The influence of land use and mobility policy on travel behavior : a comparative case study of Flanders and the Netherlands

Numerous transportation studies have indicated that the local built environment can have an important effect on travel behavior; people living in suburban neighborhoods travel more by car than people living in urban neighborhoods. In this paper, however, we will analyze whether the regional land use has an important influence on travel behavior by comparing two regions with a varying land-use pattern: Flanders (Belgium) and the Netherlands. The different land-use pattern seems to have influenced travel behavior in both regions. An active spatial planning policy in the Netherlands, clustering activities in urban surroundings, appears to have realized a sustainable travel behavior, as a substantial share of residents frequently walk, cycle or use public transportation. The rather passive spatial planning in Flanders, resulting in urban sprawl, seems to stimulate car use. The applied mobility policy also has an impact on the travel behavior and land use of the Flemings and the Dutch. Infrastructure is concentrated in Dutch urban environments, whereas Flanders has a more widespread network of infrastructure and cheap public transportation, resulting in a further increase of suburbanization

The A B C’s of Graphic Novels

I have highlighted twenty-five concerns that I address when talking about the graphic novel in the many recent presentations I have conducted on this topic

Beyond psychologisation: the non-psychology of the Flemish novelist Louis Paul Boon

Is not the most intriguing aspect of psychologisation seems to be that every critique threatens to bounce back in some kind of meta-psychologisation. Although in this day and age and age it seems highly unlikely to repeat the popular anti-psychiatry movement of some decades ago and to get an anti-psychology movement on the tracks, it would leave us immediately stranded in some kind of essentialization of the human being and its life-world. Are we thus lost in psychologisation? Is there no outside of psychology and psychologisation? In the following I will focus on the novel De Paradijsvogel (The Bird of Paradise) of the leftist Flemish novelist Louis Paul Boon. I will briefly juxtapose it with Christopher Lasch‘s seminal critique in his book The Culture of Narcissism and search for the germs of a non-psychology: which is, a critique on psychologisation which transcends the pitfalls of metapsychologisation and reopens the path of an ideology critique, the latter seemingly having become impossible too

Absolute spatial deixis and proto-toponyms in Kata Kolok

This paper presents an overview of spatial deictic structures in Kata Kolok, a sign language which is indigenous to a Balinese village community. Sociolinguistic surveys and lexicographic comparisons have indicated that Kata Kolok is unrelated to the signing varieties in other parts of Bali and should be considered a sign language isolate as such. Kata Kolok emerged five generations ago and has been in intimate contact with spoken Balinese from its incipience. The findings from this paper suggest that this cross-modal contact has led to an absolute construction of the signing space, which is radically different in comparison to spatial deixis in other sign languages. Furthermore, Kata Kolok does not seem to have a class of true toponyms, but rather deploys deictic proto-toponyms. The Kata Kolok system on the whole does not exhibit any related linguistic forms or direct calques from spoken Balinese, and this suggests that the conceptual overlap between these two languages may have been facilitated by shared cultural practices as well as gestural communication rather than direct borrowings. Ultimately, this analysis challenges the very notion of a sign language isolate and suggests that Kata Kolok and other emergent signing varieties should be considered in light of the broader semiotic context in which they have evolved

Storytelling, Folktales and the Comic Book Format

The reading process in comics is an extension of text. In text alone the process of reading involves word-to-image conversion. Comics accelerate that by providing the image. When properly executed, it goes beyond conversion and speed and becomes a seamless whole. In every sense, this misnamed form of reading is entitled to be regarded as literature because the images are employed as a language. There is a recognizable relationship to the iconography and pictographs of oriental writing. When this language is employed as a conveyance of ideas and information, it separates itself from mindless visual entertainment. This makes comics a storytelling medium

The block-ZXZ synthesis of an arbitrary quantum circuit

Given an arbitrary $2^w \times 2^w$ unitary matrix $U$, a powerful matrix decomposition can be applied, leading to four different syntheses of a $w$-qubit quantum circuit performing the unitary transformation. The demonstration is based on a recent theorem by F\"uhr and Rzeszotnik, generalizing the scaling of single-bit unitary gates ($w=1$) to gates with arbitrary value of~$w$. The synthesized circuit consists of controlled 1-qubit gates, such as NEGATOR gates and PHASOR gates. Interestingly, the approach reduces to a known synthesis method for classical logic circuits consisting of controlled NOT gates, in the case that $U$ is a permutation matrix.Comment: Improved (non-sinkhorn) algorithm to obtain the proposed circui

Scaling a unitary matrix

The iterative method of Sinkhorn allows, starting from an arbitrary real matrix with non-negative entries, to find a so-called 'scaled matrix' which is doubly stochastic, i.e. a matrix with all entries in the interval (0, 1) and with all line sums equal to 1. We conjecture that a similar procedure exists, which allows, starting from an arbitrary unitary matrix, to find a scaled matrix which is unitary and has all line sums equal to 1. The existence of such algorithm guarantees a powerful decomposition of an arbitrary quantum circuit.Comment: A proof of the conjecture is now provided by Idel & Wolf (http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.5728

The Birkhoff theorem for unitary matrices of prime-power dimension

The unitary Birkhoff theorem states that any unitary matrix with all row sums and all column sums equal unity can be decomposed as a weighted sum of permutation matrices, such that both the sum of the weights and the sum of the squared moduli of the weights are equal to unity. If the dimension~$n$ of the unitary matrix equals a power of a prime $p$, i.e.\ if $n=p^w$, then the Birkhoff decomposition does not need all $n!$ possible permutation matrices, as the epicirculant permutation matrices suffice. This group of permutation matrices is isomorphic to the general affine group GA($w,p$) of order only $p^w(p^w-1)(p^w-p)...(p^w-p^{w-1}) \ll \left( p^w \right)!$