Towards a thriving society:How donors and investors can drive positive change

Wat hebben de anticonceptiepil, het Rijksmuseum, het poliovaccin en Sesamstraat met elkaar gemeen? Ze zijn allemaal grotendeels tot stand gekomen dankzij donaties. Hieruit blijkt dat filantropie een onmisbare rol speelt in onze samenleving. Maar hoe selecteer je een effectief goed doel?Tijdens zijn oratie bespreekt Smeets wat mensen drijft om met hun geld een positieve bijdrage te leveren aan de samenleving. Waarom doneren Nederlanders zo gul? Is het verstandig om duurzaam te beleggen? Kijken beleggers alleen naar hun financiële rendement of ook naar hun maatschappelijke impact

QMRA in the Drinking Water Distribution System

AbstractA Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment (QMRA) model was developed for contamination events after mains repairs. The sensitivity analysis showed that the contamination concentration is the most important parameter, next to the pathogen dose response relation. The time of opening valves and of consumption are also important parameters. The event location within the network and the amount of consumption are of smaller importance. Issuing a boil water advice and opening only one valve before “releasing” the entire isolation section are effective measures to reduce the number of infected people per event by a factor of 2 to 4

Atom lithography without laser cooling

Using direct-write atom lithography, Fe nanolines are deposited with a pitch of 186 nm, a full width at half maximum (FWHM) of 50 nm, and a height of up to 6 nm. These values are achieved by relying on geometrical collimation of the atomic beam, thus without using laser collimation techniques. This opens the way for applying direct-write atom lithography to a wide variety of elements.Comment: 7 pages, 11 figure

Evaluation of work-related psychosocial factors and regional musculoskeletal pain: results from a EULAR Task Force

Objectives: to establish whether review articles provide consistent conclusions on associations between workplace psychosocial factors and musculoskeletal pain and, if differences exist, to explore whether this is related to the methods used.Methods: reviews, reported up to February 2007, that included consideration of workplace psychosocial factors and upper limb, back or knee pain were identified through searches of multiple databases. The specific work-related psychosocial factors considered were job demands, support, job autonomy and job satisfaction. The conclusions of each review on one or more of the psychosocial/musculoskeletal pain associations were extracted.Results: 15 review articles were identified that considered one or more of the regional pain syndromes included in the study. For back pain, the most consistent conclusions (four reviews positive out of six) were with high job demands and low job satisfaction. The studies of upper limb pain were exclusively related to shoulder and/or neck pain, and the most consistent positive conclusions were with high and low job demands (four reviews positive out of six and two reviews positive out of three, respectively). For knee pain, only a single review was identified. For individual reviews of back and upper limb pain, there were marked differences in the number of associations concluded to be positive between reviews.Conclusions: the reasons for reviews coming to different conclusions included that they were often evaluating different bodies of evidence (according to their search criteria, the year when the review was conducted, the role that quality assessment played in whether studies contributed to evidence, and the combination of risk factors addressed in individual studies), but more important was whether the review specified explicit criteria for making conclusions on strength of evidence. These conclusions emphasise the importance of developing standardised methods for conducting such evaluations of existing evidence and the importance of new longitudinal studies for clarifying the temporal relationship between psychosocial factors and musculoskeletal pain in the workplac

Pandemic panic?:Results of a 14 month longitudinal study on fear of COVID-19

BACKGROUND: Fear is an evolutionary adaptive emotion that serves to protect the organism from harm. Once a threat diminishes, fear should also dissipate as otherwise fear may become chronic and pathological. While actual threat of the COVID-19 pandemic (i.e., number of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths) has substantially varied over the course of the pandemic, it remains unclear whether (subjective) fear has followed a similar pattern. METHOD: To examine the development of fear of COVID-19 during the pandemic and investigate potential predictors of chronic fear, we conducted a large online longitudinal study (N = 2000) using the Prolific platform between April 2020 and June 2021. Participants were voluntary response samples and consisted of residents of 34 different countries. The Fear of the Coronavirus Questionnaire (FCQ) and several other demographic and psychological measures were completed monthly. RESULTS: Overall, we find that fear steadily decreased since April 2020. Additional analyses showed that elevated fear was predicted by region (i.e., North America > Europe), anxious traits, gender, risks for loved ones, general health, and media use. LIMITATIONS: The interpretation of the results of this study is limited by the non-representativeness of the sample and the lack of data points between August 2020 and June 2021. CONCLUSIONS: This study helps to characterize the trajectory of fear levels throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and establish several relevant predictors of increased fear

The latent and item structure of COVID-19 fear:A comparison of four COVID-19 fear questionnaires using SEM and network analyses

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), several reports have shown that fear relating to COVID-19 has sharply increased. To measure fear of COVID-19, various questionnaires have been developed in parallel. However, fear concerning COVID-19 is not necessarily a uniform construct and the different questionnaires may cover diverse aspects. To examine the underlying structure of fear of COVID-19, we conducted structural equation modelling and network analyses on four scales in an online convenience sample (N = 829). Particularly, the Fear of COVID-19 Scale (Ahorsu et al., 2020), the Fear of the Coronavirus Questionnaire (Mertens et al., 2020), and the COVID Stress Scales (Taylor, Landry, Paluszek, Fergus et al., 2020, Taylor, Landry, Paluszek, Rachor et al., 2020) were included in our study, along with a new scale that also assessed socio-economic worries relating to COVID-19. We found that fear of COVID-19 was best classified into four clusters: Fear of health-related consequences, fear of supplies shortages and xenophobia, fear about socio-economic consequences, and symptoms of fear (e.g., compulsions, nightmares). We also find that a central cluster of items centered on fear of health, which likely represents the core of fear of COVID-19. These results help to characterize fear due to COVID-19 and inform future research

Wealthy Americans and redistribution:The role of fairness preferences

We examine the attitudes of the wealthy towards government redistribution using a large and diverse sample of individuals from the top 5% of the income and wealth distribution in the U.S., as well as the remaining 95%. Three results stand out: (1) wealthy Americans have distinct fairness preferences, with a greater willingness to accept inequalities relative to the general public, (2) individuals who self-report having experienced upward social mobility and became first-generation wealthy are particularly accepting of inequality, while those born into wealth have fairness preferences similar to the general population; (3) the disparity in fairness preferences between the rich and the general public is predictive of greater opposition to redistribution among the wealthy, resulting in more conservative voting behavior. These findings provide new insights into the reasons behind the wealthy's opposition to government redistribution.</p