Highlighting the Challenges in the Development, Funding, and Reimbursement of Medical Innovations from a Developer Perspective

Healthcare system is an essential system for any nation as it is responsible for maintaining the health of the individuals and public. However, the outbreak of different viral diseases such as influenza, covid-19 etc. has encouraged medical research in different developing and developed countries. Similarly, in Malaysia, different public and private research centers and biotechnology firms are being promoted to develop new and innovative medical drugs and equipment. However, different challenges are faced by the developers in promoting the development and innovations of medical commodities. Thus, this study was conducted to investigate different challenges in the development, funding, and reimbursement of medical innovations in Malaysia. For this purpose, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 7 developers from different public research and development (R&D) centers and biotechnology firms in Malaysia. After the interviews were conducted, their edited transcription was obtained, and thematic analysis was conducted, and different themes and sub-themes were formulated. The results obtained from this study showed that the lack of innovative environment, strategic compliances and effective funding structure negatively influences medical innovations in Malaysia. It has also been observed that poor reimbursement practices and policies and lack of pricing strategies by the Malaysian government impacts the ROI of the associated firms and developers. Thus, it has been recommended that mega-funds and reimbursement policies should be promoted to overcome these challenges in medical innovations.Copyright © 2023 ThinkBiotech LLC. All rights reserved.

Multimodal literacies and critical refllexivity: Digital storytelling as a 21st century tool for Learning Developers

Digital storytelling (DS) is a multimedia storytelling technique that has become an efficacious educational tool in tertiary environments. Individual students, supported by other students in a facilitated "Story Circle", create short videos using digital devices, still images, and a cloud-based video editor in response to a targeted story prompt. The DS process aligns closely with an emerging trend in universities to instil in their students both critical reflection skills and strong digital, media, and visual literacies to enable them to thrive in their professional and personal lives. This paper proposes the adoption of DS as an additional and innovative pedagogical strategy by Learning Developers (LDs) within discipline-specific embedded teaching. Embedded teaching is a well-established method of developing student literacies, and LDs already employ this approach to support academics across disciplines. The integration of DS into this practice would further strengthen the capacity of LDs to enhance students' capabilities as they move into post-Covid, 21st-century 'graduateness'.

Assessing Wellbeing and Soft Skills of Software Developers and Students in the Context of Working from Home during the COVID-19 era

Derived from COVID-19 pandemic remote work is now a trend, involving new skills and variations on developers' wellbeing. Current students are going to live this new era in the labor market;it is needed to know if they are getting ready for this scenario. This paper presents an exploratory study based on a survey to assess how developers in industry and students in the academy experienced their wellbeing expressed in emotions during the pandemic, as well as how they practiced the soft skills involved in software development. The results of developers are considered as basis to assess how students are prepared for this context. The descriptive study has shown that developers experienced more positive emotions, while students had a mix of positive and negative emotions. In terms of soft skills, developers and students showed closer levels of practice, however students should reinforce some skills. © 2022 IEEE.

A Twitter dataset for Monkeypox, May 2022.

After struggling with COVID-19 pandemic for two years, the world is finally recovering from this crisis. Nonetheless, another virus, Monkeypox, is quickly spreading throughout the world and in non-endemic regions and continents, threatening the world to a new pandemic. Twitter as a popular social media has successfully been used for predicting and controlling outbreaks. Much research previously has been done for building early warning systems, trend prediction, and misinformation and fake news detection. Since tweets are not accessible to all researchers, in this work, a publicly available dataset containing 2400202 tweets gathered from May first to December twenty-fifth, 2022 is presented. Twitter developers academic researcher API which returns all the tweets matching a given query was used to gather the dataset. To this end, the full archive search and keywords related to Monkeypox and its equivalents in other languages, i.e. Monkeypox or "monkey pox" or "viruela dei mono" or "variole du singe" or "variola do macoco" were used. The retweets were excluded using the negation operator, and the tweet ids and user ids were extracted and shared with public. Approximately, 1.79 percent (43047 number) of tweets were geotagged. To visualize the geotagged tweets, the longitude and latitude of the bounding box coordinates were averaged. This work will help researchers shed light on the news, patterns, and on-going discussions of Monkeypox on social media, identify hotspots, and help contain the Monkeypox virus.

