Routing for analog chip designs at NXP Semiconductors

During the study week 2011 we worked on the question of how to automate certain aspects of the design of analog chips. Here we focused on the task of connecting different blocks with electrical wiring, which is particularly tedious to do by hand. For digital chips there is a wealth of research available for this, as in this situation the amount of blocks makes it hopeless to do the design by hand. Hence, we set our task to finding solutions that are based on the previous research, as well as being tailored to the specific setting given by NXP. This resulted in an heuristic approach, which we presented at the end of the week in the form of a protoype tool. In this report we give a detailed account of the ideas we used, and describe possibilities to extend the approach

Prevention of unintentional injuries in early childhood: Using an E-health4Uth home safety intervention to promote parents’ child safety behaviours

Every day around the world the lives of more than two thousand families are torn apart by the loss of a child due to an unintentional injury [1]. Such tragedy can change lives irrevocably. It is a major public health problem that requires urgent attention. “Unintentional injury” is used to refer to injuries that were unplanned. Unintentional injuries can be defined as events in which the injury occurs in a short period of time (seconds or minutes); the harmful outcome was not sought; or the outcome was the result of one of the forms of physical energy in the environment or normal body functions being blocked by external means, e.g. drowning. The most common unintentional injuries result from motor vehicle crashes, falls, fires and burns, drowning, poisonings and aspirations [2]. Injury is a major cause of death of children (aged 0-18 years old) throughout the world, responsible for about 950.000 deaths each year [1, 3]. Unintentional injuries account for almost 90% of these deaths [1]. Unintentional injuries are also a major cause of disabilities and loss of quality of live, which can have a long-lasting impact on all facets of children’s lives, i.e. relationships, learning and play, and their parents’ lives [1, 4-6]. In the Netherlands unintentional injuries are also the greatest health problem among children [7, 8]. Each year 18 children aged 0-4 years die caused by unintentional injuries in and around the home. Additionally 41.000 children aged 0-4 years are medically treated, of which 23.000 children at the emergency room of a hospital because of unintentional injuries [9-11]. Among preschool children, toddlers have the highest risk of getting injured [1, 11]. The direct medical costs of an injury among children aged 0 to 4 years old, treated at the emergency room or hospitalized, is on average €820 per victim [11]. Promoting healthy behaviour of parents is important in order to reduce the number of unintentional injuries in young children. This thesis presents studies on the prevention of unintentional injuries in and around the home with regard to falls, poisoning, drowning, and burns

Good Applications for Crummy Entity Linkers? The Case of Corpus Selection in Digital Humanities

Over the last decade we have made great progress in entity linking (EL) systems, but performance may vary depending on the context and, arguably, there are even principled limitations preventing a "perfect" EL system. This also suggests that there may be applications for which current "imperfect" EL is already very useful, and makes finding the "right" application as important as building the "right" EL system. We investigate the Digital Humanities use case, where scholars spend a considerable amount of time selecting relevant source texts. We developed WideNet; a semantically-enhanced search tool which leverages the strengths of (imperfect) EL without getting in the way of its expert users. We evaluate this tool in two historical case-studies aiming to collect a set of references to historical periods in parliamentary debates from the last two decades; the first targeted the Dutch Golden Age, and the second World War II. The case-studies conclude with a critical reflection on the utility of WideNet for this kind of research, after which we outline how such a real-world application can help to improve EL technology in general.Comment: Accepted for presentation at SEMANTiCS '1

"Into the Woods": The Experiences and Preparation of Teachers Who Direct Secondary School Musical Theatre

This study examines the personal investment of four NSW Independent secondary school music and drama teachers who direct musical theatre productions. It considers these teachers’ attitudes and beliefs regarding the social and educational value of such productions, and the manner in which these productions exist within the schools that produce them. Through semi-structured interviews with these four teachers, this study outlines their experiences in producing and directing these musical theatre productions and their preparation for such involvement. By examining the relationship between the preparation and experiences of these teachers in relation to their beliefs and opinions regarding available training, this study also considers the implications of this data in regard to music education degrees

