Numerical classification of soils and its application in survey

Numerical classification of soils was studied with emphasis on methodology and feasibility in survey. A procedure was designed for construction of classes sufficiently homogeneous in terms of relevant properties and handlable by the surveyor. In the procedure 'central' depth-profiles are calculated separately for each property (e.g. clay content), from a sample of depth-profiles, with a relocation method minimizing within-class variances. Any soil profile can thus be identified in the field by allocating its constituent depth-profiles to the central depth-profile that is most similar for the respective properties. Resulting strings of class labels serve for interim data recording. If too many combinations of central depth-profiles arise to map all individually, they are fused into larger classes and within-class variances are again minimized. This procedure was applied to survey data from a marine clay area in the Netherlands: field estimates for 6 properties in 2212 profiles divided into 20 depth intervals. A new method was used to map classes automatically. Tests showed that: samples of several hundred profiles were needed; order of profiles and initial solution for relocation had little effect on results; only extreme weighting significantly affected homogeneity for different variables. Choice of weights and number of classes should be related and supported by sensitivity analysis.<p/

A soil sampling program for the Netherlands

Soil data users in The Netherlands were inventoried for current and future data needs. Prioritized data needs were used to design the Netherlands Soil Sampling Program (NSSP) as a framework containing 3 groups of related projects: map upgrading, map updating and upgrading of pedotransfer functions. In each one group, the sampling design, performance criteria and optimal sample size were defined. This paper focuses on the upgrading of the existing soil map of The Netherlands at scale 1:50,000, and extensively treats the user inventory and the sampling strategy. The sampling design, performance criteria of the sampling and associated optimal sample size were obtained by statistical analysis of soil data available before the sampling. The Phosphate Sorption Capacity (PSC) was chosen as target variable to optimize sampling, because it dominated total cost per sample. A prior analysis of a performance criterion related to the sampling error of PSC resulted in a cost saving of 13% relative to total cost determined earlier by expert judgment. A posterior analysis showed that the set quality criterion was reached or better in 6 out of 7 cases. The NSSP resulted in a data base with soil data from 2524 sample points selected by stratified random sampling, and a collection of 5764 aliquots taken at these points. The NSSP has been showing its usage potential for various kinds of environmental studies and could be a sound future basis for a national scale monitoring program

The enhancement of the search-ability of OCRed Texts HTR+, segmentation and meta-dating early modern ordinances

From May till November 2019, the KB National Library of the Netherlands (The Hague) hosts the Researcher-in-Residence project ‘Entangled Histories of Early Modern Ordinances’. This ‘short paper’-presentation reports on the ongoing project. The project’s hypotheses read that: when problems arose, small ‘states’ had to act swiftly; thus, governments may have adopted – parts of – successful legislation from neighbouring areas. These ‘entangled histories’ may become obvious while studying the political-institutional activities through legislation. Hence, the project uses printed books of ordinances from the Low Countries (1500-1800s) to answer this hypothesis. These sources used for this project are early modern norms (ordinances) printed in a gothic font (25%) and roman font (75%). The techniques that will be developed through ‘entangled histories’ will have a widespread positive effect. These techniques coincide with the project’s three steps: 1. Segmentation of the texts, going from sentence-recognition (Lonij, Harbers, 2016) to article-segmentation of larger texts; this requires that the computer is trained to recognise the beginning and end of texts, either as a chapter or as an individual text within a compilation of texts. We apply the P2PaLA-tool from the University of Valencia, which is integrated into Transkribus to recognise the different sections in our corpus. 2. Improving the OCR-results of digitised sources. By using machine learning techniques, such as the Handwritten Text Recognition suite Transkribus we will reprocess the files which currently have poor quality OCR. By treating the printed with hand-carved letters as very consistent handwriting we hope to obtain a higher quality of recognition (CER <5%). 3. We want to create automatic metadata by training a computer to recognise the conditions that categories were based upon. This will be based on an already developed tool called Annif (created by the Finnish National Library). After supervised training, the computer can then suggest, apply and supplement categories to other texts based on the idea of topic modelling (Leydesdorff, 2017). This is a pilot that will prove the applicability of the tool to other languages as well.' We will use NLP such as NER technologies to identify dates, titles, and persons. Due to its significance for such a broadly studied range of sources, we hope to make the output of the tagged entities available as RDF with the intention of making the output available in the Dutch national infrastructure With the data generated in this project, visualisations of the development of laws across the Netherlands – and possibly Europe - could become possible. These normative texts (laws) this data is based on, contain indications of how governments of burgeoning states dealt with unexpected threats to safety, security, and order through home-invented measures, borrowed rules, or adjustments of what was established elsewhere. While the thousands of texts become more easily accessible, it will become possible to look for entangled histories with neighbouring states, due to synchronic and diachronic comparisons. Firstly within the Low Countries (from one province to another), from which we will be using 108 books of ordinances; secondly, it will be possible to look for connections with German-speaking lands as the same metadata is applied as the Max-Planck-Institute für europäische Rechtsgeschichte has done in several projects. The connection with the German dataset will be established through (numbered) URI’s and Linked Data, as a step after the initial project. The ordinances within the books of ordinances are frequently consulted by researchers of various disciplines (e.g. history, law, political sciences, linguistics) to unravel rules for controlling complex societies. Having the possibility of a longitudinal search, based upon contents rather than the index or title, as well as having an overview based upon several states has so far been impossible due to the impenetrable amount of scanned texts. • Leydesdorff, L., and A. Nerghes. (2017) "Co-word maps and topic modelling: A comparison using small and medium-sized corpora (N< 1,000)." Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 68(4): 1024-35. • Lonij, J., Harbers, F. (2016), Genre classifier. KB Lab: The Hague http://lab.kb.nl/tool/genre-classifier • Finnish National Library, Annif 2.0, https://github.com/NatLibFi/Annif

