Schone mais met eg of schoffel en een beetje middel

Als rekening wordt gehouden met specifieke omstandigheden kan het middelengebruik nog verder terug

Ondernemerschap versterken door coachen, begeleiden en competenties ontwikkelen

Versterking van ondernemerschap is een belangrijke strategie om de transitie naar een duurzame landbouw te stimuleren. Maar hoe doe je dat? Bijvoorbeeld met de methode interactief strategisch management, die ondernemers ondersteunt bij het opzetten en uitvoeren van toekomstgerichte strategieë

Dutch Patient-Generated Subjective Global Assessment (PG-SGA): training improves scores for comprehensibility and difficulty

Rationale: The Patient-Generated Subjective Global Assessment (PG-SGA) is a validated instrument to assess and monitor malnutrition, which consists of both patient-reported and professional-reported items. A professional should be able to correctly interpret all items. Untrained professionals may experience difficulty in completing some items of the PG-SGA. We aimed to explore the change in perceived comprehensibility and difficulty of the Dutch PG-SGA by health care professionals on the use of the instrument, before and after training. Methods: A sample of 36 untrained health care professionals, of which 34 dietitians, completed a set of 29 items on a four point scale regarding comprehensibility and difficulty of the PG-SGA on two separate occasions: T0) two weeks before and T1) directly after an instructional session on the PG-SGA and training with the physical exam. Summarized comprehensibility indexes (SCI) and difficulty indexes (SDI) were calculated for the patient part of the PG-SGA (aka PG-SGA Short Form; PG-SGA SF), the professional part of the PG-SGA (PG-SGApro) and the full PG-SGA, to quantify the level of perceived comprehensibility and difficulty. SCI≥0.80 and SDI≥0.80 were considered acceptable, SCI≥0.90 and SDI≥0.90 were considered excellent. Results: SCI of the PG-SGA SF was acceptable both before (SCI: 0.80) and after training (SCI: 0.89). SCI of the PG-SGApro and full PG-SGA changed from unacceptable (SCI: 0.64; 0.69) to excellent (SCI: 0.95; 0.94). All SDIs changed from unacceptable (SDI for respectively PG-SGA SF, PG-SGApro and full PG-SGA: 0.71; 0.50; 0.57) to acceptable (SDI: 0.88; 0.85; 0.87). Conclusion: Training professionals in the use of the PG-SGA can be an effective strategy for improving the level of both comprehensibility and difficulty

Financing SME growth in the UK: meeting the challenges after the global financial crisis

In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis new forms of SME finance are emerging in the place of traditional banking and equity finance sources. This Special Issue has its origins in a conference organised in June 2014 by the Centre for Enterprise and Economic Development Research (CEEDR) at Middlesex University Business School, where all but the final two papers were presented. The Conference was designed to provide a timely forum for leading academics, practitioners and policy makers to disseminate current research and practitioner knowledge exploring finance gaps and how best to address the financing needs of small high growth potential businesses

Combatting irregular migration through information campaigns

Several migrant receiving countries such as Australia, the U.S. and Switzerland have launched migration information campaigns in migrant sending and transit countries about the risks involved in (irregular) migration. With the current high influx of migrants more and more of such campaigns are launched. Such campaigns can target different goals: to help to prevent irregular movements by ensuring that people are sufficiently informed about the potential risks; to manage expectations people might have about the opportunities they will have after migration or to outright prevent migration altogether. This research project will look at several aspects of migration information campaigns: the design, the implementation, the assumptions underlying the campaign and the possible effects of these campaigns. The use of social media will receive separate attention. How and to what extent migration information campaigns are part of social media platforms used by refugees and migrants and whether or not they influence migration decisions remains unclear though. CONTENT: 1. Introduction 2. Migration information campaigns: an overview 3. Do campaigns work? Assumptions and critique 4. Conclusions and discussio

A comparison of alternative assays to measure DNA damage in stallion spermatozoa: TUNEL test versus ‘Nicoletti assay’

The aberrations of sperm DNA may cause various problems and have negative consequences on fertility. These influence embryonic development or might lead to early embryo loss. Sperm Chromatin Structure Assay (SCSA) is the flow cytometric method most often used for the detection of DNA lesions; however, some studies using that method reached confusing conclusions. The aim of this pilot study was to adjust and compare two alternative tests, namely the TUNEL test and the Nicoletti assay. The above-mentioned two flow cytometric methods capable of detecting the fragmented DNA of sperm were tested on 12 frozen-thawed stallion semen samples. The TUNEL test demonstrated much higher DNA fragmentation ratio than the Nicoletti assay (mean ± SD: 30.77 ± 13.03% vs. 1.93 ± 0.89%, respectively). A fluorescent microscopic check of the samples showed that TUNEL labelled the plasma membrane and the mitochondria in a nonspecific way, rather than detecting only the fragmented DNA, thus eventually resulting in a false positive sign. The Nicoletti assay is simpler, quicker and does not detect nonspecific binding; however, further analyses are required to determine its diagnostic value

Guidance on the environmental risk assessment of plant pests

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) requested the Panel on Plant Health to develop a methodology for assessing the environmental risks posed by harmful organisms that may enter, establish and spread in the European Union. To do so, the Panel first reviewed the methods for assessing the environmental risks of plant pests that have previously been used in pest risk assessment. The limitations identified by the review led the Panel to define the new methodology for environmental risk assessment which is described in this guidance document. The guidance is primarily addressed to the EFSA PLH Panel and has been conceived as an enhancement of the relevant parts of the “Guidance on a harmonised framework for pest risk assessment and the identification and evaluation of pest risk management options by EFSA”. Emphasizing the importance of assessing the consequences on both the structural (biodiversity) and the functional (ecosystem services) aspects of the environment, this new approach includes methods for assessing both aspects for the first time in a pest risk assessment scheme. A list of questions has been developed for the assessor to evaluate the consequences for structural biodiversity and for ecosystem services in the current area of invasion and in the risk assessment area. To ensure the consistency and transparency of the assessment, a rating system has also been developed based on a probabilistic approach with an evaluation of the degree of uncertainty. Finally, an overview of the available risk reduction options for pests in natural environments is presented, minimum data requirements are described, and a glossary to support the common understanding of the principles of this opinion is provided