Abstract Background: Many countries in Europe have implemented managed competition and patient choice during the last decade. With the introduction of managed competition, health insurers also became an important stakeholder. They purchase services on behalf of their customers and are allowed to contract …

This column is about two paradoxes in IT, the Law of Gates and the Hanlon Razor. Many functionalities can be automated, but that this rarely says anything about the "real" contribution of the employees. For example, we still have train conductors, who also still check the validity of admission tickets, …

Women want positive birth experiences with high quality maternity care that is neither too much, too soon, nor too little, too late. Research confirms the effectiveness of midwifery care, and the midwifery approach to birth as physiologic may counter the upward trend of the unnecessary medicalization …

In this thesis, we develop mathematical models for the optimal deployment of security forces addressing two main challenges: adaptive behavior of the adversary and uncertainty in the model. We address several security applications and model them as agent-intruder games. The agent represents the security …

Digital technologies permeate and transform organisational practices. As a society, we need means to explore the uncharted terrain that lies ahead and the desirability and consequences of possible courses of action to move forward. We investigate a design approach, called ‘future probing’, to envision …

The author discusses how helicopters may fly autonomously using fuzzy logic, without crashing too often. He reviewes the added value of sensor fusion in military observation systems. Sensor fusion is motivated by the expected qualitative and quantitative improvement of observations and thus of situation …

In western countries there has been an increase of children with an ethnic minority background in foster care. Because foster parents often have a (family) ethnic majority background, transethnic placements have become more common. There is reason to assume that foster children with an ethnic minority …

In 1875 explorer Henry Morton Stanley (UK 1841-1904) produced a photograph of Kabaka (King) Muteesa of Buganda (UG, 1838-1884) and his chiefs. Muteesa’s land was positioned on the northern shore of a body of water that we now call Lake Victo-ria, in a country that would later be named after his kingdom. …

Modern binaural hearing aids (HAs) can collaborate wirelessly with each other as well as with other assistive (wireless) devices. This enables multi-microphone noise reduction over small wireless acoustic sensor networks (WASNs) to increase the intelligibility under adverse conditions. In this work, …

The reason for this research is the missing social media strategy for Beauty Oranje, the beauty center of the Hotels van Oranje. Within four months the social media strategy of Beauty Oranje will be formed through a combination of existing literature aimed at formulating a social media strategy. The …