Global Answers to Global Problems: Health as a Global Public Good. 1/2007

Address by Jorge Sampaio, UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy to Stop Tuberculosis and former President of Portugal, on the occasion of the 8th Hendrik Brugmans Memorial Lecture to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Hendrik Brugmans, sponsored by the College of Europe, the Madariaga Foundation and the Alumni Association of the College of Europe, Brussels City Hall, 14 December 2006

Book Review: No Other Gods: Christian Belief in Dialogue with Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam

A review of No Other Gods: Christian Belief in Dialogue with Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam by Hendrik Vroom

Christendom and Christianity in the Middle Ages: The Relations between Religion, Church, and Society

Reviewed Book: Bredero, Adriaan Hendrik. Christendom and Christianity in the Middle Ages: The Relations between Religion, Church, and Society. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994

Was Schön ever right?

A few years ago, Jan Hendrik Schön impressed the world of science with exciting ideas and amazing experiments. Those experiments are believed no more. But were we wrong to admire the ideas at the time, or have we been too ready to turn our backs on novel ideas because they are associated with misconduct

Ratings and rankings: Voodoo or Science?

Composite indicators aggregate a set of variables using weights which are understood to reflect the variables' importance in the index. In this paper we propose to measure the importance of a given variable within existing composite indicators via Karl Pearson's `correlation ratio'; we call this measure `main effect'. Because socio-economic variables are heteroskedastic and correlated, (relative) nominal weights are hardly ever found to match (relative) main effects; we propose to summarize their discrepancy with a divergence measure. We further discuss to what extent the mapping from nominal weights to main effects can be inverted. This analysis is applied to five composite indicators, including the Human Development Index and two popular league tables of university performance. It is found that in many cases the declared importance of single indicators and their main effect are very different, and that the data correlation structure often prevents developers from obtaining the stated importance, even when modifying the nominal weights in the set of nonnegative numbers with unit sum.Comment: 28 pages, 7 figure

Hendrik Albertus and his ex-slave Mey: A drama in three acts

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented August 1989In the early spring of 1832, Mey, a slave belonging to Hendrik Albertus van Niekerk, initiated a series of events that, in quick succession, saw him beaten by his master's son, Hendrik, Jr., whipped again by his master's own hand, and unconditionally freed by old Hendrik barely ten days later. It is a remarkable story, probably without parallel in the history of the Cape Colony, and worth telling if only for that reason. But the story also deserves the historian's attention because in determining why events passed as they did, some light can be shed on previously obscure areas of South African history

Ralph Gomberg Distinguished Visiting Artist: John Mack, oboe, April 26, 2003

This is the concert program of the Ralph Gomberg Distinguished Visiting Artist: John Mack, oboe performance on Saturday, April 26, 2003 at 2:00 p.m., at the Concert Hall, 855 Commonwealth Avenue. Works performed were "Ballade" by Hendrik Andriessen, "Pastorale," Op. 38 by Howard Hanson, and Sonatine (transc. David Walter) by Maurice Ravel. A masterclass featuring students Michael Dressler and Laura Motley followed the performance. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Humanities Library Endowed Fund

Kahler-Einstein metrics on symmetric Fano T-varieties

We relate the global log canonical threshold of a variety with torus action to the global log canonical threshold of its quotient. We apply this to certain Fano varieties and use Tian's criterion to prove the existence of Kahler-Einstein metrics on them. In particular, we obtain simple examples of Fano threefolds being Kahler-Einstein but admitting deformations without Kahler-Einstein metric.Comment: 12 pages, main theorem slightly improved + minor correction