Rumoer aan de Amstel. Het Amsterdamse stadhuis en het muziektheater 1808-1988

Review of a book authored bij Herman de Liagre Böhl.Review of a book authored bij Herman de Liagre Böhl

Review of periodical articles

Historians are held hostage by the sources that are available to them, and for that reason, the historiography of medieval towns is dominated by research on thirteenth-, fourteenth- or fifteenth-century case-studies. In preceding centuries, literacy was largely the monopoly of ecclesiastical milieus, who were often hostile or simply not interested in describing the urban settlements which then emerged all over Europe. An interesting exception, however, is the Breton town of Redon, which took shape around an abbey that was established in 832 with support of the Carolingian Emperor Louis the Pious. By navigating the unusually extensive set of Carolingian cartularies of this abbey, as well as the available cartographic and archaeological evidence, Julien Bachelier has developed an incisive sketch of the development of a town in the shadow of the Carolingian abbey in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (‘Une ville abbatiale bretonne. Redon du IXe au XIVe siècle’, Histoire Urbaine, 48 (2017), 133–54). This case-study confirms once again that the urbanization of medieval Europe was more than a side-effect of the rebirth of long-distance trade as the canonical Pirenne thesis would have it. The Redon case provides a valuable contribution to the revisionist perspective that stresses the importance of local demand from abbeys, episcopal palaces and castles as a stimulus for urban development (see esp. the seminal work of A. Verhulst, The Rise of Cities in North-West Europe (Cambridge, 1999))

Describing the scale and composition of calls for police service: a replication and extension using open data

This paper describes the scale and composition of emergency demand for police services in Detroit, United States. The contribution is made in replication and extension of analyses reported elsewhere in the United States. Findings indicate that police spend a considerable proportion of time performing a social service function. Just 51% of the total deployed time responding to 911 calls is consumed by crime incidents. The remainder is spent on quality of life (16%), traffic (15%), health (7%), community (5%), and proactive (4%) duties. A small number of incidents consume a disproportionately large amount of police officer time. Emergency demand is concentrated in time and space, and can differ between types of demand. The findings further highlight the potential implications of radically reforming police forces in the United States. The data and code used here are openly available for reproduction, reuse, and scrutiny

The BASE-platform project: Deriving the bathymetry from combined satellite data

The project »BAthymetry SErvice platform« (BASE-platform) addresses the lack of available up-to-date, high-resolution bathymetry data in many areas of the world. With the increasing number of earth observation satellites, e.g. by the ongoing deployment of ESA’s Sentinel fleet, remote sensing data of the oceans are widely available. Three sources of satellite information are combined in BASE-platform: optical, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and altimetry data. BASEplatform’s ambition is to use these data for creating bathymetric maps and supply them to end users via a bathymetry data portal, where data will be available off-the-shelf as well as on demand. Adequate metadata will be provided along with the bathymetry so usability by the end user is ensured

A whey protein-based multi-ingredient nutritional supplement stimulates gains in lean body mass and strength in healthy older men: A randomized controlled trial

Protein and other compounds can exert anabolic effects on skeletal muscle, particularly in conjunction with exercise. The objective of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of twice daily consumption of a protein-based, multi-ingredient nutritional supplement to increase strength and lean mass independent of, and in combination with, exercise in healthy older men. Forty-nine healthy older men (age: 73 ± 1 years [mean ± SEM]; BMI: 28.5 ± 1.5 kg/m2) were randomly allocated to 20 weeks of twice daily consumption of either a nutritional supplement (SUPP; n = 25; 30 g whey protein, 2.5 g creatine, 500 IU vitamin D, 400 mg calcium, and 1500 mg n-3 PUFA with 700 mg as eicosapentanoic acid and 445 mg as docosahexanoic acid); or a control (n = 24; CON; 22 g of maltodextrin). The study had two phases. Phase 1 was 6 weeks of SUPP or CON alone. Phase 2 was a 12 week continuation of the SUPP/CON but in combination with exercise: SUPP + EX or CON + EX. Isotonic strength (one repetition maximum [1RM]) and lean body mass (LBM) were the primary outcomes. In Phase 1 only the SUPP group gained strength (Σ1RM, SUPP: +14 ± 4 kg, CON: +3 ± 2 kg, P < 0.001) and lean mass (LBM, +1.2 ± 0.3 kg, CON: -0.1 ± 0.2 kg, P < 0.001). Although both groups gained strength during Phase 2, upon completion of the study upper body strength was greater in the SUPP group compared to the CON group (Σ upper body 1RM: 119 ± 4 vs. 109 ± 5 kg, P = 0.039). We conclude that twice daily consumption of a multi-ingredient nutritional supplement increased muscle strength and lean mass in older men. Increases in strength were enhanced further with exercise training

New genetic loci link adipose and insulin biology to body fat distribution.

Body fat distribution is a heritable trait and a well-established predictor of adverse metabolic outcomes, independent of overall adiposity. To increase our understanding of the genetic basis of body fat distribution and its molecular links to cardiometabolic traits, here we conduct genome-wide association meta-analyses of traits related to waist and hip circumferences in up to 224,459 individuals. We identify 49 loci (33 new) associated with waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for body mass index (BMI), and an additional 19 loci newly associated with related waist and hip circumference measures (P < 5 × 10(-8)). In total, 20 of the 49 waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for BMI loci show significant sexual dimorphism, 19 of which display a stronger effect in women. The identified loci were enriched for genes expressed in adipose tissue and for putative regulatory elements in adipocytes. Pathway analyses implicated adipogenesis, angiogenesis, transcriptional regulation and insulin resistance as processes affecting fat distribution, providing insight into potential pathophysiological mechanisms