Everywhere but Nowhere: Development Experiences of the International Game Developers in Finland during the Covid-19 Pandemic and Remote Work

The Covid-19 pandemic has influenced people's views on work, and a significant portion of the global game industry converted to remote work during the pandemic. To explore the status of game development in this pivotal moment, we have conducted semi-structured interviews with 27 immigrant/expatriate game developers ("game expats") in Finland analyzing their migration push and pull on societal, industrial, social, and individual factors. The results indicate societal and industrial factors simultaneously influencing game expats' migration intention, but with an increasing influence of game corporation's role on developers' both on-the-job and off-the-job embeddedness due to an absence of (local) community activities during the pandemic. The data also reveals that game developers are valuing the physical workspace for face-to-face interactions, despite the industrial norm of digital tools and seamless transition to remote work. Furthermore, an alarming stratification and hierarchization within the game industry were identified, which game developers self-dividing in-house versus outsourced workforce even if they were both required to work remotely. This paper contributes to game studies on game developers' experiences as an attempt to investigate the local context of game development. It is also one of the first snapshots of game work practices in Finland during the Covid-19 era. © 2022 Owner/Author.

CodeWalk: Facilitating Shared Awareness in Mixed-Ability Collaborative Software Development

COVID-19 accelerated the trend toward remote software development, increasing the need for tightly-coupled synchronous collaboration. Existing tools and practices impose high coordination overhead on blind or visually impaired (BVI) developers, impeding their abilities to collaborate effectively, compromising their agency, and limiting their contribution. To make remote collaboration more accessible, we created CodeWalk, a set of features added to Microsoft's Live Share VS Code extension, for synchronous code review and refactoring. We chose design criteria to ease the coordination burden felt by BVI developers by conveying sighted colleagues' navigation and edit actions via sound effects and speech. We evaluated our design in a within-subjects experiment with 10 BVI developers. Our results show that CodeWalk streamlines the dialogue required to refer to shared workspace locations, enabling participants to spend more time contributing to coding tasks. This design offers a path towards enabling BVI and sighted developers to collaborate on more equal terms. © 2022 ACM.

The Vision of the Main Mobile Apps Related to Caravanning: an Analysis of the Reviews Focusing on Users and Developers

Mobile applications (apps) are becoming an essential tool when it comes to sightseeing. There is even a specific category for trips in the leading app stores. These are no strangers to the rise of the itinerant travel style, the caravans. The study aims to understand the situation of the main caravanning apps in Spain. We have carried out a web scraping methodology using a sample of 1,601 Spanish reviews of the main apps related to caravanning. The most interesting findings, among others, are that we are getting to know a sector that up to now was unknown and that even has not been affected by the pandemic crisis. Besides, the paper has demonstrated that developers do not follow the right strategies in caravanning apps. The paper also shows users' most crucial concerns about these apps. Therefore, managers of caravanning apps could improve their strategies by focusing their attention on users' concerns and, most important, reviews to respond.

A qualitative study of developers' discussions of their problems and joys during the early COVID-19 months.

