The Internet has dramatically changed the business landscape and the way word-of-mouth spreads. The possibilities for small, Internet-depending firms to compete have improved. This study addresses the question how such firms in the Netherlands, Sweden, and Finland deal with word-of-mouth through the …

Recent years have shown the emergence of numerous local energy initiatives (prosumer communities) in the Netherlands. Many of them have set the goal to establish a local and sustainable energy provision on a not-for-profit basis. In this study we carried out exploratory case studies on a number of Dutch …

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014. Creating agents that are capable of emulating similar socio-cultural dynamics to those found in human interaction remains as one of the hardest challenges of artificial intelligence. This problem becomes particularly important when considering embodied …

In this report a description is given of two implementation concepts for the implementation of shaft alignment, vibration measurement and on site machining in the Asia market. The entire analysis process has been described including an actor analysis, process analysis and market analysis. The two …

The Saxion University of Applied Sciences recently started its “Safety at Work” project. Its objective is to increase safety in the workplace by combining and applying state-of-the-art factors from Ambient Intelligence, Industrial & Product Design and Smart Materials [1].The human factor plays a significant …

Bax.shop.nl is an online music store for DJs, producers and musicians. The last few years Bax-shop.nl is dealing with fast growing developments. Due to these developments there has been chosen to launch an online store for France at the beginning of 2013, and as this store has been launched, Bax-shop.nl …

The characteristics of a hydrogen plasma in an inductively coupled RF plasma setup were studied using a double Langmuir probe and an optical emission spectrometer. At various settings for the gas pressure, gas ow, RF power and probe position, values were obtained for the electron temperature and plasma …

BACKGROUND: The employment of physician assistants (PAs) is a strategy to improve access to care. Since the new millennium, a handful of countries have turned to PAs as a means to bridge the growing gap between the supply and demand of medical services. However, little is known about this new workforce …

Despite the polar bears’ long history of high popularity in zoo settings, many studies indicate that this wide-ranging species expresses many abnormal repetitive behaviours in captivity, such as stereotypic walking, head swinging and repetitive swimming bouts. This is also the case in the male polar …

BACKGROUND: T lymphocytes are orchestrators of adaptive immunity. Naïve T cells may differentiate into Th1, Th2, Th17 or iTreg phenotypes, depending on environmental co-stimulatory signals. To identify genes and pathways involved in differentiation of Jurkat T cells towards Th1 and Th2 subtypes we performed …