Islamic Feminism: A Discourse of Gender Justice and Equality

This paper examines Islamic feminism using structural methodology and the phenomenological approach to examine the component of Muslim feminists\u27 activism that utilizes ijtihad and tafsir to reinterpret patriarchal rhetoric and highlight Islamic discourses that validate gender equality. These scholars and activists critically analyze Islamic theology by employing hermeneutics in order to produce Islamic exegeses that affirm social justice, gender equality, and liberation. Religion plays a critical role in building collective cultural identities; therefore, examining sacred texts\u27 representation and prescription of gender roles and mores generates an understanding of the gender order in the community of believers, while simultaneously exposing contextual patriarchal inaccuracies that result in gender inequities. Muslim scholar-activists engage in this work to re-appropriate their cultural self-definition by emphasizing the socio-political environments that shaped the interpretations of the Qur’an and Hadiths in order to promote justice and affirm gender equality within an Islamic paradigm. A liberatory theology legitimized by Islamic sacred texts not only confronts systemic and systematic repressive practices against women but also mandates reflexive change in Islamic societies. Muslims\u27 collective identity is couched within an Islamic discourse; therefore, Muslim scholar-activists\u27 reinterpretation of sacred texts has the potential to enable a genuine cultural paradigm shift that can establish the necessary milieu for progressive women’s rights to not only be proposed but also implemented successfully in Islamic societies. This paper evaluates the growing academic literature on reform-oriented Muslim scholar-activists and specifically focuses on the ways in which Islamic feminists reinterpret the Qur’an by employing ijtihad and tafsir to 1) contextualize verses and revelations; 2) search for the best meaning as charged by the Qur’an; 3) compare specific words or ayats with the syntactical composition elsewhere in the sacred text; and, 4) read ayat and suras in a holistic manner with the Qur’an’s broader thematic message in mind. Their reinterpretations set the foundation for Islamic feminists\u27 activism in broader society that seeks to eliminate social discrimination, promote social justice, and progress human equality and dignity. This examination of Muslim scholar-activists\u27 hermeneutics illustrates that Islamic feminism is a viable avenue to empower Muslim women and foster grass-roots cultural transformation in Muslim societies towards more gender egalitarian attitudes and practices. I argue that Islamic feminist scholars’ hermeneutics unshackles Islam’s liberatory theology and egalitarian message from patriarchal inaccuracies

Escaping the middle income trap

Item does not contain fulltex

Warmte-koude opslag en duurzaam gebruik van de ondergrond

Warmte koude opslag (WKO) is een energie en kostenbesparende methode voor het verwarmen en koelen van gebouwen. Open WKO systemen pompen het grondwater heen en weer om het gebouw te koelen of te verwarmen. Gesloten WKO systemen gebruiken alleen de warmte van het grondwater om huizen te verwarmen of te koelen. In Nederland is er de laatste jaren een sterke en door de overheid gestimuleerde groei van het aantal WKO systemen. Gesloten WKO systemen zouden een risico kunnen vormen voor de kwaliteit van het grondwater door het groot aantal perforaties van de ondergrond en door het mogelijke lekken van koelvloeistof. Bij open WKO systemen moet voorkomen worden dat verschillende grondwaterlagen gemengd worden waardoor ongewenste geochemische en microbiologische processen optreden. In principe kan een open WKO systeem wel op een vervuilde locatie worden toegepast, maar er is specifiek maatwerk nodig om de verspreiding van de vervuiling te beperken. De bescheiden temperatuursveranderingen die door WKO systemen worden opgewekt in het grondwater vormen slechts een gering risico voor geochemische processen. Deze temperatuursveranderingen zouden in principe wel aanleiding kunnen geven tot een toename van het aantal ziektekiemen in het grondwater. Daarom is het belangrijk dat er voldoende afstand is tussen een drinkwaterwinning en de omringende WKO installaties. Verder onderzoek is nodig om vast te stellen welke invloed WKO installaties hebben op de bacteriën in het grondwater. Het opslaan van heet (90 °C) grondwater heeft een groot aantal milieubezwaren. De Europese kaderrichtlijn water ziet ook de inbreng van warmte in het grondwater als een mogelijke verontreiniging wanneer daar nadelige gevolgen voor mensen of ecosystemen aan verbonden zijn. Het toezicht van de provincies op het groeiende aantal WKO systemen in de praktijk verdient nadere aandacht

A small angle X-ray scattering study on high pH silica precipitations

Silica precipitations were carried out at high pH (7-10) and elevated temperatures (60-90 degrees C) by means of simultaneous dosing of diluted water glass and sulphuric acid into a stirred thermostatted reaction vessel. In order to investigate the development of the vulnerable silica structures during the processes, every 5-10 min small samples were taken from the reaction mixture and analysed using small angle X-ray scattering. It was found that a narrow particle size distribution was maintained throughout the entire preparation procedure (or at least from about 1 h until the end of the process), despite the fact that the primary silica particles were growing continuously. In addition, a continuous decrease in the total number of primary particles was observed, indicating that the primary particles were involved in clustering and aging processes, and that (except for the initial reaction stages) newly dosed silica does not form new particles but is deposited onto the already existing particles. Ostwald ripening, which is regarded as the most important aging mechanism, probably proceeds relatively rapidly under the applied process conditions, leading to a persistent high degree of monodispersit