Desk study of the possible impact of fisheries and other human activities on the marine environment in Mauritania. An exploration

Wageningen IMARES has been contracted by Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality with funding from the “BO PPP”-programme to make an inventory of existing and expected future human activities in that part of the Eastern Atlantic Ocean that forms the Economic Exclusive zone of Mauritania with respect to their possible impact on the marine ecosystem. The inventory will mainly be focused on the different fisheries in the area, but will not be restricted to these. Based on this inventory of activities this report will consider data needed to properly assess the impacts on the ecosystem arising from these and the studies required to gather that data

Religious beliefs in decision-making and counselling around prenatal anomaly screening: Views of pregnant Muslim Turkish and Moroccan women and midwives

Reinders, J.S. [Promotor]Hutton, E.K. [Promotor]Manniën, J. [Copromotor]Verhoeven, P.S. [Copromotor

A real-world stochastic two-person game

This article discusses a real-world application of a terminating two-person stochastic game. The problem comes from a Dutch television game show in which two finalists play a dice game. Each player chooses a number of dice to be rolled. The score of the roll is added to the player's total provided that none of the dice showed the outcome one. The first player reaching a prespecified number of points is the winner. This article discusses the computation and the structure of an optimal strategy

Inventory of current and future presence of non-wind sea use functions

In order to assess the suitability of locations on the Central and Southern North Sea for wind parks present sea use functions should also be taken into account. These sea use functions comprise shipping, oil and gas extraction, fisheries, cables and pipelines, military activities, sand extraction, radar interference and nature conservation. IMARES has collected data on these other sea use functions. Data was gathered from several national institutions, with a good deal of help from our project partners in identifying the best available sources

Identification and analysis of interactions between sea use functions

This report focuses on the interactions both positive and negative between offshore wind energy and the non-wind sea use functions.Some sea use functions can co-exist without substantial negative effects. Other combinations are problematic or even impossible and should be avoided. Therefore the interactions of the sea use functions are of importance

Comparing methods to approach cumulative effects in the North-East Atlantic: CUMULEO case study

OSPAR Intersessional Correspondence Group – Cumulative Effects (ICG-C), part of OSPAR commission Environmental Impact of Human Activities (EIHA), is seeking for common approaches on (cross-border) cumulative effects. At the OSPAR ICG-C meeting of 12-13 December 2012 (Copenhagen), three cumulative effects assessment (CEA) methods have been discussed: CUMULEO; ODEMM; and HARMONY. It was concluded that a case study could help in finding best available approaches and tools within the three methods for a specific question. This report describes the case study based on the CUMULEO method

Just a joke? Adolescents’ preferences for humor in media entertainment and real-life aggression

Humorous media entertainment frequently punctuates the everyday lives of adolescents. Theorists have suggested that this exposure may impact behavior, particularly real-life aggression. Specifically, exposure to prosocial (coping) humor in media entertainment is posited to decrease aggression, whereas the reverse has been argued for exposure to antisocial (disparaging and slapstick) humor. Despite these suppositions, little empirical evidence about this relationship exists. To fill this gap, this study employed a cohort-sequential design using latent growth curve models to estimate the (co-)development of adolescents’ preferences for television shows featuring disparaging, slapstick, and coping humor and aggression from age 10 to 17. Results showed that at the onset of adolescence, especially boys had a higher preference for shows with disparaging and slapstick humor than with coping humor. However, over the course of adolescence, boys' and girls' preferences for shows with coping humor increased, while especially girls' preferences for shows with disparaging and slapstick humor decreased. These preferences were unrelated to adolescents' aggression. Our findings provide an important addition to the ongoing media effects debate. Taken together, they offer room for optimism and point toward an increased focus on the potential positive rather than the negative sides of humor in the lives of young people