Introduction to a Culturally Sensitive Measure of Well-Being: Combining Life Satisfaction and Interdependent Happiness Across 49 Different Cultures

How can one conclude that well-being is higher in country A than country B, when well-being is being measured according to the way people in country A think about well-being? We address this issue by proposing a new culturally sensitive method to comparing societal levels of well-being. We support our reasoning with data on life satisfaction and interdependent happiness focusing on individual and family, collected mostly from students, across forty-nine countries. We demonstrate that the relative idealization of the two types of well-being varies across cultural contexts and are associated with culturally different models of selfhood. Furthermore, we show that rankings of societal well-being based on life satisfaction tend to underestimate the contribution from interdependent happiness. We introduce a new culturally sensitive method for calculating societal well-being, and examine its construct validity by testing for associations with the experience of emotions and with individualism-collectivism. This new culturally sensitive approach represents a slight, yet important improvement in measuring well-being

Culture-level dimensions of social axioms and their correlates across 41 cultures

Leung and colleagues have revealed a five-dimensional structure of social axioms across individuals from five cultural groups. The present research was designed to reveal the culture level factor structure of social axioms and its correlates across 41 nations. An ecological factor analysis on the 60 items of the Social Axioms Survey extracted two factors: Dynamic Externality correlates with value measures tapping collectivism, hierarchy, and conservatism and with national indices indicative of lower social development. Societal Cynicism is less strongly and broadly correlated with previous values measures or other national indices and seems to define a novel cultural syndrome. Its national correlates suggest that it taps the cognitive component of a cultural constellation labeled maleficence, a cultural syndrome associated with a general mistrust of social systems and other people. Discussion focused on the meaning of these national level factors of beliefs and on their relationships with individual level factors of belief derived from the same data set.(undefined

Mesoporous SBA-15 silica modified with calix[4]arene and β-cyclodextrin

Mesoporous SBA-15 type silica with covalently fixed β-cyclodextrin (0.56 mmol/g) and calix[4]arene (0.40 mmol/g) functional groups and with specific surface areas of 384 to 723 m²/g have been obtained

Electrochemical Properties of TiO2 Electrode Prepared by Various Methods

AbstractThin transparent TiO2 layers were created on the conductive ITO glass by means of the templated sol-gel technique and by the subsequent calcination at 450° C. The sol-gel method using molecular templating is based on a chemical process utilizing hydrolysis and polycondesation of metal alkoxides in the core of reverse micelles which allows a production of uniform particles in layers. The sol-gel method was chosen by reason of the sol-gel layers electrodes are transparent and possess very stabile surface. For the preparation of the thin sol-gel TiO 2 films, numerous deposition techniques were applied. This contribution is focused on the study of structural and photo-electrochemical properties of the sol-gel nanostructured layers deposited by two various techniques (a dip-coating and an inkjet printing). The sol's viscosity, concentration, solvent volatility, speed of pulling etc. may influence the final structural properties of layers, such as film thickness, nanoparticles size and surface morphology. The surface properties were determined by XRD, Raman, SEM, AFM and UV-Vis analyses. Photo-induced electrochemical properties were measured by potentiodynamic methods in the three-compartment electrochemical cell. This Pyrex cell contained supporting electrolyte (0.1M Na2SO4) and the TiO2/ITO electrode was used as a working electrode. As an UV source the polychromatic mercury lamp was employed and the wavelength of the incident light was focused by an interference filter on 365nm

A Comparative Study on Activated Carbons Derived from a Broad Range of Agro-industrial Wastes in Removal of Large-Molecular-Size Organic Pollutants in Aqueous Phase

The National University of Tumbes provided important financial support (Proyecto de Investigacion Docente - Resolucion No 1217-2013/UNT-R). The Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and Consejo Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnologia e Innovacion Tecnologica (CONCYTEC) in Peru (joint project reg. No. 002/PE/2012) are also gratefully recognized for their support. The Academy of Finland and the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation (Tekes) are acknowledged for research funding to the AdMatU project from the Development funds and to the HYMEPRO project, respectively. Thanks to Dr. Gladys Ocharan, Alex Diamond, and Hana Snajdaufova (from ICPF) for technical support and Dr. Tomas Strasak (from ICPF) for help with DFT calculations.Consejo Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Tecnológica - Concyte

MEGAPlus: Unconventional Methane Production from Combined CBM-UCG Technology under the EU Research Fund for Coal and Steel (RFCS)

International audienc