This research introduces the concept of visibility as a useful tool to assess the democratic features of public spaces. It understands democratic public spaces as open spaces, which are accessible to all and allow different cultural expressions for individuals and groups. The concept of visibility refers to the visual perception of the observable features of distinctive urban groups in public space, which give evidence of how these groups engage with, shape, and construct public space. The re...

This thesis proposes a framework to address the design process in design education. Building upon the assumption that teachers, being professional designers, do not discuss the design process in the architectural design studio and do not have a vocabulary to do so, five generic elements or anchor points are defined which represent the basic design skills. The validity of the framework and the assumption is tested respectively in interviews with a variety of designers and in observations of di...

When asked to name an archetypal love story, most people will reply 'Romeo & Juliet', although some say 'Tristan & Isolde' instead. Very few will come up with a classical example, and the reason for this is simple: when you say archetypal, it is assumed you mean love between a man and a woman, and instances of this in classical accounts are rare. The reason for this is also not hard to find: as it does now, 'love' in the ancient world meant the affection of equals, and given the inferior posi...

This history is intended for students and their academic teachers and those in the general public who are interested in having a highlighted chronological panoramic view of from where the human capacity for creating civilizations is coming ever since anatomically modern humans came into the picture at the earliest about 200,000 years ago. Volumes Book-1 and Book-2 specifically deal with Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals. Book-1 begins with a summary that accentuates the last phenomenal 2...

On a cold Monday morning in March 1945, just after the hunger winter, children and their parents gathered on a dock in Waddinxveen. The malnourished children are leaving on a boat to Drenthe, where there still is food. They don’t know how long they will be away or where they are heading. But they trust the minister and they the need for food is high. The children have become refugees of war in their own country.

In 2016 the author and grandchild of minister Warmenhoven found his travelogue...

Amidst rising global inequality, migration, climate change, health pandemics, and deepening poverty, it is time to redirect our economy towards more sustainable and socially just processes and outcomes. In Wellbeing Economics Nicky Pouw puts forward a new framework that places human wellbeing at the centre, instead of economic growth. She postulates ten reasons why economics should change to remain a relevant discipline and develops a Wellbeing Economic Matrix (WEM) to implement this approach...

'Protocol to Manage Relationships Today' explains the contemporary value of protocol, not only for monarchies or diplomatic institutes, but for any non-profit or for-profit organisation. This book presents modern protocol as a tool to build strong, authentic networks of reciprocal relationships.

When used effectively protocol can:

- Increase the effect of the networking activities of an organisation. Protocol gives a professional structure to relationship management, to achieve access to the...

- A woman who is lying in a coma in a hospital and later tells what at that time was discussed in the hall of the hospital, far from the department where she lay...

- A man who recognizes people who previously were only in his surroundings while he lay in coma...

- A woman who for surgery is cooled down to a level where her brain no longer functions, reports on that operation from personal observation

Just three of the millions of near-death experiences (NDE's) that people have experienced i...

From Memling to Rubens

The Golden Age of Flanders

Why did Hans Memling paint everything in such minute detail? How did Rubens, in just a few brushstrokes, create special effects that Steven Spielberg would envy? And why was the Southern Netherlands the artistic centre of the world for three centuries?

From Memling to Rubens: The Golden Age of Flanders tells the story of Flemish art from the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as you’ve never read it before. It’s a rollercoaste...

To understand the physics of Black Holes, it is important to understand the first law in Physics which controls our entire universe. This is the law of “Perfect Equilibrium”. Within the entire universe there is always a prefect equilibrium between all the physical forces like gravity, forces of inertia, radiation pressure and Electro-Magnetic Interaction forces at any time, in any direction and at any space coordinate. This is the fundamental law in physics on which also the existence of ...