Natural Disaster at the Closing of the Dutch Golden Age

By the early eighteenth century, the economic primacy, cultural efflorescence, and geopolitical power of the Dutch Republic appeared to be waning. The end of this Golden Age was also an era of natural disasters. Between the late seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth century, Dutch communities weathered numerous calamities, including river and coastal floods, cattle plagues, and an outbreak of strange mollusks that threatened the literal foundations of the Republic. Adam Sundberg demonstrates that these disasters emerged out of longstanding changes in environment and society. They were also fundamental to the Dutch experience and understanding of eighteenth-century decline. Disasters provoked widespread suffering, but they also opened opportunities to retool management strategies, expand the scale of response, and to reconsider the ultimate meaning of catastrophe. This book reveals a dynamic and often resilient picture of a society coping with calamity at odds with historical assessments of eighteenth-century stagnation.

INVESTIGATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE RESPONSES TO CANCER AND RELIGIOUS COPING STYLES OF NEWLY DIAGNOSED BREAST CANCER PATIENTS

This research is a descriptive study conducted to assess the relationship between the responses to cancer by patients newly diagnosed with breast cancer and their religious coping.The study included 150 newly diagnosed breast cancer patients who received chemotherapy from November 2016/ April 2017 in the outpatient chemotherapy unit of a private university hospital. As a data collection tool, the questionnaire containing the descriptive and demographic characteristics of the patients, the scale of response style to cancer, and the religious coping style scale were used in the study. The data of the research were analyzed in terms of normal distribution by using the Shapiro-Wilks normality test. Since the data did not show normal distribution, the Mann-Whitney U test was used in two independent group comparisons, and the Kruskal-Wallis test was used in comparisons between more than two independent groups.Spearman correlation analysis was used to assess the relationship between scales. The predictive level of the Religious Coping Subscales to the Cancer Response subscale scores was evaluated by linear regression analysis. In the study, spiritual struggling subscale score within the scale of response to cancer was 51.81+4.95, the helplessness-despair subscale score was 9.85+2.39, anxious anticipate subscale score was 23.54+2.35, the fatalist subscale score was 19.98+1.59, and deny subscale score was 1.73+0.67.In other words, it was determined that the spiritual struggling soul was highly used by patients in response to cancer. In the study, the positive religious coping scale scores were 23.16+3.27, and negative religious coping scores were 7.72+1.77, which mean that most of the patients had positive religious coping scores. A positive correlation was found between the positive religious coping score and the spiritual struggling score (p<0.05; r=0.440). As the positive religious coping increases, the patients' struggle with disease is increasing. It has been observed that there is a relationship between cancer responses and religious coping of newly diagnosed breast cancer patients.

COVID-19 global climate impact may be brief

Subject COVID-19 and climate. Significance The speed and scale of response to the COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented. One-quarter of the global population is now in lockdown, with governments worldwide declaring emergencies, mobilising extra funding and demanding drastic behavioural changes from citizens to stem the spread of the virus. Year-on-year carbon emissions are likely to decline notably in 2020 as a result of prolonged disruptions to economic activity. The longer these persist, the deeper the short-term carbon impact will be. Whether this is a blip, however (as seen in the 2008-09 financial crisis), or the start of a longer-term decline, will depend on the economic policies that governments assemble in response to the disruptions. Impacts Social distancing-induced remote working for white-collar jobs may trigger longer-term changes in business travel practices. Reduced industrial and transport activity will improve local air quality, potentially easing pollution-related respiratory illness. Climate-focused social movements will have to adapt to new forms of organisation in the absence of traditional mass protests.

Integrating over uncertainty in spatial scale of response within multispecies occupancy models yields more accurate assessments of community composition

Species abundance and community composition are affected not only by the local environment, but also by broader landscape and regional context. Yet determining the spatial scale at which landscapes affect species remains a persistent challenge that hinders ecologists’ abilities to understand how environmental gradients influence species presence and shape entire communities, especially in the face of data deficient species and imperfect species detection.Here we present a Bayesian framework that allows uncertainty surrounding the ‘true’ spatial scale of species’ responses (i.e., changes in presence/absence) to be integrated directly into a community hierarchical model.This scale selecting multi-species occupancy model (ssMSOM) estimates the scale of response, and shows high accuracy and correct type I error rates across a broad range of simulation conditions. In contrast, ensembles of single species GLMs frequently fail to detect the correct spatial scale of response, and are often falsely confident in favoring the incorrect spatial scale, especially as species’ detection probabilities deviate from perfect.Integrating spatial scale selection directly into hierarchical community models provides a means of formally testing hypotheses regarding spatial scales of response, and more accurately determining the environmental drivers that shape communities.

Humanitarian Aid Logistics

This chapter contrasts the response to the Wenchuan earthquake (May 2008) which took place in a landlocked region of China with that of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, which as an island nation, was theoretically easily accessible to external aid provision via air or sea. In the initial period following the Wenchuan earthquake, the response was wholly internal as a detailed needs assessment was carried out. Once the Chinese authorities had established the scale of response required, international assistance was quickly allowed into the country. Several multimodal solutions were devised to minimize the risk of supply breakdown. Haiti required substantial external aid and logistics support, but severe organizational and infrastructural weaknesses rendered the supply chain extremely vulnerable locally. This translated to a mismatch between the volume of aid supplied and logistics capability, highlighting the importance of “last-mile” distribution management. The two earthquakes posed extreme challenges to the logistics operations, though both required a mix of military and non-military input into the logistics response. Nonetheless, in each case the non-standard logistics solutions which were devised broadly met the requirements for effective aid distribution in extreme environments.

Humanitarian Aid Logistics

This chapter contrasts the response to the Wenchuan earthquake (May 2008) which took place in a landlocked region of China with that of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, which as an island nation, was theoretically easily accessible to external aid provision via air or sea. In the initial period following the Wenchuan earthquake, the response was wholly internal as a detailed needs assessment was carried out. Once the Chinese authorities had established the scale of response required, international assistance was quickly allowed into the country. Several multimodal solutions were devised to minimize the risk of supply breakdown. Haiti required substantial external aid and logistics support, but severe organizational and infrastructural weaknesses rendered the supply chain extremely vulnerable locally. This translated to a mismatch between the volume of aid supplied and logistics capability, highlighting the importance of “last-mile” distribution management. The two earthquakes posed extreme challenges to the logistics operations, though both required a mix of military and non-military input into the logistics response. Nonetheless, in each case the non-standard logistics solutions which were devised broadly met the requirements for effective aid distribution in extreme environments.