Fuzzy sets voor zachte klassegrenzen: Toepassing op het landevaluatiesysteem BODEGA

In dit toepasbaarheidsonderzoek is nagegaan of en hoe de wiskundige theorie van vage verzamelingen (fuzzy sets), en de daarop geënte meerwaardige logica (fuzzy logic), toegepast kan worden in de landevaluatie. Daarbij is speciale aandacht besteed aan inpassing in het bestaande systeem BODEGA. Met methoden gebaseerd op vage verzamelingen kan rekening worden gehouden met onzekerheid over klassengrenzen door geleidelijke in plaats van scherpe grenzen te vormen. Dat leidt tot een intensiever gebruik van beschikbare gegevens en achtergrondkennis en tot meer gedifferentieerde beoordelingen. Als test is in een proefgebied in Noord-Brabant de geschiktheid voor weidebouw geëvalueerd met een fuzzy variant van BODEGA

Rapid identification information and its influence on the perceived clues at a crime scene:an experimental study

Crime scenes can always be explained in multiple ways. Traces alone do not provide enough information to infer a whole series of events that has taken place; they only provide clues for these inferences. CSIs need additional information to be able to interpret observed traces. In the near future, a new source of information that could help to interpret a crime scene and testing hypotheses will become available with the advent of rapid identification techniques. A previous study with CSIs demonstrated that this information had an influence on the interpretation of the crime scene, yet it is still unknown what exact information was used for this interpretation and for the construction of their scenario. The present study builds on this study and gains more insight into (1) the exact investigative and forensic information that was used by CSIs to construct their scenario, (2) the inferences drawn from this information, and (3) the kind of evidence that was selected at the crime scene to (dis)prove this scenario. We asked 48 CSIs to investigate a potential murder crime scene on the computer and explicate what information they used to construct a scenario and to select traces for analysis. The results show that the introduction of rapid ID information at the start of an investigation contributes to the recognition of different clues at the crime scene, but also to different interpretations of identical information, depending on the kind of information available and the scenario one has in mind. Furthermore, not all relevant traces were recognized, showing that important information can be missed during the investigation. In this study, accurate crime scenarios where mainly build with forensic information, but we should be aware of the fact that crime scenes are always contaminated with unrelated traces and thus be cautious of the power of rapid ID at the crime scene

Rapid identification information and its influence on the perceived clues at a crime scene:an experimental study

