The project 'Facing Forward' started with a collaboration between five institutions: the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, De Appel arts centre, W139, the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam and the art magazine Metroplis M. Having previously organized the lecture series and publications 'Right About Now: Art & Theory in the 1990s' (2005/2006) and 'Now is the Time: Art & Theory in the 21st Century' (2008/2009), the organizing committee decided to take the final (...) step in this timeline and turn its attention to the far horizon. Informed by a shared interest in the role that history, speculation, and utopianism play in the field of contemporary art and design (as well as the larger context of global, socio-economic and political developments), a selection of seven themes emerged from the conversations of the initial organizers. These would eventually shape the seven lecture and discussions events - collected in this volume of essays - publicized under the banner Art & Theory From a Future Perspective. A great number of internationally renowned speakers were invited to reflect on the proposed themes during often sold-out events, which were presented at the Oude Lutherse Kerk in Amsterdam in 2011/2012. Yet, however compelling our desire as organizers to go beyond the framework of contemporary events and the current interest, well-nigh obsession, with history, it is obviously an illusion to think that we can escape the past by means of a turn towards the future."--Page 8. (shrink)

In 2009, a small group of domestic workers joined FNV Bondgenoten, the largest Dutch trade union in the private sector and affiliated with the Dutch trade union confederation FNV. The group that joined consisted mainly of women immigrant workers, many of whom did not have a residence permit. FNV’s policy is that we organize workers and do not ask for passports. Still, a group like this brought to light several problems for FNV, both practical and fundamental. The Article identifies three (...) types of problems. The first set of problems concerns the invisibility of domestic workers. Domestic workers work in private houses and are leery of talking to strangers if they don’t have residence permits. This demanded new organizing tactics from the sector, like asking women to bring a friend to a meeting and joining churches. A cash payment of membership fees system was devised, its administration done by handwriting. At the same time, the public debate on immigration toughened; immigrants without residence permits in particular were depicted as somewhere between a profiteer and the devil. This debate also took place within FNV. The second set of problems is defined by the traditional views in Dutch society on domestic work. The group chose to become union members, since they wanted to better their position in the labor market. Dutch law on domestic work excludes them from full protection of labor and social security law. The inclusion of domestic work in labor and social security law is contrary to cultural and historical traditions and views and therefore contentious. The third set of problems is caused by the connectedness of labor and social security law and immigration law. Domestic workers in the Netherlands work in the shadows in two ways: by not having a residence permit, and by not being protected by labor and social security law. The result of our campaign is that a group of publicly financed care workers will be better protected, but the group of domestic workers that fought for ILO Convention 189 will still be excluded from our labor and social security law and not be able to qualify for a residence permit. (shrink)

Teksten van 12 moderne filosofen over de mens.

Problem solving by autonomous, interacting computersystems has attracted much attention in the ArtificialIntelligence community. These autonomous computersystems, called agents, provide a promisingperspective for the legal knowledge-based systemscommunity, as legal problem solving often involvesdistributed problem solving capabilities that gobeyond the capabilities of individual knowledge-basedsystems.We focus on the coordination of agents andcommunication between agents by proposing a model ofcommunication between various agents using modellingtechniques such as communication primitives and statetransition diagrams. Our representation concerns theDutch Algemene Wet Bestuursrecht (AWB; GeneralAct on Administrative Law). (...) A proposal for an agentarchitecture describes how these communication aspectscan be incorporated into an architecture. (shrink)

Signed and written languages are intimately related in proficient signing readers. Here, we tested whether deaf native signing beginning readers are able to make rapid use of ongoing sign language to facilitate recognition of written words. Deaf native signing children received prime target pairs with sign word onsets as primes and written words as targets. In a control group of hearing children, spoken word onsets were instead used as primes. Targets either were completions of the German signs or of the (...) spoken word onsets. Task of the participants was to decide whether the target word was a possible German word. Sign onsets facilitated processing of written targets in deaf children similarly to spoken word onsets facilitating processing of written targets in hearing children. In both groups, priming elicited similar effects in the simultaneously recorded event related potentials, starting as early as 200 ms after the onset of the written target. These results suggest that beginning readers can use ongoing lexical processing in their native language – be it signed or spoken – to facilitate written word recognition. We conclude that intimate interactions between sign and written language might in turn facilitate reading acquisition in deaf beginning readers. (shrink)

