Great effort is put into making our mobility system more sustainable in order to mitigate climate change. One corner stone of this endeavour is the transition from internal combustion engines to electric engines for private cars. This transition, however, introduces new challenges, especially regarding the demand for electrical energy from renewable sources.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIt is common for people working on linguistic geography, language contact and typology to make use of some type of distance metric between lects. However, most work so far has either used Euclidean distances, or geodesic distance, both of which do not represent the real separation between communities very accurately. This paper presents two datasets: one on walking distances and one on topographic distances between over 8700 lects across all macro-areas.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGeographical confounding in phylogenetic inference models has long been an issue. Often models have great difficulty detecting whether congruences or similarities between languages in phylogenetic datasets stem from common genetic descent or geographical proximity effects such as language contact. In this study, we introduce a distance-based Gaussian process approach with latent phylogenetic distances that can detect potential geographic contact zones and subsequently account for geospatial biases in the resulting tree topologies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the importance of understanding, forecasting, and avoiding infectious processes, as well as the necessity for understanding the diffusion and acceptance of preventative measures. Simple contagions, like virus transmission, can spread with a single encounter, while complex contagions, such as preventive social measures (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn Earth's history warm and cold periods have alternated. Especially, during the Pleistocene, the alternation between these different climatic conditions has led to frequent range expansions and retractions of many species: while thermophilic species dispersed during warm periods, cold adapted species retracted to cold refugia and vice versa. After the last Pleistocene cycle many cold adapted taxa found refuges in relict habitats in mountain ranges.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHealth agencies advocate reducing children's sweetness exposure to lower sweetness preference or liking to ultimately lower sugar intake. However, the relationship between sweetness exposure, preference, and liking remains unclear. This work investigated the influence of exposure to a sucrose-containing sweet or sour-tasting drink on sweetness preference and liking for sweet and sour products in 4-7-year-old children (n = 65).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCritical transitions describe a phenomenon where a system abruptly shifts from one stable state to an alternative, often detrimental, stable state. Understanding and possibly preventing the occurrence of a critical transition is thus highly relevant to many ecological, sociological, and physical systems. In this context, it has been shown that the underlying network structure of a system heavily impacts the transition behavior of that system.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNed Tijdschr Geneeskd
July 2023
The report 'Future-proof disciplinary law: Learning from disciplinary procedures en team- and network responsibilities in disciplinary law in healthcare' is discussed. The aim of the Dutch Disciplinary law is to foster and monitor the quality of professional practice. In the report it is stated that this goal is achieved through learning.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPortion size manipulation is well known to be effective in increasing vegetable intake in adults, whereas less is known about the effects of portion size manipulation on reducing meat intake. This online study investigated the effects of recommended and regularly consumed portion sizes of vegetables and meat in five familiar Dutch meals. Participants evaluated 60 food pictures of five meals and used a 100 mm VAS to measure expected liking, satiety, food-evoked emotions, and the perceived normal portion size.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMethods to forecast critical transitions, i.e. abrupt changes in systems' equilibrium states have relevance in scientific fields such as ecology, seismology, finance and medicine among others.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCritical transitions can be conceptualized as abrupt shifts in the state of a system typically induced by changes in the system's critical parameter. They have been observed in a variety of systems across many scientific disciplines including physics, ecology, and social science. Because critical transitions are important to such a diverse set of systems it is crucial to understand what parts of a system drive and shape the transition.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFolia Parasitol (Praha)
October 2022
Trichodina centrostrigeata Basson, Van As et Paperna, 1983 from Oreochromis mossambicus (Peters) and O. niloticus (Linnaeus) from different host populations from Argentina, Mexico and South Africa was reviewed. Although T.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMagnetosensitive elastomers respond to external magnetic fields by changing their stiffness and shape. These effects result from interactions among magnetized inclusions that are embedded within an elastic matrix. Strong external magnetic fields induce internal restructuring, for example the formation of chain-like aggregates.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInfants become increasingly exposed to sweet-tasting foods in their first year of life. However, it is still unclear whether repeated exposure to sweet taste is linked to infants' sweetness liking during this period. Making use of data from the OPALINE cohort, this study aimed to examine the link between sweetness exposure and sweetness liking during two important periods in early infant feeding: at the start of complementary feeding (3-6 months) and the transition to the family table (10-12 months).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe present study explored how primary school-aged children from families with a low socioeconomic position produce 'likes' and 'dislikes' of foods during everyday family meals, and how these (dis)likes are understood and treated by their parents. It is crucial to understand how food preferences develop in the course of everyday life, as it is known that there are socioeconomic disparities in food preference and consumption, and that children from families with a low socioeconomic position have relatively poorer diets. Deploying an interactional approach to food preference, video recordings of 79 evening meals in families with a low socioeconomic position were analyzed using discursive psychology and conversation analysis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Parenting interventions during the first years of life on what and/or how to feed infants during complementary feeding can promote healthy eating habits.
Objectives: An intervention promoting repeated exposure to a variety of vegetables [repeated vegetable exposure (RVE); what] and an intervention promoting responding sensitively to child signals during mealtime [video-feedback intervention to promote positive parenting-feeding infants (VIPP-FI); how] were compared, separately and combined (COMBI), with an attention control condition (AC). Primary outcomes were vegetable consumption and self-regulation of energy intake; secondary outcomes were child anthropometrics and maternal feeding practices (sensitive feeding, pressure to eat).
Studies on the possibility of predicting critical transitions with statistical methods known as early warning signals (EWS) are often conducted on data generated with equation-based models (EBMs). These models base on difference or differential equations, which aggregate a system's components in a mathematical term and therefore do not allow for a detailed analysis of interactions on micro-level. As an alternative, we suggest a simple, but highly flexible agent-based model (ABM), which, when applying EWS-analysis, gives reason to (a) consider social interaction, in particular negative feedback effects, as an essential trigger of critical transitions, and (b) to differentiate social interactions, for example in network representations, into a core and a periphery of agents and focus attention on the periphery.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this article we propose a novel method to estimate the frequency distribution of linguistic variables while controlling for statistical non-independence due to shared ancestry. Unlike previous approaches, our technique uses all available data, from language families large and small as well as from isolates, while controlling for different degrees of relatedness on a continuous scale estimated from the data. Our approach involves three steps: First, distributions of phylogenies are inferred from lexical data.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Eating in the absence of hunger (EAH), the susceptibility to eat despite satiety, may increase overweight. While EAH has been established in school-aged children, less is known about it during toddlerhood.
Objectives: This study assessed to what extent 18-month-old children eat in the absence of hunger, the stability of this behaviour at 24 months and the association of child eating behaviours with EAH.
Conceptual knowledge about objects is essential for humans, as well as for animals, to interact with their environment. On this basis, the objects can be understood as tools, a selection process can be implemented and their usage can be planned in order to achieve a specific goal. The conceptual knowledge, in this case, is primarily concerned about the physical properties and functional properties observed in the objects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Labour Mark Res
March 2021
Recent research suggests that new technologies are important drivers of empirically observed labour market polarisation. Many analyses in the field of economics are conducted to evaluate the changing share of employment in low-skill, medium-skill and high-skill occupations over time. This occupation-based approach, however, may neglect the relevance of specific skills and skill bundles, which potentially can be used to explain the observable patterns of labour market polarisation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany American and Dutch adolescents use marijuana regularly. There is concern that such use may impair cognitive function more in adolescents than adults. We examined effects of regular marijuana use on long-term memory and perseveration among American and Dutch adolescents.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF