Pilot erfemissie van bloembollenbedrijven in Noord-Holland (Breezand)

In het Noordelijk Zandgebied in Noord-Holland worden voor enkele gewasbeschermingsmiddelen de waterkwaliteitsnormen (MTR) geregeld overschreden. In 2009 zijn telers uit een deel van de Westpolder van Anna Paulowna in de Kop van Noord Holland een samenwerkingsproject gestart om inzicht te krijgen in emissieroutes van gewasbeschermingsmiddelen vanaf het erf om daarmee emissie via deze routes te voorkomen en de waterkwaliteit in de polder te verbeteren. Eind 2010 hebben zich vier gewasbeschermingsmiddelenfabrikanten aangesloten bij de samenwerking: Certis, Bayer, Syngenta en BASF

“Dolls or teddies?”: constructing lesbian identity through community-specific practice.

The concept of ‘community’ often presents a problem for queer linguists. ‘The gay community’ is often viewed as an impossible site for research due to its imagined status, whilst local communities of gay people have been considered too heterogeneous and idiosyncratic to draw conclusions from. In this article, however, it is argued that both of these aspects of community can, and should, be a central focus of an investigation into language and sexual identity. Through the analysis of a conversation emerging from a lesbian group, using a sociocultural linguistics framework, it is argued here that the community of practice approach can play a crucial role in understanding how ideologies from ‘the gay community’ are used to construct a coherent sexual identity on a local level. The analysis reveals how the group engages in practices that enable them to construct micro-level personas in direct response to broader, ideological structures of heteronormativity

Economic evaluation of an Australian nurse home visiting programme : a randomised trial at 3 years

Objectives To investigate the additional programme cost and cost-effectiveness of ‘right@home’ Nurse Home Visiting (NHV) programme in relation to improving maternal and child outcomes at child age 3 years compared with usual care. Design A cost–utility analysis from a government-as-payer perspective alongside a randomised trial of NHV over 3-year period. Costs and quality-adjusted lifeyears (QALYs) were discounted at 5%. Analysis used an intention-to-treat approach with multiple imputation. Setting The right@home was implemented from 2013 in Victoria and Tasmania states of Australia, as a primary care service for pregnant women, delivered until child age 2 years. Participants 722 pregnant Australian women experiencing adversity received NHV (n=363) or usual care (clinic visits) (n=359). Primary and secondary outcome measures First, a cost–consequences analysis to compare the additional costs of NHV over usual care, accounting for any reduced costs of service use, and impacts on all maternal and child outcomes assessed at 3 years. Second, cost–utility analysis from a government-as-payer perspective compared additional costs to maternal QALYs to express cost-effectiveness in terms of additional cost per additional QALY gained. Results When compared with usual care at child age 3 years, the right@home intervention cost $A7685 extra per woman (95$A7006 to $A8364) and generated 0.01 more QALYs (95$A50 000 per QALY. Conclusions Benefits of NHV to parenting at 2 years and maternal health and well-being at 3 years translate into marginal maternal QALY gains. Like previous cost-effectiveness results for NHV programmes, right@home is not cost-effective at 3 years. Given the relatively high up-front costs of NHV, long-term follow-up is needed to assess the accrual of health and economic benefits over time

The quality of different types of child care at 10 and 18 months. A comparison between types and factors related to quality.

The quality of care offered in four different types of non-parental child care to 307 infants at 10 months old and 331 infants at 18 months old was compared and factors associated with higher quality were identified. Observed quality was lowest in nurseries at each age point, except that at 18 months they offered more learning activities. There were few differences in the observed quality of care by child-minders, grandparents and nannies, although grandparents had somewhat lower safety and health scores and offered children fewer activities. Cost was largely unrelated to quality of care except in child-minding, where higher cost was associated with higher quality. Observed ratios of children to adults had a significant impact on quality of nursery care; the more infants or toddlers each adult had to care for, the lower the quality of the care she gave them. Mothers' overall satisfaction with their child's care was positively associated with its quality for home-based care but not for nursery settings

Comics, graphic narratives, and lesbian lives

Lesbian comics and graphic narratives have gained unprecedented cultural presence in the twenty-first century. Yet despite the surge in interest in the work of artists such as Alison Bechdel, and despite the existence of a substantial online archive about lesbian comics created by artists, readers, and collectors, relatively little critical attention has been directed to this work. The chapter begins to fill this gap. Taking the Bechdel’s work as its start-and-end point, it provides an overview of major developments in lesbian comics and contextualises them including in relation to the gendered conditions of possibility that define comics culture

Incorporating local Ca2+ dynamics into single cell ventricular models

Understanding physiological mechanisms underlying the activity of the heart is of great medical importance. Mathematical modeling and numerical simulation have become a widely accepted method of unraveling the underlying mechanism of the heart. Calcium (Ca2 + ) dynamics regulate the excitation-contraction coupling in heart muscle cells and hence are among the key players in maintaining normal activity of the heart. Many existing ventricular single cell models lack the biophysically detailed description of the Ca2 +  dynamics. In this paper we examine how we can improve existing ventricular cell models by replacing their description of Ca2 +  dynamics with the local Ca2 +  control models. When replacing the existing Ca2 +  dynamics in a given cell model with a different Ca2 +  description, the parameters of the Ca2 +  subsystem need to be re-fitted. Moreover, the search through the plausible parameter space is computationally very intensive. Thus, the Grid enabled Nimrod/O software tools are used for optimizing the cell parameters. Nimrod/O provides a convenient, user-friendly framework for this as exemplified by the incorporation of local Ca2 +  dynamics into the ventricular single cell Noble 1998 model