Culture has freed us to some extent from nature, first through language and religion, and almost simultaneously through technology. From the control of the fire and the first tools until now - smart technology - technological development has taken a long cultural path, with many challenges and possibilities. …

Digital technology is beautiful but, unfortunately, is also incredibly unreliable. Imagine, after a night of good sleep, you enter your car where you find that the brake pedal is on the right and the accelerator pedal on the left. An update, with kind regards from Volkswagen. Or that the manufacturer …

We see what we expect to see. For example, If we 're interested in a certain type of car, "suddenly" we see many more of these cars than before. This bias confirms the correctness of our interest, hence it 's called confirmation bias. In itself this isn 't a problem, in looking through our “pink glasses" …

For many decades social sciences have been captivated by the statistical method. In itself there is nothing wrong with this method, but a serious side effect of a large fixation on surveys, likert-scales and normal distributions is that the argument is still seen mainly as opinion and therefore hardly …

In this colomn it is argued that investing in education, healthcare and construction is investing in local economy and society. At least, if education perceives "get ready for a smart world" (the credo of Saxion University) as more than an uncritical adaptation to the latest products of the high-tech …

William James stated: "Individuality outruns all classification, yet we insist on classifying every one we meet under some general label". It is argued that people classify to make sense of their world. By labelling (repeating) patterns, we learn to navigate through our world and through our lives. Often, …

A colomn about nurture (development) and innate brain structures. Our brain is important. A car does not drive without a motor, but the purpose of the journey is not anchored in the engine. As long as we are judged on what we do or don 't do in the world, running away on time in a conflict, for example, …

CC-BY-NC-ND Smart Industry - de vierde industriële revolutie - gaat volgens veel publicaties de inhoud van werk razendsnel en drastisch veranderen. De veel geponeerde stelling is dat de samensmelting van allerlei technologische ontwikkelingen op het gebied van o.a. automatisering, optica en big data …

A colomn about Neurotypic Spectrum Disorder (NSD). Incidence 5 out of 10 persons, only 3 out of 100 are completely excluded (they have ASD, autistic spectrum disorder). NSD means a reduced capacity to obtain one or more preoccupations, let alone losing themselves in fascinations; Superficial knowledge …

Normal is a concept that stems from two very interesting mathematical concepts: the normal distribution and the central limit theorem. People possess infinite numbers of properties. By far the most are unknown, they don’t matter to our reality. However, through our knowledge systems - perception and …