructional design in online-based computational thinking learning. The development of this study employs the ADDIE method. The final step of the development stage was carried out through a small-scale online class experiment. The development result obtained by Scratch, which is an online programming platform that is suitable for 1) learning Computational Thinking, 2) instructional design that refers to problem-based learning, and 3) instructional strategies that refer to Bloom's taxonomy. The results of the small-scale instructional design experiment showed that there was a significant improvement in the students' ability in problem-solving and computational thinking. © 2023 Author(s).

Advances and challenges in intranasal vaccines development for respiratory infectious diseases.

The great challenge to prevent transmission makes widespread of respiratory infectious diseases easily occur. Intranasal immunization is considered to be a promising route of vaccination to prevent it. Different from parenteral vaccines, intranasal vaccines can induce mucosal immune in respiratory tracts in addition to systemic immune, which provide the first line of defense against respiratory pathogen infection and further prevent transmission. Safe and effective intranasal spray flu vaccines have been licensed. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, intranasal administration has been applied in different vaccine platforms. This article has reviewed the progress of intranasal vaccines for respiratory infectious diseases that have been licensed or are under evaluation in the clinical trials, meanwhile discusses its unique advantages and challenges faced.Copyright © 2023, Publication Centre of Anhui Medical University. All rights reserved.

[Establishment and preliminary application of quantitative real-time PCR assay for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 subgenomic nucleocapsid RNA].

Objective: To establish a rapid and specific quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) method for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 subgenomic nucleocapsid RNA (SgN) in patients with COVID-19 or environmental samples. Methods: The qPCR assay was established by designing specific primers and TaqMan probe based on the SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequence in Global Initiative of Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID) database. The reaction conditions were optimized by using different annealing temperature, different primers and probe concentrations and the standard curve was established. Further, the specificity, sensitivity and repeatability were also assessed. The established SgN and genomic RNA (gRNA) qPCR assays were both applied to detect 21 environmental samples and 351 clinical samples containing 48 recovered patients. In the specimens with both positive gRNA and positive SgN, 25 specimens were inoculated on cells. Results: The primers and probes of SgN had good specificity for SARS-CoV-2. The minimum detection limit of the preliminarily established qPCR detection method for SgN was 1.5×102 copies/ml, with a coefficient of variation less than 1%. The positive rate of gRNA in 372 samples was 97.04% (361/372). The positive rates of SgN in positive environmental samples and positive clinical samples were 36.84% (7/19) and 49.42% (169/342), respectively. The positive rate and copy number of SgN in Wild strain were lower than those of SARS-CoV-2 Delta strain. Among the 25 SgN positive samples, 12 samples within 5 days of sampling time were all isolated with virus; 13 samples sampled for more than 12 days had no cytopathic effect. Conclusion: A qPCR method for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 SgN has been successfully established. The sensitivity, specificity and repeatability of this method are good.

Learner Engagement in a Business Simulation Game: Impact on Higher-Order Thinking Skills

Higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) are reliable predictors of success in school and the workplace. A typical technique for encouraging higher-order thinking is to use instructional design interventions that engage learners in simple cognitive activities. Business simulation game (BSG) is one of the types of interactive learning environments that can increase HOTS. In addition, student engagement and attitude toward technology use are considered strong influences on HOTS. The study explored the effect of using a BSG on HOTS and student engagement. It examined the influence of attitude toward the use of a BSG on HOTS and student engagement. The results of the t-test analysis showed that learning activities using BSG had a positive effect on HOTS and student engagement. Additionally, PLS-SEM analysis results indicated that immersion, interaction, and intention to use the game influence student engagement. Furthermore, student engagement significantly influenced HOTS. The findings indicate that students must demonstrate that they are engaging actively in a course to improve HOTS and that a BSG can be a valuable and effective tool for promoting engagement. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic caused limitations in sampling and representativeness of respondents. Future research should involve a bigger sample size and students who have attended related courses. © The Author(s) 2022.

Teaching Effect after Changing Mode of Continuing Medical Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Objective To explore the teaching effect of the teaching mode changed from traditional teaching to online teaching after the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Methods Relying on the Beijing Women's Health Care Technology Improvement Project, the online and offline continuing medical education was carried out, to train the obstetrician and gynecologist working in 16 maternal and child health care hospitals in 16 administrative regions of Beijing, which was planned from September 2020 to December 2025. This study retrospectively collected the assessment results of the two teaching modes from March 2021 to December 2021 (the first year of the teaching plan), and compared the teaching effects. Results Online teaching completed three sessions of 30 live online conference courses, with about 25 000 participants, including 4757 obstetricians and gynecologists from 16 maternal and child health care hospitals in Beijing. A total of 82 on-site teaching courses were held for offline teaching, and 1771 gynecologists and obstetricians from 16 maternity and child care hospitals in Beijing participated in the study. The scores of online teaching and offline teaching were 90.88±4.88 and 88.65±4.35, respectively. Conclusions Online teaching maybe has similar teaching effects as offline teaching. Compared with offline teaching, online teaching has more advantages, such as convenience, efficiency and economy, which is worthy of promotion and application in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. © 2022, Peking Union Medical College Hospital. All rights reserved.

