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

Conformal invariance of curvature perturbation

We show that in the single component situation all perturbation variables in the comoving gauge are conformally invariant to all perturbation orders. Generally we identify a special time slicing, the uniform-conformal transformation slicing, where all perturbations are again conformally invariant to all perturbation orders. We apply this result to the delta N formalism, and show its conformal invariance.Comment: 15 pages, 1 figur

Non-Minimal Sneutrino Inflation, Peccei-Quinn Phase Transition and non-Thermal Leptogenesis

We consider a phenomenological extension of the minimal supersymmetric standard model which incorporates non-minimal chaotic inflation, driven by a quartic potential associated with the lightest right-handed sneutrino. Inflation is followed by a Peccei-Quinn phase transition based on renormalizable superpotential terms, which resolves the strong CP and mu problems of the minimal supersymmetric standard model provided that one related parameter of the superpotential is somewhat small. Baryogenesis occurs via non-thermal leptogenesis, which is realized by the inflaton decay. Confronting our scenario with the current observational data on the inflationary observables, the baryon assymetry of the universe, the gravitino limit on the reheating temperature and the upper bound on the light neutrino masses, we constrain the effective Yukawa coupling involved in the decay of the inflaton to relatively small values and the inflaton mass to values lower than 10^12 GeV.Comment: 21 pages including 3 figures; Final versio

Reducing the environmental impact of surgery on a global scale: systematic review and co-prioritization with healthcare workers in 132 countries

Background Healthcare cannot achieve net-zero carbon without addressing operating theatres. The aim of this study was to prioritize feasible interventions to reduce the environmental impact of operating theatres. Methods This study adopted a four-phase Delphi consensus co-prioritization methodology. In phase 1, a systematic review of published interventions and global consultation of perioperative healthcare professionals were used to longlist interventions. In phase 2, iterative thematic analysis consolidated comparable interventions into a shortlist. In phase 3, the shortlist was co-prioritized based on patient and clinician views on acceptability, feasibility, and safety. In phase 4, ranked lists of interventions were presented by their relevance to high-income countries and low–middle-income countries. Results In phase 1, 43 interventions were identified, which had low uptake in practice according to 3042 professionals globally. In phase 2, a shortlist of 15 intervention domains was generated. In phase 3, interventions were deemed acceptable for more than 90 per cent of patients except for reducing general anaesthesia (84 per cent) and re-sterilization of ‘single-use’ consumables (86 per cent). In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for high-income countries were: introducing recycling; reducing use of anaesthetic gases; and appropriate clinical waste processing. In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for low–middle-income countries were: introducing reusable surgical devices; reducing use of consumables; and reducing the use of general anaesthesia. Conclusion This is a step toward environmentally sustainable operating environments with actionable interventions applicable to both high– and low–middle–income countries

On optimal orientations of Cartesian products of even cycles

Networks324299-30

Optimal orientations of products of paths and cycles

Discrete Applied Mathematics781-3163-174DAMA

On optimal orientations of G vertex-multiplications

Discrete Mathematics2191-3153-171DSMH

On optimal orientations of cartesian products with a bipartite graph

Discrete Applied Mathematics981-2103-120DAMA

On a conjecture concerning optimal orientations of the cartesian product of a triangle and an odd cycle

10.1016/S0012-365X(00)00346-0Discrete Mathematics2321-3153-161DSMH