Many software developers started to work from home on a short notice during the early periods of COVID-19. A number of previous papers have studied the wellbeing and productivity of software developers during COVID-19. The studies mainly use surveys based on predefined questionnaires. In this paper, we investigate the problems and joys that software developers experienced during the early months of COVID-19 by analyzing their discussions in online forum devRant, where discussions can be open and not bound by predefined survey questionnaires. The devRant platform is designed for developers to share their joys and frustrations of life. We manually analyze 825 devRant posts between January and April 12, 2020 that developers created to discuss their situation during COVID-19. WHO declared COVID-19 as pandemic on March 11, 2020. As such, our data offers us insights in the early months of COVID-19. We manually label each post along two dimensions: the topics of the discussion and the expressed sentiment polarity (positive, negative, neutral). We observed 19 topics that we group into six categories: Workplace & Professional aspects, Personal & Family well-being, Technical Aspects, Lockdown preparedness, Financial concerns, and Societal and Educational concerns. Around 49% of the discussions are negative and 26% are positive. We find evidence of developers' struggles with lack of documentation to work remotely and with their loneliness while working from home. We find stories of their job loss with little or no savings to fallback to. The analysis of developer discussions in the early months of a pandemic will help various stakeholders (e.g., software companies) make important decision early to alleviate developer problems if such a pandemic or similar emergency situation occurs in near future. Software engineering research can make further efforts to develop automated tools for remote work (e.g., automated documentation).

The Current Landscape of mRNA Vaccines Against Viruses and Cancer-A Mini Review.

Both infectious viral diseases and cancer have historically been some of the most common causes of death worldwide. The COVID-19 pandemic is a decidedly relevant example of the former. Despite progress having been made over past decades, new and improved techniques are still needed to address the limitations faced by current treatment standards, with mRNA-based therapy emerging as a promising solution. Highly flexible, scalable and cost-effective, mRNA therapy is proving to be a compelling vaccine platform against viruses. Likewise, mRNA vaccines show similar promise against cancer as a platform capable of encoding multiple antigens for a diverse array of cancers, including those that are patient specific as a novel form of personalized medicine. In this review, the molecular mechanisms, biotechnological aspects, and clinical developments of mRNA vaccines against viral infections and cancer are discussed to provide an informative update on the current state of mRNA therapy research.

CAPIRS: COVID-19-Based Application Programming Interface Recommendation System for the Developers

Context: From the past few years, Application Programming Interface (API) is widely used for mobile- and web-based application developments. Software developers can integrate third-party services into their projects to achieve their development goals efficiently using APIs;however, with the rapid increase in the number of APIs, the manual selection of Mashup-oriented API is becoming more difficult for the developer. Objective: In the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone wants an update about the latest Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and the latest information on COVID-19. Additionally, a software developer wants to develop an application that provides the SOPs and latest information of COVID-19;a developer can add these functionalities into an application using COVID-19-based APIs. Moreover, the current work aims at proposing a COVID-19-based API recommendation system for the developers. Method: In this study, we propose a COVID-19-based API recommendation system for developers. The recommendation system takes a developer query as input and recommends top-3 APIs and supported features, which help the developer during software development. Furthermore, the proposed COVID-19-based API recommendation system ensures the maximum participation of the developers by validating the recommended APIs and recommendation system from the expert developers using research questionnaires. Results: Additionally, the proposed COVID-19-based API recommendation system's output is validated by expert developers and evaluated on 120 expert developers' queries. In addition, experiment results show that single value decomposition achieves better prediction. Conclusion: We conclude that it is significantly important to recommend APIs along with supported features to the developer for project development, and future work is needed to take more developer's queries also to build Integrated Development Environment for the developers. © 2022 World Scientific Publishing Co.

Premiums or Discounts? The State of Real Estate Investing in the U.S. and Mexico

Among these is Green Street Advisors, who are a meritorious source for information on various indicators of the behavior of real estate, including their analysis of the Premiums (or Discounts) on the Net Asset Value, of each of the sectors that make up the large Commercial Real Estate group. In the podcast on FIBRAs and Capital Markets under COVID-19, Colliers International and SiiLA Mexico, agree that the industrial sector is one of the least affected by COVID.2 However, SiiLA indicates ("The Value of Post COVID-19 Properties")3 that the logistics sector, being one of the most defensive, will have the challenge of organizing its supply chain. In some cases, during turbulent times, market conditions change in such a way that despite the high risk affected by most sectors, as in this case are Retail, Lodging and Office, given the high demand for quality space and strategic location for e-Commerce or for Nearshore Manufacturing, the industrial properties that meet these requirements benefit by becoming attractive opportunities.

