iAge en langer zelfstandig wonen

Een posterpresentatie van Hieke van der Kloet over de ICT behoefte van 50-plussers om zo lang mogelijk zelfstandig te kunnen blijven wonen in de eigen woning. De eerste resultaten van haar onderzoek zijn te lezen. Net als de eerste conclusies en aanbevelingen

Local homebuyers in the Groningen earthquake region

ABSTRACT: Local homebuyers in the Groningen earthquake region Ir. Hieke T. van der Kloet Hanze University of Applied Sciences Groningen Research Centre for Built Environment NoorderRuimte [email protected] 0031-50-595-2015 The earthquakes after the natural gas extraction in the Groningen region of the Netherlands have a significant impact on the housing market and sustainability of the communities in this region. Since the strongest earthquake around the community of Huizinge in August 2012, with an magnitude of 3.6 on the Richter scale, it became clear there is a relation between natural gas extraction and earthquakes due to soil subsidence. As a consequence houses in the region get damaged and after research it gets obvious housing prices decline and the region will become unattractive to potential buyers of houses, damaged or not. Therefore the Dutch Petroleum Company (NAM) since April 29th 2014 offers a compensation for the loss of the housing price before and after the earthquake of Huizinge to property owners who want to sell their home. They only get the compensation after a sales deal and only if they agree with the proposed compensation. Since the compensation for the decrease in house prices has been introduced, the number of participants of the regulation is lacking behind the actual sales of houses. Our study aims to contribute to the research on the consequences of earthquakes by natural gas mining on the real estate market in the northern part of the Netherlands, especially the Groningen region. First of all we want to declare why relatively a large part of the property owners (about 60% until 2015) don’t request for the compensation regulation. Our second question concerns the buyers of the (damaged) houses in the earthquake area. Why would they buy a home in a region full of risks? Who are these buyers? We use a mixed-method approach for data collection which leads to an analysis of a unique dataset on notarial deeds of house sales in nine municipalities in the Groningen earthquake region according to The Land Registry of the Netherlands during the period 2013 until the end of 2015 as well as discovering common patterns of interview results with residents and experts. First results show that the majority of the homebuyers originate from the local earthquake area in the Province of Groningen. Reasons why property sellers after the house sale don’t opt for the compensation regulation concerns the complexity of the regulation, the used valuation model and the expected long control time afterwards. From the first results we conclude that the Groningen earthquake region still has its attractiveness for local residents and buyers. Otherwise the regulation for compensation doesn’t reach enough property sellers in the nine municipalities of the Groningen earthquake region. Advise to the Dutch government should be to generously compensate the residents of the Groningen earthquake regions for the loss of value of their dwellings, damaged or not. This will help to improve the regional development and attractiveness of areas that are effected by earthquakes

Self-reported sleep disturbances in patients with dissociative identity disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder and how they relate to cognitive failures and fantasy proneness

Sleep disturbances, fantasy proneness, cognitive failures, and dissociative symptoms are related to each other. However, the co-occurrence of these phenomena has been primarily studied in non-clinical samples. We investigated the correlations between these phenomena in dissociative identity disorder (DID) patients, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) patients, and healthy controls. Both patient groups reported more sleep problems and lower sleep quality and displayed higher levels of fantasy proneness and cognitive failures than controls. However, the two patient groups did not differ with regard to these variables. Moreover, a higher level of unusual sleep experiences tended to predict participants belonging to the DID group, while specifically a lower sleep quality and more cognitive failures tended to predict participants belonging to the PTSD group

Induction of the CtsR regulon improves Xylanase production in <i>Bacillus subtilis</i>

Background The bacterium Bacillus subtilis is extensively used for the commercial production of enzymes due to its efficient protein secretion capacity. However, the efficiency of secretion varies greatly between enzymes, and despite many years of research, optimization of enzyme production is still largely a matter of trial-and-error. Genome-wide transcriptome analysis seems a useful tool to identify relevant secretion bottlenecks, yet to this day, only a limited number of transcriptome studies have been published that focus on enzyme secretion in B. subtilis. Here, we examined the effect of high-level expression of the commercially important enzyme endo-1,4-β-xylanase XynA on the B. subtilis transcriptome using RNA-seq.Results  Using the novel gene-set analysis tool GINtool, we found a reduced activity of the CtsR regulon when XynA was overproduced. This regulon comprises several protein chaperone genes, including clpC, clpE and clpX, and is controlled by transcriptional repression. CtsR levels are directly controlled by regulated proteolysis, involving ClpC and its cognate protease ClpP. When we abolished this negative feedback, by inactivating the repressor CtsR, the XynA production increased by 25%.Conclusions Overproduction of enzymes can reduce the pool of Clp protein chaperones in B. subtilis, presumably due to negative feedback regulation. Breaking this feedback can improve enzyme production yields. Considering the conserved nature of Clp chaperones and their regulation, this method might benefit high-yield enzyme production in other organisms

ICT: luxury or need for 50-plus people?

LifeLong living - Needs of 50+ in relation to independent living and ICT

Quantification in untargeted mass spectrometry-based metabolomics

The aim of this thesis was to develop concepts and methods to extract qualitative and quantitative information about metabolites from untargeted mass spectrometric data of biological samples. Several typical challenges in data handling were addressed that prevent a straightforward interpretation (data analysis) of the data acquired with different types of mass spectrometric-based metabolomics methods (GC-MS, LC-MS, CE-MS or DI-MS) methods. The critical parameters causing variation in quantitative results were identified and studied at different stages in the metabolomics workflow such as data acquisition, data pre-processing and data analysis. Different methods and concepts were developed to address these and to improve the quantitation of metabolites and the comparison between metabolite data in different samples of the same study measured at different moments or between studies. The methods developed focused on improved normalization, data pre-processing of untargeted analysis and data pre-processing of high resolution direct infusion mass spectrometry data. Furthermore it was demonstrated that even for metabolomic studies with few samples cross-validation of multivariate models can be very time consuming and parallel implementation on a (large) cluster of computers is the way to make such computations feasibleUBL - phd migration 201