Crime scenes can always be explained in multiple ways. Traces alone do not provide enough information to infer a whole series of events that has taken place; they only provide clues for these inferences. CSIs need additional information to be able to interpret observed traces. In the near future, a new source of information that could help to interpret a crime scene and testing hypotheses will become available with the advent of rapid identification techniques. A previous study with CSIs demonstrated that this information had an influence on the interpretation of the crime scene, yet it is still unknown what exact information was used for this interpretation and for the construction of their scenario. The present study builds on this study and gains more insight into (1) the exact investigative and forensic information that was used by CSIs to construct their scenario, (2) the inferences drawn from this information, and (3) the kind of evidence that was selected at the crime scene to (dis)prove this scenario. We asked 48 CSIs to investigate a potential murder crime scene on the computer and explicate what information they used to construct a scenario and to select traces for analysis. The results show that the introduction of rapid ID information at the start of an investigation contributes to the recognition of different clues at the crime scene, but also to different interpretations of identical information, depending on the kind of information available and the scenario one has in mind. Furthermore, not all relevant traces were recognized, showing that important information can be missed during the investigation. In this study, accurate crime scenarios where mainly build with forensic information, but we should be aware of the fact that crime scenes are always contaminated with unrelated traces and thus be cautious of the power of rapid ID at the crime scene

The zoonotic potential of Oesophagostomum bifurcum in Ghana. Epidemiological, morphological and genetic studies

The overall objective of the present study was to assess the zoonotic potential of O. bifurcum, in other words to assess the risk of transmission of the simian parasite to humans. Knowledge of the zoonotic potential of O. bifurcum is central to controlling the infection in humans. The specific research aims were (1) to establish the presence of O. bifurcum in different species of non-human primates in two geographical areas outside of the endemic region in Ghana, (2) to determine whether there is any significant morphological variation between O. bifurcum from human and from different species of non-human primates, (3) to test the hypothesis that O. bifurcum from humans is genetically distinct from the parasite from nonhuman primates, and (4) to establish whether the hookworm Ancylostoma duodenale occurs in sympatry with O. bifurcum and impacts on human health in northern Ghana.UBL - phd migration 201

Over verenigingslidmaatschap en studiesucces

Voor een onderzoek naar mogelijke rendementsverschillen tussen leden van Leidse studentenverenigingen en niet leden is gebruik gemaakt van gegevens over lidmaatschap en behaalde examens van de cohort eerstejaars voltijdse studenten instelling 1998/1999. De range van leeftijden bij de aanvang van de studie was groot, met de verenigingsleden als relatief jonge deelgroep. Voor een goede vergelijking is binnen de cohort een selectie gemaakt op basis van leeftijd. De verdeling van de verenigingsleden over de faculteiten verschilt van die van de niet leden. Voor het onderzoek is het relevant dat de faculteiten verschillen m.b.t. de propedeuse- en doctoraalrendementen. Het propedeuserendement na twee jaar en het doctoraalrendement zijn hoger binnen de groep van leden van Leidse studentenverenigingen. Het blijkt dat verenigingsleden minder snel met een studie in Leiden stoppen. De vraag is in hoeverre het geobserveerde verenigingseffect verklaard kan worden door andere factoren. Niet alle mogelijke relevante variabelen konden in het onderzoek worden betrokken. Een deel van het verschil tussen leden en niet leden kon worden verklaard door andere effecten waarover wel gegevens beschikbaar waren, zoals faculteit van instroom en leeftijd bij de aanvang van de studie. In het onderzoek kon een positief verenigingseffect op het propedeuserendement na twee jaar en het doctoraalrendement aangetoond worden ook als met enkele andere relevante variabelen rekening werd gehouden. Het verenigingseffect is sterker naarmate de periode waarover gekeken wordt, langer is.Vakpublicati

Hoezo representatief? : over de betekenissen van representatief in de KRW literatuur

We gaan in op de selectie van representatieve locaties en representatieve tijdstippen bij monitoring voor de Europese Kaderrichtlijn Water. Het blijkt dat 'representatief' veel kan betekenen, wat niet altijd bijdraagt aan duidelijkheid over de steekproef opzet. Wij pleiten er daarom voor om het woord 'representatief' niet te gebruiken, maar de opzet en het doel van de steekproef gedetailleerd te beschrijven. 'Representatief' wordt wel eens in verband gebracht met kanssteekproeven, waarbij de eenheden aselect, at rondom, worden gekozen. Wij benadrukken dat, afhankelijk van het doel, in het ene geval een gerichte steekproef beter is en in het andere geval een kanssteekproef