Identifying key complex relations between education and healthcare in the Netherlands for future pandemic management.

Background: The effects of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and subsequent policies in the Netherlands extended beyond healthcare, impacting other societal systems such as education. This study aims to conceptualize a coupled education-healthcare system during a pandemic and identify key variables and relations that affect the accessibility of both systems. This is essential to address the interconnected nature of pandemic policymaking and design policies that account for possible unintended consequences that interventions in healthcare may have on education and vice versa.

Majority illusion drives the spontaneous emergence of alternative states in common-pool resource games with network-based information.

Common-pool resources (CPRs), including fisheries and the atmosphere, are critical for ecological, social, and economic sustainability but are easily overused. We use an agent-based model to investigate how social networks shape resource extraction outcomes. Networks with highly visible nodes can create a "majority illusion" in which most users believe high-intensity extraction is dominant, even if it is not.

Measuring Health System Resilience During the COVID-19 Pandemic Using Dynamic Indicators of Resilience Based on Sick-Leave Data.

Background And Aims: Healthcare system resilience is generally understood as the capacity of a healthcare system to prepare, withstand, and adapt to disruptive health events while maintaining the continuity and quality of essential health services. So-called dynamic indicators of resilience (DIORs) allow us to examine resilience by analysing patterns of functioning of the healthcare system in time series data. The aim of this study was to examine whether DIORs can be estimated from time series data of the functioning of the Dutch healthcare system before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, and whether these DIORs are indicative of the resilience of the Dutch healthcare system during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Spatial analysis of the potential impacts of contaminated areas in the Upper Tietê Basin (São Paulo, Brazil) on wells and aquifers.

The Upper Tietê is prominent for being the basin with the highest contaminated areas in São Paulo, Brazil, and these areas significantly compromise the quality of groundwater in the basin, directly affecting the resident population. Acknowledging the criticality of formulating indicators for effective aquifer management, we attempted to identify and assess the risk, vulnerability, and contamination degrees of aquifers and wells in the Upper Tietê Basin. To do this, we applied the aquifer vulnerability index (AVI) method to evaluate the aquifer vulnerability in the region; the delineation and identification of wellhead protection areas and at-risk wells, respectively; and the integrated risk index by integrating the data on social and aquifer vulnerabilities, hazards, and exposure.

Seeing Halos: Spatial and Consumer-Resource Constraints to Landscapes of Fear.

AbstractVegetation-free space, or "halos," surrounding habitat patches are visually striking spatial phenomena observed in various ecosystems. These halos are linked to the landscape of fear hypothesis, where risk-averse herbivores concentrate grazing near safe shelters within their habitat. We develop theory demonstrating how habitat distribution shapes trophic interactions, leading to alternative stable states in spatial patterns.

Pandemic Performance Measures of Resilience for Healthcare and Education in the Netherlands.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers focused on improving health outcomes and safeguarding healthcare availability, which have led to negative consequences for other societal systems that persist today. The impact of these policies on health and non-healthcare systems depends on the resilience of these systems, that is, the capability of a system to maintain functioning during crises by using its adaptive capacity and transformative response. Policymaking during the COVID-19 pandemic might have benefitted from considering the resilience of non-healthcare societal systems and the impact of policy choices on these systems.

Heterogeneous update processes shape information cascades in social networks.

A common assumption in the literature on information diffusion is that populations are homogeneous regarding individuals' information acquisition and propagation process: Individuals update their informed and actively communicating state either through imitation (simple contagion) or peer influence (complex contagion). Here, we study the impact of the mixing and placement of individuals with different update processes on how information cascades in social networks. We consider Simple Spreaders, which take information from a random neighbor and communicate it, and Threshold-based Spreaders, which require a threshold number of active neighbors to change their state to active communication.

Income inequality in the uptake of environmentally friendly products.

The uptake of environmentally friendly products is unequal and income-dependent. Whether solar panels or electric vehicles, lower income groups are often locked out of the benefits they offer. Worse, policies encouraging the adoption of environmentally friendly products have replicated or even exacerbated inequalities.

Spatial pattern of congenital toxoplasmosis incidence and its relationship with vulnerability and national health indicators in Brazil.

There is a gap in evidence regarding spatial clusters of the congenital toxoplasmosis (CT) and its association with social and health indicators in the Brazilian territory. Thus, we aimed herein to identify CT risk areas in Brazil and its association with social vulnerability and health indicators. An ecological and population-based study was conducted.

Anticonformists catalyze societal transitions and facilitate the expression of evolving preferences.

The world is grappling with emerging, urgent, large-scale problems, such as climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss, and pandemics, which demand immediate and coordinated action. Social processes like conformity and social norms can either help maintain behaviors (e.g.

Criminal organizations exhibit hysteresis, resilience, and robustness by balancing security and efficiency.

The interplay between (criminal) organizations and (law enforcement) disruption strategies is critical in criminology and social network analysis. Like legitimate businesses, criminal enterprises thrive by fulfilling specific demands and navigating their unique challenges, including balancing operational visibility and security. This study aims at comprehending criminal networks' internal dynamics, resilience to law enforcement interventions, and robustness to changes in external conditions.

