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Onderzoek naar belangrijkste business trends, die door onze stakeholders worden gezien. Duurzaamheid in al zijn facetten en digitalisering zijn de significante ontwikkelingen in het economisch domein, met grote gevolgen voor organisatie en werk, zo blijkt uit ons onderzoek.
Amsterdam is een superdiverse stad met belangrijke uitdagingen op het gebied van gezondheid. Overgewicht, eenzaamheid en de gezondheidskloof tussen de gevestigde bovenlaag en groepen die het minder goed getroffen hebben zijn daar enkele van. De wijk als omgeving waar mensen wonen,werken, spelen en leren biedt kansen maar ook belemmeringen voor de gezondheid. Een integrale, ‘Whole-ofsociety’- benadering – dat is een aanpak met alle partijen inclusief bewoners –biedt aanknopingspunten om de gezondheid in grootstedelijke wijken te bevorderen. Lector Gezondheiden Omgeving Lea den Broeder gaat in haar rede in op de achtergronden en oplossingsrichtingen van de uitdagende gezondheidsvraagstukken in de stad. Het bijzonder lectoraat Gezondheid en Omgeving is ingesteld in samenwerking met het Rijksinstituut voor Volksgezondheid en Milieu.
Uitspraak van het Europees Hof voor de Rechten van de Mens, met noot.
Background:In hospitalized patients with COVID-19, the dosing and timing of corticosteroids vary widely. Low-dose dexamethasone therapy reduces mortality in patients requiring respiratory support, but it remains unclear how to treat patients when this therapy fails. In critically ill patients, high-dose corticosteroids are often administered as salvage late in the disease course, whereas earlier administration may be more beneficial in preventing disease progression. Previous research has revealed that increased levels of various biomarkers are associated with mortality, and whole blood transcriptome sequencing has the ability to identify host factors predisposing to critical illness in patients with COVID-19.Objective:Our goal is to determine the most optimal dosing and timing of corticosteroid therapy and to provide a basis for personalized corticosteroid treatment regimens to reduce morbidity and mortality in hospitalized patients with COVID-19.Methods:This is a retrospective, observational, multicenter study that includes adult patients who were hospitalized due to COVID-19 in the Netherlands. We will use the differences in therapeutic strategies between hospitals (per protocol high-dose corticosteroids or not) over time to determine whether high-dose corticosteroids have an effect on the following outcome measures: mechanical ventilation or high-flow nasal cannula therapy, in-hospital mortality, and 28-day survival. We will also explore biomarker profiles in serum and bronchoalveolar lavage fluid and use whole blood transcriptome analysis to determine factors that influence the relationship between high-dose corticosteroids and outcome. Existing databases that contain routinely collected electronic data during ward and intensive care admissions, as well as existing biobanks, will be used. We will apply longitudinal modeling appropriate for each data structure to answer the research questions at hand.Results:As of April 2023, data have been collected for a total of 1500 patients, with data collection anticipated to be completed by December 2023. We expect the first results to be available in early 2024.Conclusions:This study protocol presents a strategy to investigate the effect of high-dose corticosteroids throughout the entire clinical course of hospitalized patients with COVID-19, from hospital admission to the ward or intensive care unit until hospital discharge. Moreover, our exploration of biomarker and gene expression profiles for targeted corticosteroid therapy represents a first step towards personalized COVID-19 corticosteroid treatment.Trial Registration:ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05403359; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT05403359International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID):DERR1-10.2196/48183
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I was somewhat surprized with the fog in Groningen upon my arrival. This is notthe fog that covers the beautiful landscapes of the northern Netherlands in theevening and in the early morning. No… It is the fog that obscures the real aspectsof the earthquake problem in the region and is crystallised in the phrase “Groningen earthquakes are different”, which I have encountered numerous times whenever I raised a question of the type “But why..?”. A sentence taken out of the quiver as the absolute technical argument which mysteriously overshadows the whole earthquake discussion.Q: Why do we not use Eurocode 8 for seismic design, instead of NPR?A: Because the Groningen earthquakes are different!Q: Why do we not monitor our structures like the rest of the world does?A: Because the Groningen earthquakes are different!Q: Why does NPR, the Dutch seismic guidelines, dictate some unusual rules?A: Because the Groningen earthquakes are different!Q: Why are the hazard levels incredibly high, even higher than most Europeanseismic countries?A: Because the Groningen earthquakes are different!and so it keeps going…This statement is very common, but on the contrary, I have not seen a single piece of research that proves it or even discusses it. In essence, it would be a difficult task to prove that the Groningen earthquakes are different. In any case it barricades a healthy technical discussion because most of the times the arguments converge to one single statement, independent of the content of the discussion. This is the reason why our first research activities were dedicated to study if the Groningen earthquakes are really different. Up until today, we have not found any major differences between the Groningen induced seismicity events and natural seismic events with similar conditions (magnitude, distance, depth, soil etc…) that would affect the structures significantly in a different way.Since my arrival in Groningen, I have been amazed to learn how differently theearthquake issue has been treated in this part of the world. There