Lessons Learned in Qatar: The Role of the Netherlands and Its Businesses in Addressing Human Rights Abuses in Mega-Sporting Events

Mega-sporting events (MSEs) can have a negative impact on human rights throughout their lifecycle, from the bidding stage, over to the planning and preparation stage, the delivery of the event, and also as part of their legacy after the event has concluded. They can be linked to land grabbing, forced evictions, forced labour and many other human rights abuses. The problem is that only a very few of these cases are actually addressed in the sense that rights-holders receive an effective remedy and those responsible for the abuse are held to account. MSEs are jointly organized and staged by public, private, national, and international actors, which each contribute in different ways to the associated human rights impact. Rather than looking at the responsibility of those actors directly involved in organizing and staging the event, this article looks at the responsibility of the participating actors of states that are represented at the event, namely businesses and sports bodies, using the Netherlands and the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar as the guiding example. The central questions it tries to explore based on lessons learned and opportunities missed in Qatar are how such actors are connected to adverse human rights impacts associated with MSEs, which responsibilities under the human rights framework flow from those connections, and how participating states should then ensure that businesses live up to their responsibilities

The association between reduced knee joint proprioception and medial meniscal abnormalities using MRI in knee osteoarthritis: results from the Amsterdam osteoarthritis cohort.

BACKGROUND: Osteoarthritis (OA) of the knee is characterized by pain and activity limitations. In knee OA, proprioceptive accuracy is reduced and might be associated with pain and activity limitations. Although causes of reduced proprioceptive accuracy are divergent, medial meniscal abnormalities, which are highly prevalent in knee OA, have been suggested to play an important role. No study has focussed on the association between proprioceptive accuracy and meniscal abnormalities in knee OA. OBJECTIVE: To explore the association between reduced proprioceptive accuracy and medial meniscal abnormalities in a clinical sample of knee OA subjects. METHODS: Cross-sectional study in 105 subjects with knee OA. Knee proprioceptive accuracy was assessed by determining the joint motion detection threshold in the knee extension direction. The knee was imaged with a 3.0 T magnetic resonance (MR) scanner. Number of regions with medial meniscal abnormalities and the extent of abnormality in the anterior and posterior horn and body were scored according to the Boston-Leeds Osteoarthritis Knee Score (BLOKS) method. Multiple regression analyzes were used to examine whether reduced proprioceptive accuracy was associated with medial meniscal abnormalities in knee OA subjects. RESULTS: Mean proprioceptive accuracy was 2.9degree + 1.9degree. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-detected medial meniscal abnormalities were found in the anterior horn (78%), body (80%) and posterior horn (90%). Reduced proprioceptive accuracy was associated with both the number of regions with meniscal abnormalities (P < 0.01) and the extent of abnormality (P = 0.02). These associations were not confounded by muscle strength, joint laxity, pain, age, gender, body mass index (BMI) and duration of knee complaints. CONCLUSION: This is the first study showing that reduced proprioceptive accuracy is associated with medial meniscal abnormalities in knee OA. The study highlights the importance of meniscal abnormalities in understanding reduced proprioceptive accuracy in persons with knee OA. Copyright 2013 Osteoarthritis Research Society International. All rights reserve

Waveguide-integrated silicon T centres

The performance of modular, networked quantum technologies will be strongly dependent upon the quality of their quantum light-matter interconnects. Solid-state colour centres, and in particular T centres in silicon, offer competitive technological and commercial advantages as the basis for quantum networking technologies and distributed quantum computing. These newly rediscovered silicon defects offer direct telecommunications-band photonic emission, long-lived electron and nuclear spin qubits, and proven native integration into industry-standard, CMOS-compatible, silicon-on-insulator (SOI) photonic chips at scale. Here we demonstrate further levels of integration by characterizing T centre spin ensembles in single-mode waveguides in SOI. In addition to measuring long spin T_1 times, we report on the integrated centres' optical properties. We find that the narrow homogeneous linewidth of these waveguide-integrated emitters is already sufficiently low to predict the future success of remote spin-entangling protocols with only modest cavity Purcell enhancements. We show that further improvements may still be possible by measuring nearly lifetime-limited homogeneous linewidths in isotopically pure bulk crystals. In each case the measured linewidths are more than an order of magnitude lower than previously reported and further support the view that high-performance, large-scale distributed quantum technologies based upon T centres in silicon may be attainable in the near term

“Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence

The rhetoric of “excellence” is pervasive across the academy. It is used to refer to research outputs as well as researchers, theory and education, individuals and organisations, from art history to zoology. But does “excellence” actually mean anything? Does this pervasive narrative of “excellence” do any good? Drawing on a range of sources we interrogate “excellence” as a concept and find that it has no intrinsic meaning in academia. Rather it functions as a linguistic interchange mechanism. To investigate whether this linguistic function is useful we examine how the rhetoric of excellence combines with narratives of scarcity and competition to show that the hypercompetition that arises from the performance of “excellence” is completely at odds with the qualities of good research. We trace the roots of issues in reproducibility, fraud, and homophily to this rhetoric. But we also show that this rhetoric is an internal, and not primarily an external, imposition. We conclude by proposing an alternative rhetoric based on soundness and capacity-building. In the final analysis, it turns out that that “excellence” is not excellent. Used in its current unqualified form it is a pernicious and dangerous rhetoric that undermines the very foundations of good research and scholarship

The Harris hip score: Do ceiling effects limit its usefulness in orthopedics?: A systematic review

The Harris hip score (HHS), a disease-specific health status scale that is frequently used to measure the outcome of total hip arthroplasty, has never been validated properly. A questionnaire is suitable only when all 5 psychometric properties are of sufficient quality. We questioned the usefulness of the HHS by investigating its content validity. We performed a systematic review based on a literature search in PubMed, Embase, and the Cochrane Library for descriptive studies published in 2007. 54 studies (59 patient groups) met our criteria and were included in the data analysis. To determine the content validity, we calculated the ceiling effect (percentage) for each separate study and we pooled data to measure the weighted mean. A subanalysis of indications for THA was performed to differentiate the populations for which the HHS would be suitable and for which it would not. A ceiling effect of 15% or less was considered to be acceptable. Over half the studies (31/59) revealed unacceptable ceiling effects. Pooled data across the studies included (n = 6,667 patients) suggested ceiling effects of 20% (95%CI: 18-22). Ceiling effects were greater (32%, 95%CI:12-52) in those patients undergoing hip resurfacing arthroplasty. Although the Harris hip score is widely used in arthroplasty research on outcomes, ceiling effects are common and these severely limit its validity in this field of researc

Effect of elevated substrate temperature deposition on the mechanical losses in tantala thin film coatings

Brownian thermal noise in dielectric multilayer coatings limits the sensitivity of current and future interferometric gravitational wave detectors. In this work we explore the possibility of improving the mechanical losses of tantala, often used as the high refractive index material, by depositing it on a substrate held at elevated temperature. Promising results have been previously obtained with this technique when applied to amorphous silicon. We show that depositing tantala on a hot substrate reduced the mechanical losses of the as-deposited coating, but subsequent thermal treatments had a larger impact, as they reduced the losses to levels previously reported in the literature. We also show that the reduction in mechanical loss correlates with increased medium range order in the atomic structure of the coatings using x-ray diffraction and Raman spectroscopy. Finally, a discussion is included on our results, which shows that the elevated temperature deposition of pure tantala coatings does not appear to reduce mechanical loss in a similar way to that reported in the literature for amorphous silicon; and we suggest possible future research directions