Should Mission Statements Be Promises? (And should they have to be?)

This paper explores how mission statements might become a resource for improving nonprofit governance and accountability. The author asks what legal duty or moral obligation nonprofit organizations should be under to articulate a mission statement that others (the government, donors, prospective beneficiaries, the public at large) could use to assess their goals and performance. The paper explores how mission statements might include auditable claims, rather than vague aspirations, and raises questions about how various stakeholders might be empowered to use mission statements in holding an organization to account.This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 33.5. Hauser Working Paper Series Nos. 33.1-33.9 were prepared as background papers for the Nonprofit Governance and Accountability Symposium October 3-4, 2006

Acoustic differences between German and Dutch labiodentals

The present article is a follow-up study of the investigation of labiodentals in German and Dutch by Hamann & Sennema (2005), where we looked at the perception of the Dutch labiodental three-way contrast by German listeners without any knowledge of Dutch and German learners of Dutch

Dutch listeners' use of suprasegmental cues to English stress

Dutch listeners outperform native listeners in identifying syllable stress in English. This is because lexical stress is more useful in recognition of spoken words of Dutch than of English, so that Dutch listeners pay greater attention to stress in general. We examined Dutch listeners’ use of the acoustic correlates of English stress. Primary- and secondary-stressed syllables differ significantly on acoustic measures, and some differences, in F0 especially, correlate with data of earlier listening experiments. The correlations found in the Dutch responses were not paralleled in data from native listeners. Thus the acoustic cues which distinguish English primary versus secondary stress are better exploited by Dutch than by native listeners

Voiced labiodental fricatives or glides – all the same to Germans

Dutch has a three-way contrast in labiodental sounds, which causes problems for native speakers of German in their acquisition of Dutch, since German contrasts only two labiodentals. The present study investigates the perception of the Dutch labiodental fricative system by German L2 learners of Dutch and shows that native Germans with no or little knowledge of the Dutch language categorize the Dutch labiodental voiced fricative and approximant as their native voiced fricative. Advanced learners, however, succeed in acquiring a category for the voiced fricative, illustrating that plasticity in the perception of a second language develops with the amount of exposure to the language

CESAM : The CCSO annual model of the Dutch economy

This paper presents CESAM, a macroeconometric model of the Dutch economy based on annual data. CESAM can be characterized as a Keynesian expenditure model including a neoclassical production model and a post-Keynesian financial model. This characterization holds for most of the Dutch macroeconometric models including, for instance, FREIA-KOMPAS of the Dutch Central Planning Bureau. There are, however, some interesting features that distinguish CESAM from other Dutch models: the production structure is based on a putty-clay vintage approach; the financial model is based on a system of financial accounts and is modelled using the portfolio approach; and the institutional structure of Dutch public finance is described in detail. The main objectives in using the model are to generate medium-term forecasts of the Dutch economy and to analyse economic policy

Scalar Matter Coupled to Quantum Gravity in the Causal Approach: Finite One-Loop Calculations and Perturbative Gauge Invariance

Quantum gravity coupled to scalar massive matter fields is investigated within the framework of causal perturbation theory. One-loop calculations include matter loop graviton self-energy and matter self-energy and yield ultraviolet finite and cutoff-free expressions. Perturbative gauge invariance to second order implies the usual Slavnov-Ward identities for the graviton self-energy in the loop graph sector and generates the correct quartic graviton-matter interaction in the tree graph sector. The mass zero case is also discussed.Comment: 37 pages, latex, no figures, some typos corrected, section 3 modifie

The effect of L1 regional variation on the perception and production of standard L1 and L2 vowels

This study reports on the perception and production of Standard Dutch and Standard British English vowels by speakers of two regional varieties of Belgian Dutch (East Flemish and Brabantine) which differ in their vowel realizations. Twenty-four native speakers of Dutch performed two picture-naming tasks and two vowel categorization tasks, in which they heard Standard Dutch or English vowels and were asked to map these onto orthographic representations of Dutch vowels. The results of the Dutch production and categorization tasks revealed that the participants’ L1 regional variety importantly influenced their production and especially perception of vowels in the standard variety of their L1. The two groups also differed in how they assimilated non-native English vowels to native vowel categories, but no major differences could be observed in their productions of non-native vowels. The study therefore only partly confirms earlier studies showing that L1 regional variation may have an influence on the acquisition of non-native language varieties

Exit, voice and loyalty in the Netherlands

Native Dutch are emigrating from the Netherlands in surprisingly large numbers. This column shows that most Dutch emigrants are choosing to exit due to dissatisfaction with the quality of the public domain, particularly high population density. Is their exit a vote of no confidence in the Dutch government?

When to cross Over? Cross-language linking using Wikipedia for VideoCLEF 2009

We describe Dublin City University (DCU)'s participation in the VideoCLEF 2009 Linking Task. Two approaches were implemented using the Lemur information retrieval toolkit. Both approaches rst extracted a search query from the transcriptions of the Dutch TV broadcasts. One method rst performed search on a Dutch Wikipedia archive, then followed links to corresponding pages in the English Wikipedia. The other method rst translated the extracted query using machine translation and then searched the English Wikipedia collection directly. We found that using the original Dutch transcription query for searching the Dutch Wikipedia yielded better results

Dutch Word Stress as Pronounced by Indonesian Students

This study focuses on the way in which the Dutch monophthongal vowels are pronounced by Indonesian students. To investigate whether Indonesian students realize the Dutch vowels correctly, especially when they are stressed, I analysed duration and quality of stressed and unstressed Dutch vowels. Measurements were done on the duration and the formant frequencies of the vowels spoken by Indonesian students and by native speakers of Dutch as well. Statistical analysis showed that in general the differences in duration between vowels spoken by the Indonesian students and by the native speakers were not significant. However, the effect of stress on the lengthening of the vowels was stronger for the Indonesian students than for the native speakers. In addition, statistical analysis of the formant frequencies confirmed that the non-native speakers realized the Dutch vowels slightly differently from the Dutch native speakers. The Indonesian students pronounced the stressed vowels more clearly than their unstressed counterparts; yet their vowel diagram is smaller than the vowel diagram of the native speakers