Spatial analysis of hospital-related mortality due to COVID-19 among children and adolescents in Brazil.

The objective was to perform a spatial analysis of the hospital mortality rate (HMR) due to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) attributed to COVID-19 among children and adolescents in Brazil from 2020 to 2021. A cluster method was used to group federal units (FUs) based on HMR. In 2020, clusters with high HMRs were formed by north/northeast FUs.

Adaptive foraging of pollinators fosters gradual tipping under resource competition and rapid environmental change.

Plant and pollinator communities are vital for transnational food chains. Like many natural systems, they are affected by global change: rapidly deteriorating conditions threaten their numbers. Previous theoretical studies identified the potential for community-wide collapse above critical levels of environmental stressors-so-called bifurcation-induced tipping points.

Using network analysis to identify leverage points based on causal loop diagrams leads to false inference.

Network analysis is gaining momentum as an accepted practice to identify which factors in causal loop diagrams (CLDs)-mental models that graphically represent causal relationships between a system's factors-are most likely to shift system-level behaviour, known as leverage points. This application of network analysis, employed to quantitatively identify leverage points without having to use computational modelling approaches that translate CLDs into sets of mathematical equations, has however not been duly reflected upon. We evaluate whether using commonly applied network analysis metrics to identify leverage points is justified, focusing on betweenness- and closeness centrality.

Optimization of institutional incentives for cooperation in structured populations.

The application of incentives, such as reward and punishment, is a frequently applied way for promoting cooperation among interacting individuals in structured populations. However, how to properly use the incentives is still a challenging problem for incentive-providing institutions. In particular, since the implementation of incentive is costly, to explore the optimal incentive protocol, which ensures the desired collective goal at a minimal cost, is worthy of study.

Spatio-temporal analysis of leptospirosis in Brazil and its relationship with flooding.

Leptospirosis is a serious public health problem in Brazil, which can be observed after flooding events. Using an exploratory mixed clustering method, this ecological study analyzes whether spatial-temporal clustering patterns of leptospirosis occur in Brazil. Data from the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS) were used to calculate the prevalence of leptospirosis between 2007 and 2017 in all counties of the country.

Sociocultural determinants of global mask-wearing behavior.

Behavioral responses influence the trajectories of epidemics. During the COVID-19 pandemic, nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) reduced pathogen transmission and mortality worldwide. However, despite the global pandemic threat, there was substantial cross-country variation in the adoption of protective behaviors that is not explained by disease prevalence alone.

[Tuberculosis and diabetes comorbidity in Brazil, 2012-2018: exploratory spatial data analysis and statistical modelingLa comorbilidad tuberculosis-diabetes en Brasil, 2012-2018: análisis exploratorio de la distribución espacial y modelización estadística].

Objective: To describe the spatial distribution of tuberculosis-diabetes comorbidity and identify the social determinants of the double burden of disease in the period from 2012 to 2018 in Brazil.

Method: In the present ecological study, municipalities were the unit of analysis. All cases of tuberculosis reported from 2012 to 2018 to the National Notifiable Disease Information System SINAN were included.

Segregation and clustering of preferences erode socially beneficial coordination.

Polarization on various issues has increased in many Western democracies over the last decades, leading to divergent beliefs, preferences, and behaviors within societies. We develop a model to investigate the effects of polarization on the likelihood that a society will coordinate on a welfare-improving action in a context in which collective benefits are acquired only if enough individuals take that action. We examine the impacts of different manifestations of polarization: heterogeneity of preferences, segregation of the social network, and the interaction between the two.

Combination of institutional incentives for cooperative governance of risky commons.

Finding appropriate incentives to enforce collaborative efforts for governing the commons in risky situations is a long-lasting challenge. Previous works have demonstrated that both punishing free-riders and rewarding cooperators could be potential tools to reach this goal. Despite weak theoretical foundations, policy makers frequently impose a punishment-reward combination.

A well-timed shift from local to global agreements accelerates climate change mitigation.

Recent attempts at cooperating on climate change mitigation highlight the limited efficacy of large-scale negotiations, when commitment to mitigation is costly and initially rare. Deepening existing voluntary mitigation pledges could require more stringent, legally-binding agreements that currently remain untenable at the global scale. Building-blocks approaches promise greater success by localizing agreements to regions or few-nation summits, but risk slowing mitigation adoption globally.

Biased perceptions explain collective action deadlocks and suggest new mechanisms to prompt cooperation.

When individuals face collective action problems, their expectations about others' willingness to contribute affect their motivation to cooperate. Individuals, however, often misperceive the cooperation levels in a population. In the context of climate action, people underestimate the pro-climate positions of others.

Coalition-structured governance improves cooperation to provide public goods.

While the benefits of common and public goods are shared, they tend to be scarce when contributions are provided voluntarily. Failure to cooperate in the provision or preservation of these goods is fundamental to sustainability challenges, ranging from local fisheries to global climate change. In the real world, such cooperative dilemmas occur in multiple interactions with complex strategic interests and frequently without full information.