November 12, 2012

Life line for Frisian studies

Filed under: Science by Branko Collin @ 8:15 am

During one of his last days in office former Education Minister Halbe Zijlstra has saved the bachelor programme Minorities and Multilingualism: Into the Frisian Laboratory at the University of Groningen (RUG).

The minister granted the program a subsidy of 120,000 euro per year, the provincial government reported last Tuesday. The RUG will sponsor the programme for the same amount.

In 2010 only one person studied Frisian at the RUG.

Frisian is one of the two official languages of the province of Friesland, the other being Dutch.

Halbe Zijlstra was born in Friesland in 1969, in the town of Oosterwolde.

(Photo by Rupert Ganzer, some rights reserved)

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November 11, 2012

Love letter to the landscape of Holland

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 10:14 am

American blogger Abi Sutherland currently lives just North of Amsterdam, and she is slowly getting used to the fact that there are no mountains here:

This is a good spot. The bike path runs between two strips of water, both bright with reflected sky. To my right is a narrow patch of reeds, its leaves beginning to turn purple-brown with autumn. The last light of the day gives them a bit of its orange, a parting gift of warmth and richness. To my left, the fields stretch out for kilometers, flat and treeless. Only the livestock and the woodwork—bridges and little stretches of fence—break the landscape between me and the outlines of the distant trees and towns. Above it all, the sky is full of light.

[…]

This is nothing like anything I have ever known. If my love of California came through the front door and my love of Scotland through the side, this sudden, inarticulate love of the Netherlands is the unexpected guest who appears one day in the living room, ringing no bell and answering no invitation. And yet here it is, and it draws me out of the house and away from the cities every bright day. I go out for half-hour rides and come back three hours later, windblown and bright-eyed.

Go read.

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November 10, 2012

Teenager from Helmond buys ticket to space

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 10:36 am

Last Sunday Rowin Hellings (18) from Helmond near Eindhoven bought himself a ride on a suborbital space flight.

The flights were being sold as part of a sales promotion by German consumer electronics chain Media Markt. In 2014 Hellings will be flying aboard an XCOR Lynx rocket plane. His ticket was sponsored by his parents and cost 73,333 euro, according to Eindhovens Dagblad.

Although Media Markt charged the regular price for the flight, they padded the purchase with 6,600 euro worth of consumer electronics.

Earlier this year Sabine van der Sluis (33) won a flight on the Lynx as part of a loyalty scheme promotion, AD wrote back then.

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November 5, 2012

Sexologists believe virtual child porn may take pressure off for paedophiles

Filed under: Health by Branko Collin @ 1:54 pm

Out of every 20 men that get convicted for possession of child pornography only one will ever rape a child, sexologist Erik van Beek told newspaper Trouw two weeks ago.

A colleague, Rik van Lunsen of the AMC hospital, says that there is a group of paedophiles that they call the ‘healthy’ group. These men report themselves to the AMC and are clearly struggling with their conscience. They are afraid they will end up doing things to children that they don’t really want to do. Van Lunsen believes that the first step for these men is to stop the struggle against their feelings: “It’s like telling somebody that they should not think of a purple crocodile. Such a person will end up only thinking of purple crocodiles.”

Van Lunsen added that paedophiles cannot be cured: “Sexual preferences are set in stone once you turn eight.”

Both sexologists plead for allowing the production and possession of realistic, virtual child pornography. Apart from providing the ‘healthy group’ of paedophiles with a safety valve, they hope this will disrupt the market for real child pornography.

Realistic virtual child pornography was outlawed in the Netherlands in 2002. The Dutch tend to differentiate between paedophiles (adults sexually attracted to children) and child rapists (‘pedoseksuelen’). Lolicon, manga that depicts sex with children, may not be illegal in the Netherlands.

Photo by Jason Rogers, some rights reserved.

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November 4, 2012

Heated bike paths and glow in the dark roads

Filed under: Automobiles,Bicycles by Branko Collin @ 9:43 pm

The towns of Utrecht and Zutphen will start experiments with heating bike paths, DutchNews reports.

The news site quotes a Telegraaf article that says these experiments will start ‘soon’. The idea is that ‘asphalt collectors’ will collect and store the summer heat, and release this energy in the winter to stop ice from forming. This could reduce accidents:

‘The result is cooler asphalt in summer and a warmer surface in winter,’ Marcel Boerefijn, the project’s leader, is quoted as saying. In the future, footpaths could also be kept ice-free using the same techniques, he said.

Boerefijn says the new surface and heat collection system will cost between €30,000 and €40,000 a kilometre – about the same as it costs to lay new asphalt.

Car drivers need not feel left out. In 2013 a “few hundred metres of glow in the dark, weather-indicating road will be installed in the province of Brabant” according to Wired.

The special paint needed for these glow in the dark roads was developed by Studio Roosegaarde and will be used to create road markings.

The studio has also been working on a paint that will be invisible until the temperature drops below a certain point. This could be used according to designer Daan Roosegaarde to indicate that the road is slippery.