Build This House: Real Estate Opportunities in The U.S. Under Biden

In the face of sudden economic stops, monetary policy has demonstrated its limitations, and successive waves of fiscal relief packages disbursed by governments have provided critical liquidity support to help shore up balance sheets for households and for companies hard-hit by the pandemic.2 As multiple vaccines are disseminated across the globe, an uneven economic recovery has taken shape, with countries such as Italy, Spain, and the U.K. having experienced severe contractions in 2020, and with China actually posting real GDP growth in 2020.3 While investors remain exuberant about the prospects of additional stimulus measures-fueling the unleashing of pent-up demand and the onset of the 'roaring twenties'-expectations for higher inflation have sent shudders through bond and equity markets in the U.S. Nevertheless, considerable slack in the labor market remains in the U.S., with segments of the economy still far behind recovery.4 In early 2021, the real unemployment rate hovered around 10%.5 The aggregate unemployment rate for those at the bottom part of the wage quartile far exceeds that of the top-with many minimum wage jobs in sectors such as leisure and hospitality having been decimated during the crisis, whilst higher-earning white-collar workers have, for the most part, been able to retain their jobs working from home.6 Indeed, even thinking beyond unemployment numbers and focusing on income, many households within the bottom three quintiles of the income distribution came into the crisis in a situation of stagnation, or deep distress. [...]these opportunities are also to be found across global markets. [...]with central banks and governments committed to expansionary monetary policy in the wake of the pandemic, a lower interest rate-induced surge in buying homes (for those who can afford to) has unfolded within advanced economies across the globe, including Singapore, Canada, and the U.K.18, 19, 20 In December 2020, U.S. housing starts jumped to their highest level in 13 years.21 In early 2021, U.S. existing home sales reached the highest level in 14 years.22 Similarly, with the rush of pent-up demand emerging from initial lockdowns, house prices in the U.K. hit a six-year zenith.23 Looking beyond lower interest rates as a causal factor, purchases have been stepped up throughout the pandemic by those who have been able to work from home, and might have transitioned into a more amenable living arrangement, potentially with more space to live and work and play. [...]homeowners in the U.S. spent an average of $17,140 on their homes in the first eight months of the pandemic.24 Due to the surge in demand, a shortage of supply, and ongoing tariffs and disruptions to supply chains, the price of lumber has spiked by 180% since the spring of 2020, eating into developers' margins, and also contributing to the rise in house prices.25 It is important to note in the debates about the potential return of high inflation, house prices are not included in

The human factor: the “unknown unknowns” in the real estate development process

Purpose>Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity (VUCA) are terms the military have coined to describe the environment they often operate in. This paper examines how this decision-making framework can be used to better inform real estate investment and development. In celebration of this journal's 40th anniversary, we also explore how VUCA can be related to and expand on the teachings of Dr. James A. Graaskamp who published his seminal piece on the Fundamentals of Real Estate Development (1981) the same year. In that piece, he highlights the importance of paying attention to the human factor, the consumers of real estate.Design/methodology/approach>This is a thought piece on an alternative decision-making framework that can help capture the dynamic environment that commercial real estate investors and developers are currently working in. VUCA captures the difficulty of predicting the future in a world of accelerating, unpredictable change. This is particularly important in today's rapidly changing world caused not only by the current COVID-19 pandemic but also the exponential growth of the proptech industry as well as the increasing risks and opportunities associated with climate change that continues to impact the built environment.Findings>This is not a traditional research project with empirical findings. We are presenting an alternative framework for thinking about making investment decisions in these current volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times today and in the future. In addition, the importance of multidisciplinary training and the human factor are stressed.Research limitations/implications>There are no limitations to this research as it is the ideas of the authors. Implications are to help real estate investors, developers and educators better understand the environment that they are working in.Practical implications>VUCA captures better the dynamic nature of real estate investments compared to traditional analysis. It helps one better analyze the risks and returns but also to acknowledge that there is a lot you cannot predict and there are many exogenous variables that can, at times, completely change the rules of the game. Flexibility and adaptability are essential tools for working in a VUCA environment. In addition, the human factor plays an increasingly important role and real estate investors and developers that clearly understand this and focus on the consumer will likely be more successful.Originality/value>We believe that this is the first time that VUCA has been used in the real estate academic literature.

