Smart urbanism in Barcelona: A knowledge-politics perspective

There is a risk in the ‘Smart City’ that plural forms of knowing the city become eclipsed by singular governance-oriented analyses produced through computational logics originating from undemocratic service providers. In light of this concern, this chapter considers three aspects of smart urbanism’s knowledge politics: i) the role of urban agencies – or understanding smart urbanism as a situated, socio-material practice; ii) the agency of smart city technologies’ materiality as well as the ownership and control of these technologies, and: iii) the political rationalities, values and assumptions embedded in smart city technologies’ design and use. Drawing on these insights, this chapter analyses smart knowledge politics in Barcelona, where the 2015 Council elections replaced a market-oriented political leadership enthusiastically implementing the Smart City with a political leadership whose origins in social movements and citizen democracy made it deeply sceptical towards smart urbanism. We analyse how this opened up space for different approaches to using technology in the city while at the same time giving rise to materially very different kinds of smart knowledge configuring technologies emphasizing citizen participation and democratic control of knowledge production. Indeed, political rationalities and smart knowledge configuring technologies intersected and co-evolved, rather than one informing the other unidirectionally

Structure-(in)dependent Interpretation of Phrases in Humans and LSTMs

In this study, we compared the performance of a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network to the behavior of human participants on a language task that requires hierarchically structured knowledge. We show that humans interpret ambiguous noun phrases, such as second blue ball, in line with their hierarchical constituent structure. LSTMs, instead, only do so after unambiguous training, and they do not systematically generalize to novel items. Overall, the results of our simulations indicate that a model can behave hierarchically without relying on hierarchical constituent structure

Verliesnormen voor fosfaat en stikstof

De fosfaatproductie zal in 2000 fors gedaald zijn ten opzichte van 1990 door een kleiner wordende veestapel en een geringere fosfaatuitscheiding per dier

Parameter identification in a semilinear hyperbolic system

We consider the identification of a nonlinear friction law in a one-dimensional damped wave equation from additional boundary measurements. Well-posedness of the governing semilinear hyperbolic system is established via semigroup theory and contraction arguments. We then investigte the inverse problem of recovering the unknown nonlinear damping law from additional boundary measurements of the pressure drop along the pipe. This coefficient inverse problem is shown to be ill-posed and a variational regularization method is considered for its stable solution. We prove existence of minimizers for the Tikhonov functional and discuss the convergence of the regularized solutions under an approximate source condition. The meaning of this condition and some arguments for its validity are discussed in detail and numerical results are presented for illustration of the theoretical findings

Kunstmestvervangers onderzocht

Het in dit pamflet beschreven onderzoek worden de landbouwkundige en milieukundige effecten van het gebruik van de producten uit de installaties als meststof getest. Het onderzoek bestaat uit verschillende deelprojecten die kort benoemd worde

Schijnwerpers op economie De M.e

Het proefbedrijf De M.e weet scherpe milieudoelstelling te realiseren. De afgelopen jaren is hierover al veel geschreven en gesproken. Regelmatig werd daarbij opgemerkt: Leuk zulke goede cijfers maar wat kost dat nou?. Dit is reden geweest voor een aantal onderzoeksinstellingen om de schijnwerpers meer te richten op de economische resultaten

Relation between body composition and severe diarrhea in patients treated with preoperative chemoradiation with capecitabine for rectal cancer:a single-centre cohort study

BACKGROUND: Chemoradiation with capecitabine followed by surgery is standard care for locally advanced rectal cancer (LARC). Severe diarrhea is considered a dose-limiting toxicity of adding capecitabine to radiation therapy. The aim of this study was to describe the risk factors and the impact of body composition on severe diarrhea in patients with LARC during preoperative chemoradiation with capecitabine. METHODS: A single centre retrospective cohort study was conducted in a tertiary referral centre. All patients treated with preoperative chemoradiation with capecitabine for LARC from 2009 to 2015 were included. Patients with locally recurrent rectal cancer who received chemoradiation for the first time were included as well. Logistic regression analyses were performed to identify risk factors for severe diarrhea. RESULTS: A total of 746 patients were included. Median age was 64 years (interquartile range 57–71) and 477 patients (64%) were male. All patients received a radiation dosage of 25 × 2 Gy during a period of five weeks with either concomitant capecitabine administered on radiation days or continuously during radiotherapy. In this cohort 70 patients (9%) developed severe diarrhea. In multivariable logistic regression analyses female sex (OR: 4.42, 95% CI 2.54–7.91) and age ≥ 65 (OR: 3.25, 95% CI 1.85–5.87) were the only risk factors for severe diarrhea. CONCLUSIONS: Female patients and patients aged sixty-five or older had an increased risk of developing severe diarrhea during preoperative chemoradiation therapy with capecitabine. No relation was found between body composition and severe diarrhea

The SAFE-trial:Safe surgery for glioblastoma multiforme: Awake craniotomy versus surgery under general anesthesia. Study. protocol for a multicenter prospective randomized controlled trial

Background: Surgery of GBM nowadays is usually performed under general anesthesia (GA) and resections are often not as aggressive as possible, due to the chance of seriously damaging the patient with a rather low life expectancy. A surgical technique optimizing resection of the tumor in eloquent areas but preventing neurological deficits is necessary to improve survival and quality of life in these patients. Awake craniotomy (AC) with the use of cortical and subcortical stimulation has been widely implemented for low-grade glioma resections (LGG), but not yet for GBM. AC has shown to increase resection percentage and preserve quality of life in LGG and could thus be of important value in GBM surgery. Methods/design: This study is a prospective, multicenter, randomized controlled trial (RCT). Consecutive patients with a glioblastoma in or near eloquent areas (Sawaya grading II/III) will be 1:1 randomized to awake craniotomy or craniotomy under general anesthesia. 246 patients will be included in neurosurgical centers in the Netherlands and Belgium. Primary end-points are: 1) Postoperative neurological morbidity and 2) Proportion of patients with gross-total resections. Secondary end-points are: 1) Health-related quality of life; 2) Progression-free survival (PFS); 3) Overall survival (OS) and 4) Frequency and severity of Serious Adverse Effects in each group. Also, a cost-benefit analysis will be performed. All patients will receive standard adjuvant treatment with concomitant chemoradiotherapy. Discussion: This RCT should demonstrate whether AC is superior to craniotomy under GA on neurological morbidity, extent of resection and survival for glioblastoma resections in or near eloquent areas. Trial registration: Clinicaltrials.gov: NCT03861299 Netherlands Trial Register (NTR): NL758