The idea is to not only use more sustainable methods of illuminating major roads, thus making them safer and more efficient, but to rethink the design of highways at the same time as we continue to rethink vehicle design. As Studio Roosegaarde sees it, connected cars and internal navigation systems linked up to the traffic news represent just one half of our future road management systems — roads need to fill their end of the bargain and become intelligent, useful drivers of information too.

See also: A Dutch bike path with solar panels

(Photo by Flickr user comedynose, some rights reserved)

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November 3, 2012

DigiNotar hacker came in through front door

Filed under: IT by Branko Collin @ 4:28 pm

In 2011 Dutch web certificate company DigiNotar was compromised completely by an Iranian hacker, and a report released this week details how it was done.

The report, written by security auditors Fox-IT and published by the state last Monday, shows that the hacker managed to get access to Diginotar’s public website, which had already been hacked in 2009. In fact, the defacements from that year were still online when the hack was discovered in August 2011, security.nl reported at the time.

According to Webwereld, Fox-IT’s report reads like a how-to for pwning a badly secured system. The hacker installed a shell on the web server, which must have been easy to do, as the still online defacements showed the way. DigiNotar had a firewall between its public network (which it called the Demilitarised Zone) and its segmented internal network, but it also had a long list of exceptions in the firewall. The certificate servers were also attached to the office network of DigiNotar, so that the hacker could use the standard MS Windows Remote Desktop tool to create false certificates.

Just another day at the office for an experienced black hat hacker.

Techworld reports that the DigiNotar hack was mainly used to attack Gmail users in Iran. DigiNotar declared bankruptcy in September 2011. The company’s certificates were heavily relied upon by the Dutch government, but also by Google.

Web certificates are a means to tell your browser that the website you are visiting real is the website it claims to be. This is useful for online banking and so on.

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November 2, 2012

SS Rotterdam stays in Rotterdam

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 11:39 pm

The recently restored former passenger liner SS Rotterdam will stay in the city it was named after, DutchNews reports.

The ship was bought in 2005 by housing corporation Woonbron which wanted to turn it into a hotel and restaurant complex after renovations. Renovations, however, cost 230 million euro, which is 224 million euro over budget. Woonbron started capsizing and had to let go of the monumental steamer, and at the same time of its board member Martien Kromwijk.

NRC adds that the high cost was partially related to the unexpected presence of asbestos on board.

In 2009 the cost overrun was still limited to ‘merely’ 169 million euro, as 24 Oranges reported back then.

The new owner Westcord Hotels, a Dutch hotel chain, paid almost 30 million euro.

(Photo by Jakub Bogucki, some rights reserved)

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October 29, 2012

Bicycle bags transform into picnic set

Filed under: Bicycles,Design,Food & Drink by Branko Collin @ 11:23 am

The Springtime picnic set has three life stages, as a pair of bicycle ‘bags’ (pupa), as a basket (larva) and as a table and two chairs (imago).

The set was design by Jeriël Bobbe. It is made of wood and contains pockets for tableware. It is currently not for sale, according to Bright.

(Photos: Bloon Design)

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October 28, 2012

Douwe Egberts admits its Senseo coffee has been weak

Filed under: Food & Drink by Branko Collin @ 1:20 pm

Dutch coffee makers Douwe Egberts have been reducing the amount of coffee in the pods for its Senseo system for years, Volkskrant reports.

The newspaper quotes CEO Michiel Herkemij, who blames former parent company Sara Lee. The amount of coffee in the pods was reduced from 7.5 grams to 7 grams to cut costs. Now that Douwe Egberts is its own company again (called “D. E. Master Blenders”), the missing half gram has been returned to the pods.

It appears the coffee maker wants to go back to competing on quality rather than price. Earlier this year Herkemij told NRC: “If you lower the quality you open the door for white labels. Their pods are 20% cheaper and yet have the same quality as ours. When I worked for Heineken I learned that the only way to distinguish yourself is with better products.”

Herkemij also wants to ditch the recent style of advertising which involved celebrities like Doutzen Kroes and Rutger Hauer and return to the cosy mood of yesteryear’s ads that used the slogan “het aroma komt je tegemoet” (‘the smell of coffee greets you’).

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October 27, 2012

Dutch incarceration rate dropped 44% in 5 years

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 2:36 pm

In 2010 there were 75 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants in the Netherlands.

This is down 44% from 134 prisoners in 2005, according to a study by the Research and Documentation Centre of the Ministry of Security. RTL Nieuws reports that Estonia had a greater absolute drop in inmates, from 327 to 259.

A spokesperson of the ministry told the broadcaster that reason for the strong decline in inmates is that the number of serious felonies has decreased a lot.

The thing that struck me in the 664 pages long report is how few prisoners we used to have. In 1980 the Netherlands had 23 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants:

See also:

(Photo by Moira Durano-Abesmo, some rights reserved)

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