Exploring the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on residential energy consumption: a global literature review

The outbreak of COVID-19 made researchers notice some new points and change their focus, such as the economies of scale for residential energy use, energy dependency of societies, etc. This paper provides a bibliometric analysis of 497 articles by VOSviewer, finding that existing studies on building energy use during COVID-19 could be summarized into four keywords, i.e., building occupants, coronavirus, sustainability and monitoring and management. Significant increases in residential energy consumption are found with the increased duration of in-home-activity, while the growth rate varies between different neighborhoods, different times of day and different usage of energy. Attitudes vary toward the changing trend in the post-pandemic period, and the impacts of lockdown, new confirmed cases, social distancing, etc. on residential energy consumption have been given special attention in recent studies. Policy implications are concluded for maintaining normal operation of residential energy systems under the shock of public health emergencies. © 2023 Newcastle University.

National innovation systems and the achievement of sustainable development goals: Effect of knowledge-based dynamic capability

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of knowledge-based dynamic capabilities in national innovation systems in the achievement of sustainable development goals, employing an empirical approach in the context of the unprecedented COVID-19 crisis. Based on data from 130 sample countries, we analyzed the impact of knowledge-based dynamic capabilities on the achievement of sustainable development goals using PLS-SEM. In particular, we considered the differences in the impact of knowledge-based dynamic capabilities on the achievement of sustainable development goals at different stages of economic development. The results show that knowledge-based dynamic capabilities have a positive impact on the achievement of sustainable development goals, while their compositional dimensions have a dual impact, both direct and indirect. In addition, knowledge-based dynamic capabilities have different impacts on the achievement of sustainable development goals at different stages of economic development. This indicates that a country's economic development level will affect the relationship between knowledge-based dynamic capabilities and the achievement of sustainable development goals. However, it also means that there is a more complex relationship between these capabilities and the achievement of the goals. This study offers a new perspective for sustainable development research, adds new insights to the theory of linking knowledge-based dynamic capabilities to the achievement of sustainable development goals, and provides a measurement standard for the impact of those capabilities on the goals. © 2023 The Authors

Chinese Immigrants' Health Beliefs and Practices of Traditional Chinese Medicine in British Columbia of Canada

Objective: This study is to address the health beliefs and health behavior of Chinese immigrants residing in the Greater Vancouver area of British Columbia (BC) Province in Canada. This article discussed Chinese immigrants' traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) use, health beliefs, and health behaviors. Methods: Information used in this study is based on data collected in the Chinese-speaking community in the Greater Vancouver area of BC in 2020–2022. Quantitative and qualitative methods were applied to this study. The first stage recruited 314 participants for the quantitative study to cross-validate an instrument tool, followed by the 2nd stage of 20 stratified random sampling out of the 314 participants for TCM-related in-depth qualitative interviews. This study focuses on the second stage of TCM qualitative interviews. Results: Results indicated that TCM health beliefs have cultural and spiritual meanings tied to the Chinese-speaking participants. There are barriers for the Chinese-speaking population to access the existing healthcare services due to their TCM health beliefs and other health needs, for example, family doctors, integrated medicine for better health outcomes, and mental health services especially during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Conclusion: Integrating TCM health beliefs and behaviors of Chinese-speaking immigrants into existing Canadian mainstream health services are strongly recommended. Copyright © 2022 Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Six new species of Zaischnopsis Ashmead (Hymenoptera: Chalcidoidea: Eupelmidae) from China based on morphological and molecular data

Six new species of Zaischnopsis Ashmead (Hymenoptera: Eupelmidae) from China are described, Zaischnopsis covid Jiang & Peng sp. nov., Zaischnopsis fuscolivida Tang & Peng sp. nov., Zaischnopsis lii Jiang & Peng sp. nov., Zaischnopsis pacis Jiang & Peng sp. nov., Zaischnopsis campaniformis Tang & Peng sp. nov., and Zaischnopsis zhongi Jiang & Peng sp. nov. All the new species are described and illustrated based on females, and partial mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) sequences are provided for the six new species as well as for the previously described Z. fumosa Peng & Xiang. Females of all the species of Zaischnopsis recorded from China are differentiated in a key. © 2022, Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle. All rights reserved.