will always bedifferences among different cultures, that is understandable. I have been exposed to several earthquake engineers from different countries, and I can expect a natural variation in opinions, approaches and definitions. But the feeling in Groningen is different. I soon realized that, due to several factors, a parallel path, which I call “an augmented reality” below, was created. What I mean by an augmented reality is a view of the real-world, whose elements are augmented and modified. In our example, I refer to the engineering concepts used for solving the earthquake problem, but in an augmented and modified way. This augmented reality is covered in the fog I described above. The whole thing is made so complicated that one is often tempted to rewind the tape to the hot August days of 2012, right after the Huizinge Earthquake, and replay it to today but this time by making the correct steps. We would wake up to a different Groningen today. I was instructed to keep the text as well as the inauguration speech as simple aspossible, and preferably, as non-technical as it goes. I thus listed the most common myths and fallacies I have faced since I arrived in Groningen. In this book and in the presentation, I may seem to take a critical view. This is because I try to tell a different part of the story, without repeating things that have already been said several times before. I think this is the very reason why my research group would like to make an effort in helping to solve the problem by providing different views. This book is one of such efforts.The quote given at the beginning of this book reads “How quick are we to learn: that is, to imitate what others have done or thought before. And how slow are we to understand: that is, to see the deeper connections.” is from Frits Zernike, the Nobel winning professor from the University of Groningen, who gave his name to the campus I work at. Applying this quotation to our problem would mean that we should learn from the seismic countries by imitating them, by using the existing state-of-the-art earthquake engineering knowledge, and by forgetting the dogma of “the Groningen earthquakes are different” at least for a while. We should then pass to the next level of looking deeperinto the Groningen earthquake problem for a better understanding, and alsodiscover the potential differences.
README.first is a bilingual collection of mini-essays, published in the run up to the Plokta filmfestival. We’ve asked writers, researchers, theorists, artists, programmers, and others to pick an online video that functions as a stepping stone for their thought and practice and to comment shortly on why they find the video so significant, funny, or outright disturbing. The resulting reflections speak about Silicon Valley obsessions, our mediated social lives, the impact of technology on centuries old games, and more.Plokta showcases film as a frame of socio-technological themes and discussions. With these essays we want to broaden the scope to one of the most significant developments in visual culture of the past decades: the rise of online video. At the Institute of Network Cultures (INC), online video has been a research topic already since 2007, in a continuous project named Video Vortex. Together, Plokta and INC, hope to stimulate reflections before, during and after the festival on what the moving image has to say to us.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has changed many aspects of people’s lives, and seems to have affected people’s wellbeing and relation to technology now, and in the future. Not only has it changed people’s lives and the way citizens live, work, exercise, craft and stay connected, the pandemic has also altered the way Human Computer Interaction (HCI) professionals can engage in face-to-face interactions and consequently participatory, human-centered design and research. Limitations in being close to others and having physical, visible and shared interactions pose a challenge as these aspects are typically considered critical for the accomplishment of a transparent, attractive and critical understanding of technology and respective civic and digital engagement for wellbeing. Consequently, the risk now observed is that citizens in the new ‘normal’ digital society, particularly vulnerable groups, are beingeven less connected, supported or heard. Drawing from a study with an expert panel of 20 selected HCI related professionals in The Netherlands that participated on-line (through focus groups, questionnaires and/or interviews) discussing co-creation for wellbeing in times of COVID-19 (N=20), and civic values for conditional data sharing (N=11), this paper presents issues encountered and potential new approaches to overcome participatory challenges in the ‘new’ digital society. This study further draws on project reporting and a ‘one week in the life of’ study in times of COVID-19 with a physical toolkit for remote data collection that was used with older adults (65+, N=13) and evaluated with professionals (N=6). Drawing on such projects and professional experiences, the paper discusses some opportunities of participatory approaches for the new ‘distant’ normal.
An example for the development of a potential Minimum Data Set (MDS) within the Urban Vitality (UV) themes ‘Gezond ouder worden / Mensen in Beweging’. The goal is to ensure more uniform collection of outcome measures, based on FAIR principles (ref 1), and to facilitate reuse of data and analyses spanning multiple studies. This prototype MDS is based on The Older Persons and Informal Caregivers Survey Minimum DataSet (TOPICS-MDS) (ref 2), the project FAIR: geen woorden maar data (ref 3) in which we examined 14 UV-studies about ageing and frailty of elderly, and the set of common data elements for rare disease registration (ref 4).
Report of the project 'FAIR: geen woorden maar data' about the FAIRification of research data (in Dutch). It describes the proof of concept for implementation of the FAIR principles. The implementation is based on the resource description framework (RDF) and semantic knowledge representations using ontologies.
