Higher education reform: getting the incentives right

This study is a joint effort by the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB) and the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies. It analyses a number of `best practices¿ where the design of financial incentives working on the system level of higher education is concerned. In Chapter 1, an overview of some of the characteristics of the Dutch higher education sector is presented. Chapter 2 is a refresher on the economics of higher education. Chapter 3 is about the Australian Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS). Chapter 4 is about tuition fees and admission policies in US universities. Chapter 5 looks at the funding of Danish universities through the so-called taximeter-model, that links funding to student performance. Chapter 6 deals with research funding in the UK university system, where research assessments exercises underlie the funding decisions. In Chapter 7 we study the impact of university-industry ties on academic research by examining the US policies on increasing knowledge transfer between universities and the private sector. Finally, Chapter 8 presents food for thought for Dutch policymakers: what lessons can be learned from our international comparison

Spontaneous Ratchet Effect in a Granular Gas

The spontaneous clustering of a vibrofluidized granular gas is employed to generate directed transport in two different compartmentalized systems: a "granular fountain" in which the transport takes the form of convection rolls, and a "granular ratchet" with a spontaneous particle current perpendicular to the direction of energy input. In both instances, transport is not due to any system-intrinsic anisotropy, but arises as a spontaneous collective symmetry breaking effect of many interacting granular particles. The experimental and numerical results are quantitatively accounted for within a flux model.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures; Fig. 4 has been reduced in size and qualit

Ervaringen met intraveneus toegediend acyclovir bij ernstige herpesvirus infecties

Contains fulltext : 4333.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access

Dreijen Regeneration Study: Professional Academy 2007

This year the students of the “Professional Academy”, a combined theory and design class in landscape architecture, elaborated on a vision on the campus “de Dreijen” in Wageningen. This campus will be left by the university within the coming decade, university functions mainly moving towards the new campus “de Born” in the North of the city. Their “research by design” study brought about very different visions, but they all reflected the main theories learnt about urban sustainability and ecolog

Hysteretic clustering in granular gas

Granular material is vibro-fluidized in N=2 and N=3 connected compartments, respectively. For sufficiently strong shaking the granular gas is equi-partitioned, but if the shaking intensity is lowered, the gas clusters in one compartment. The phase transition towards the clustered state is of 2nd order for N=2 and of 1st order for N=3. In particular, the latter is hysteretic. The experimental findings are accounted for within a dynamical model that exactly has the above properties

Species-environment relationship in marine soft-bottom communities: regression modeling and the implications of scale

A literature study was performed aiming to explore the relation between the spatial scale of marine benthic surveys and the observed goodness-of-fit of regression models relating animal abundance to the environment. A further objective was to tabulate the abiotic factors and processes that predominantly explain the variation in abundance and to examine whether or not the type of important factors differ in relation to the scale of the study. Single studies in which benthos-environment regression models were applied at different spatial scales and which would have allowed a within-study comparison of the goodness-of-fit in relation to scale, were not found. The paucity of studies that reported quantitative information and, if they did so, the use of a variety of incomparable statistical models resulted in very few observations and a lack of statistical power of the (between-study) relation between scale and goodness-of-fit. Most studies confirmed the importance of sediment characteristics and elevation (in case of intertidal areas) or water depth (in case of subtidal areas) in determining the benthos. Further studies on the importance of the spatial scale of marine benthos-environment surveys should be based on a unified analytical approach, which can only be realized if original data are available