How COVID-19 Pandemic affects Software Developers' Wellbeing: An Exploratory Study in the West Border Area of Mexico-USA

The coronavirus COVID-19 swept the world in early 2020, working from home was a necessity. In the software industry, thousands of software developers began working from home, many did so on short notice, under difficult and stressful conditions. The emotions of developers can be affected by this situation. Software engineering research lacks theory and methodologies for addressing human aspects in software development. In this paper we present an exploratory study with a survey applied to practitioners in the west border area of Mexico-USA. This study is focused on the developers' wellbeing during pandemic, expressed as emotions. The results show that high percent expressed to experience positive emotions such as optimism, serenity, happiness, acceptance, trust, and interest;however, even when negative emotions are not experienced in a significant level, a portion of respondents expressed to feel them. 91.0% expressed to be satisfied working from home, however, some conditions should be improved. © 2021 IEEE.

Transforming Learning and Talent Operations at Mitsubishi Real Estate in Japan

One of the largest real estate developers in Japan, Mitsubishi Real Estate Co., Ltd. has been going through a series of transformation initiatives in talent operations and organizational architecture. This paper illustrates the organizational efforts behind the corporate initiatives of developing a learning culture sustained by cognitive technology across the business. Furthermore, the authors have analyzed the organizational impact of various initiatives geared at enhancing organizational agility at Mitsubishi Real Estate Co., Ltd. during the Covid-19 pandemic in Japan.

From COVID-19 to Cancer mRNA Vaccines: Moving From Bench to Clinic in the Vaccine Landscape.

Recently, mRNA vaccines have become a significant type of therapeutic and have created new fields in the biopharmaceutical industry. mRNA vaccines are promising next-generation vaccines that have introduced a new age in vaccinology. The recent approval of two COVID-19 mRNA vaccines (mRNA-1273 and BNT162b2) has accelerated mRNA vaccine technology and boosted the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry. These mRNA vaccines will help to tackle COVID-19 pandemic through immunization, offering considerable hope for future mRNA vaccines. Human trials with data both from mRNA cancer vaccines and mRNA infectious disease vaccines have provided encouraging results, inspiring the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries to focus on this area of research. In this article, we discuss current mRNA vaccines broadly in two parts. In the first part, mRNA vaccines in general and COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are discussed. We presented the mRNA vaccine structure in general, the different delivery systems, the immune response, and the recent clinical trials for mRNA vaccines (both for cancer mRNA vaccines and different infectious diseases mRNA vaccines). In the second part, different COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are explained. Finally, we illustrated a snapshot of the different leading mRNA vaccine developers, challenges, and future prospects of mRNA vaccines.

Coach Training Within the Covid-19 Pandemic: Challenges and Potential Pathways.

In this article we aim to provide insights about the challenges stakeholders in Portugal and across the globe may face throughout the Coronavirus Disease 2019 pandemic to reorganize coach training programs and suggest strategies to help coaches learn. Such reflection may help stakeholders across socio-cultural contexts consider the consequences of the changes made to coach training programs, the rationale for these decisions and the need to acknowledge existent challenges such as lower course completion rates, pressures to deliver the curriculum and dilemmatic decisions about course format. Furthermore, we also suggest pathways for stakeholders to develop strategies that consider contextual variables and contribute to meaningful learning. Based on the Portuguese context, several issues are discussed.