A possible explanation for policy implementation failure is that the views of the policy’s target groups are insufficiently taken into account during policy development. It has been argued that involving these groups in an interactive process of policy development could improve this. We analysed a project in which several target populations participated in workshops aimed to optimise the utilisation of an expensive novel drug (interferon beta) for patients with Multiple Sclerosis. All participants seemed to agree on the appropriateness of establishing (...) a central registry of Multiple Sclerosis patients and developing guidelines. Nevertheless, these policy measures were not implemented. Possible explanations include (1) the subject no longer had high priority when the costs appeared lower than expected, (2) the organisers had paid insufficient attention to the perceived problems of parties involved, and (3) changes within the socio-political context. The workshops in which representatives of the policy’s target populations participated did not provide enough interactivity to prevent policy implementation failure. (shrink)

Researchers from diverse disciplines, including organismal and cellular physiology, sports science, human nutrition, evolution and ecology, have sought to understand the causes and consequences of the surprising variation in metabolic rate found among and within individual animals of the same species. Research in this area has been hampered by differences in approach, terminology and methodology, and the context in which measurements are made. Recent advances provide important opportunities to identify and address the key questions in the field. By bringing together (...) researchers from different areas of biology and biomedicine, we describe and evaluate these developments and the insights they could yield, highlighting the need for more standardisation across disciplines. We conclude with a list of important questions that can now be addressed by developing a common conceptual and methodological toolkit for studies on metabolic variation in animals. (shrink)

Combining information from two or possibly several blocks of data is gaining increased attention and importance in several areas of science and industry. Typical examples can be found in chemistry, spectroscopy, metabolomics, genomics, systems biology and sensory science. Many methods and procedures have been proposed and used in practice. The area goes under different names: data integration, data fusion, multiblock analyses, multiset analyses and a few more. This book is an attempt to give an up-to-date treatment of the most used (...) and important methods within an important branch of the area; namely methods based on so-called components or latent variables. These methods have already obtained an enormous attention in for instance chemometrics, bioinformatics, machine learning and sensometrics and have proved to be important both for prediction and interpretation. The book is primarily a description of methodologies, but most of the methods will be illustrated by examples from the above-mentioned areas. The book is written such that both users of the methods as well as method developers will hopefully find sections of interest. In the end of the book there is a description of a software package developed particularly for the book. This package is freely available in R and covers many of the methods discussed. To distinguish the different type of methods from each other, the book is divided into five parts. Part I is introduction and preliminary concepts. Part II is the core of the book containing the main unsupervised and supervised methods. Part III deals with more complex structures and, finally, Part IV discusses alternative unsupervised and supervised methods. The book ends with Part V discussing the available software. Our recommendation for reading the book are as follows. A minimum read of the book would involve chapters 1, 2, 3, 5 and 7. Chapters 4, 6 and 8 are more specialized and chapters 9 and 10 contain methods we think are more advanced or less obvious to use. We feel privileged to have so many friendly colleagues who were willing to spend their time on helping us to improve the book by reading separate chapters. We would like to express our thanks to: Rasmus Bro, Margriet Hendriks, Ulf Indahl, Henk Kiers, Ingrid MaÌ⁽ge, Federico Marini, AÌ⁽smund Rinnan, Rosaria Romano, Lars Erik Solberg, Marieke Timmerman, Oliver Tomic, Johan Westerhuis and Barry Wise. Of course, the correctness of the final text is fully our responsibility! (shrink)