Lifestyle versus social determinants of health in the Dutch parliament: An automated analysis of debate transcripts

Although public health scholars increasingly recognize the importance of the social determinants of health (SDOH), health policy outputs tend to emphasize downstream lifestyle factors instead. We use an automated corpus research approach to analyse fourteen years of health policy debate in the Dutch House of Representatives' Health Committee, testing three potential causes of the lack of attention for SDOH: political ideology, by which members of parliament (MPs) from some political orientations may prioritize lifestyle factors over SDOH; lifestyle drift, by which early attention for SDOH during problem analysis is replaced by a lifestyle focus in the development of solutions as the challenges in addressing SDOH become clear; and focusing events, by which political or societal chance events, known to the public and political elites simultaneously, bolster the lifestyle perspective on health. Our analysis shows that overall, the committee spent most of its time discussing neither SDOH nor lifestyle: healthcare financing and service delivery dominated instead. When SDOH or lifestyle were referenced, left-leaning MPs referred significantly more to SDOH and right-leaning MPs significantly more to lifestyle. Temporal effects related to election cycles yielded inconsistent evidence. Finally, peak attention for both lifestyle and SDOH coincided with ongoing political debate instead of exogenous, unforeseen focusing events, and these peaks were rendered relatively insignificant by the larger and more consistent attention for health care. This paper provides a first step toward automated analysis of policy debates at scale, opening up new avenues for the empirical study of health political discourse

Lifestyle versus social determinants of health in Dutch parliament: A text mining analysis

Although public health scholars increasingly recognize the importance of the social determinants of health (SDOH), political discourse on health tends to emphasize downstream lifestyle factors instead. We use a text mining approach to analyse a decade of health debate in the Dutch house of representatives, testing three specific causes of the lack of attention for SDOH: political ideology, by which members of parliament (MPs) from some political orientations may prioritize lifestyle factors over SDOH; lifestyle drift, by which early attention for SDOH during problem analysis is replaced by a lifestyle focus in the development of solutions as the challenges in addressing SDOH become clear; and focusing events, by which one-off political or societal events bolster the lifestyle perspective on health. Our analysis shows that political ideology predicted the topics referred to by members of parliament, with left-leaning members referring more to SDOH and right-leaning members more to lifestyle. However, while some parliamentary periods start with an SDOH focus followed by a focus on lifestyle, the pattern is reversed in other parliamentary periods, yielding inconsistent evidence for and against lifestyle drift. Finally, while the ten-year peak in lifestyle-related language coincided with an important political moment around lifestyle (an anti-smoking initiative), the same was true for the SDOH peak (which coincided with a broader prevention program), and both these peaks were rendered relatively insignificant by the larger and more consistent attention for the health care system. This paper provides a first step toward automated analysis of policy debates at scale, opening up new avenues for the empirical study of health political discourse

Lifestyle versus social determinants of health in the Dutch parliament: An automated analysis of debate transcripts

Although public health scholars increasingly recognize the importance of the social determinants of health (SDOH), health policy outputs tend to emphasize downstream lifestyle factors instead. We use an automated corpus research approach to analyse fourteen years of health policy debate in the Dutch House of Representatives’ Health Committee, testing three potential causes of the lack of attention for SDOH: political ideology, by which members of parliament (MPs) from some political orientations may prioritize lifestyle factors over SDOH; lifestyle drift, by which early attention for SDOH during problem analysis is replaced by a lifestyle focus in the development of solutions as the challenges in addressing SDOH become clear; and focusing events, by which political or societal chance events, known to the public and political elites simultaneously, bolster the lifestyle perspective on health. Our analysis shows that overall, the committee spent most of its time discussing neither SDOH nor lifestyle: healthcare financing and service delivery dominated instead. When SDOH or lifestyle were referenced, left-leaning MPs referred significantly more to SDOH and right-leaning MPs significantly more to lifestyle. Temporal effects related to election cycles yielded inconsistent evidence. Finally, peak attention for both lifestyle and SDOH coincided with ongoing political debate instead of exogenous, unforeseen focusing events, and these peaks were rendered relatively insignificant by the larger and more consistent attention for health care. This paper provides a first step toward automated analysis of policy debates at scale, opening up new avenues for the empirical study of health political discourse

Stationary distribution of moral strategies in a population

Evolutionary models show that human cooperation can arise through direct reciprocity relationships. However, it remains largely unclear which psychological mechanisms may proximally motivate an individual to reciprocate. Recent evidence demonstrates that psychological motives for reciprocal choices (i.e., moral strategies) differ between individuals, which raises the question whether these differences have a stationary distribution in a population or are rather an artifact of the experimental task. Here, we combine data from three independent studies and participant samples to find that the relative prevalence of different moral strategies is highly stable across these datasets. Furthermore, the distribution of moral strategies is relatively unaffected by changes to the salient features of the experimental paradigm. Finally, the moral strategy classification assigned by our computational modeling analysis corresponds to the participants’ own subjective experience of their psychological decision process, and no existing models of social preference can account for the observed individual differences in moral strategies. This research supports the view that social decision-making is not just regulated by individual differences in 'pro-social’ versus ‘pro-self’ tendencies, but also by trait-like differences across several alternative pro-social motives, whose distribution in a population is stationary

Tele-Manipulation with two asymmetric slaves:two operators perform better than one

\u3cp\u3eCertain tele-manipulation tasks require manipulation by two asymmetric slaves, for example, a crane for hoisting and a dexterous robotic arm for fine manipulation. It is unclear how to best design human-in-the-loop control over two asymmetric slaves. The goal of this paper is to quantitatively compare the standard approach of two co-operating operators that each control a single subtask, to a single operator performing bi-manual control over the two subtasks, and a uni-manual control approach. In a human factors experiment, participants performed a heavy load maneuvering and mounting task using a vertical crane and a robotic arm. We hypothesize that bi-manual control yields worse task performance and control activity compared to co-operation, because of conflicting spatial and temporal constraints. Literature suggests that uni-manual operators should perform better than co-operation, as co-operators critically depend on each other's actions. However, other literature provides evidence that individual operators have limited capabilities in controlling asymmetric axes of two dynamic systems. The results show that the two co-operators perform the maneuvering and mounting task faster than either bi-or uni-manual operators. Compared to co-operators, uni-manual operators required more control activity for the vertical crane and less for the robotic arm. In conclusion, this study suggests that when controlling two asymmetric slaves, a co-operating pair of operators performs better than a single operator.\u3c/p\u3

The global Cd/phosphate relationship in deep ocean waters and the need for accuracy

The relationship between Cd and phosphate is intriguing for unravelling geochemical cycling in the modern ocean. Moreover it is relevant for reconstructing Cd or phosphate distributions in paleoceanography. Whether the global Cd/phosphate data indicate a single linear relationship or whether the data are better described by two different linear relationships, one for the North Atlantic Ocean data and one for the Indo-Pacific Ocean data, is still a matter of debate. Recently, new data have become available for the Southern hemisphere which partly fill a gap that existed between the North Atlantic and Indo-Pacific Ocean data. The model with two different relationships for the North Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific Ocean deviated with statistical significance from a single global linear relationship. Yet, both models are characterized by a large residual variance likely due to apparent differences in accuracy between different laboratories. If these laboratory effects are taken into account in the models, the difference between the relationships of the North Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific Ocean remains statistically significant. However, when only two data sets with the smallest phosphate concentrations (PO4 < 1 μM) are left out the significance disappears. However, it is still risky to be too conclusive on basis of the present data. More accurate Cd- and phosphate-data are needed, especially in the low concentration area. Accuracy become be improved by the availability and use of international reference standards in combination with regular spike-recovery experiments.

Organic complexation of iron in the Southern Ocean

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Haptic assistance improves tele-manipulation with two asymmetric slaves

\u3cp\u3eTele-manipulation of heavy loads typically requires the simultaneous use of two asymmetric slaves: a crane for vertical weight support and a robot for accurate lateral positioning. The industrial standard prescribes a pair of operators for such tasks (one operator to control each slave), although in principle one operator might control both slaves with a single, hybrid interface. Accurate and safe co-operative handling of the expensive and fragile heavy components is difficult, presumably due to problems in the coordination of the subtasks and the lack of mutual awareness between the two operators. This study proposes a novel haptic assistance system to improve subtask coordination and task performance. Its novelty consists of haptically linking operators/interfaces through the joint task environment. The system's efficacy is evaluated with 15 pairs of co-operators and 15 individual uni-manual operators who maneuvered a heavy load through a bounded path in Virtual Reality. Haptic assistance improves task completion time for both groups. It also reduces control activity and self-reported workload without affecting a number of critical errors made by the operators. Moreover, without haptic assistance, uni-manual operators perform worse than co-operators, but this difference between the interfaces was not found with haptic assistance.\u3c/p\u3