Monopolie met planten

Nederland is een belangrijke kraamkamer van nieuwe rassen en de grootste exporteur van zaden, bollen, pootgoed en stekken. Dat dreigt te verdwijnen, omdat het octrooirecht de innovatie bij veredelaars belemmert. Moet de Tweede Kamer de wetgeving aanpassen

Emerging Alternatives to the Impact Factor

Purpose: The authors document the proliferating range of alternatives to the impact factor that have arisen within the past five years, coincident with the increased prominence of open access publishing. Methodology/Approach: This paper offers an overview of the history of the impact factor as a measure for scholarly merit; a summary of frequent criticisms of the impact factor’s calculation and usage; and a framework for understanding some of the leading alternatives to the impact factor. Findings: This paper identifies five categories of alternatives to the impact factor: a. Measures that build upon the same data that informs the impact factor. b. Measures that refine impact factor data with “page rank” indices that weight electronic resources or Web sites through the number of resources that link to them. c. Measures of article downloads and other usage factors. d. Recommender systems, in which individual scholars rate the value of articles and a group’s evaluations pool together collectively. e. Ambitious measures that attempt to encompass the interactions and influence of all inputs in the scholarly communications system. Value of Paper: Librarians can utilize the measures described in this paper to support more robust collection development than is possible through reliance on the impact factor alone

Review of 'Men at Play' by Jonathan Bollen, Adrian Kiernander and Bruce Parr.

Review of Jonathan Bollen, Adrian Kiernander and Bruce Parr, 'Men at Play: Masculinities in Australian Theatre since the 1950s

McSweeney's and the challenges of the marketplace for independent publishing

In their article "McSweeney's and the Challenges of the Marketplace for Independent Publishing" Katrien Bollen, Stef Craps, and Pieter Vermeulen argue that the artistic projects of the US-American author, activist, and editor Dave Eggers are marked by a tension between the desire for independence and the demands of brand-building. The article offers a close analysis of the materiality and paratexts of one particular issue of McSweeney's, the literary magazine of which Eggers is the founding editor. Both the content and the apologetically aggressive tone of Eggers's editorial statements betray a deep unease with the inability to inhabit a cultural and economic position that is untainted by the compromises that publishing requires. Still, this disavowed complicity with the market in fact sustains Eggers's editorial practice in McSweeney's, which, in marked contrast to his explicit statements, thrives on a dynamic of commodification

Narratives of loss and order and imaging the Belgian landscape 1900-1945

In their article "Narratives of Loss and Order and Imaging the Belgian Landscape 1900-1945" Bruno Notteboom and David Peleman analyze a number of publications on landscape, focusing on narratives constructed by means of landscape images published in Belgium. With the work of Jean Massart and Emile Vanderwelde as a point of departure, Notteboom and Peleman discuss popularizing publications in the fields of botany, agricultural education, and tourism, as well as an urban planning. They address the three realms of landscape narratives defined by Matthew Potteiger and Jamie Purinton as story, context/intertext, and discourse. Notteboom and Peleman distinguish three recurrent operations or narrative techniques: framing, sequencing, and juxtaposing whereby their main argument is that in spite of their ideological differences the publications they discuss seek a way of dealing with processes of modernization and with the loss of a traditional way of living defined by a direct relation with the land

Landscape, culture, and education in Defoe's Robinson crusoe

In their article "Landscape, Culture, and Education in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe" Geert Vandermeersche and Ronald Soetaert discuss Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as a narrative that translates nature and our dealings with it into a literary text. Vandeermeersche and Soetaert postulate that the novel can be read as a quintessential fable of humans' cultivation of nature and the creation of individuality, which, at the same time, provides its readers with strategies for describing processes such as education. Robinson Crusoe and its characters, metaphors, and scenarios function in the "auto-communication" of culture as an enduring equipment for living (Burke), a company readers keep (Booth), and a cognitive tool in modern Western culture

The world of the landscape

In his article "The World of the Landscape" Bart Verschaffel analyzes the visual logic of the landscape genre in painting, as it was developed from the sixteenth century on. He argues that the structure of a minimal foreground, a middle ground cut off from the foreground, and a background that gives way to the distant, corresponds to a meditative attitude, proper to the nature of the image as such. The landscape is essentially a calm image. Second, Verschaffel puts forward that the middle ground in landscape images is not, as in history painting, a waiting room adjacent to the action in the foreground, but is rather oriented towards the horizon and beyond: a landscape always represents the world. In the romantic landscape tradition, moreover, the vagueness resting on the horizon comes to the fore and creates an "atmosphere" that touches a lonely soul and transforms an image of the world into an intimate encounter

Using RDF to Model the Structure and Process of Systems

Many systems can be described in terms of networks of discrete elements and their various relationships to one another. A semantic network, or multi-relational network, is a directed labeled graph consisting of a heterogeneous set of entities connected by a heterogeneous set of relationships. Semantic networks serve as a promising general-purpose modeling substrate for complex systems. Various standardized formats and tools are now available to support practical, large-scale semantic network models. First, the Resource Description Framework (RDF) offers a standardized semantic network data model that can be further formalized by ontology modeling languages such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Second, the recent introduction of highly performant triple-stores (i.e. semantic network databases) allows semantic network models on the order of $10^9$ edges to be efficiently stored and manipulated. RDF and its related technologies are currently used extensively in the domains of computer science, digital library science, and the biological sciences. This article will provide an introduction to RDF/RDFS/OWL and an examination of its suitability to model discrete element complex systems.Comment: International Conference on Complex Systems, Boston MA, October 200