Catastrophes used to be regarded as Acts of God, but nowadays tend to be blamed as Acts of Man. Although human error is a cause in the majority of accidents, it is seldomly the sole cause. Major accidents are usually the result of several errors made at different moments by different people that coincide in an extraordinary way.

Errors are common and inevitable. Humans make them regularly. But, when made in interaction with devices that can "crash, sink, burn, or explode," errors can have cat...

From the creators of the bestselling Stuff Dutch People Like series comes this new and humorous guide to what really makes Dutch people so very....Dutch! This hilarious read will have you nodding your head in agreement - and maybe even wiping away tears of laughter!

The Islands of Paros and Naxos during the Late Antique and Early Byzantine Centuries

The aim of this book is to offer a fresh approach to the history and archaeology of the Cyclades in Late Antiquity and the Byzantine Early Middle Ages in light of current archaeological investigations. It is an attempt to interpret human-environmental interaction in order to "read" the relationship between islands, settlements, landscapes and seascapes in the context of the diverse and highly interactive Medit...

Around 1600 the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands was in the middle of a war with Spain that would last for eighty years (1568-1648). Thousands of immigrants came to Amsterdam and greatly influenced the development of the Republic. Kiliaen van Rensselaer was among them. Growing up in a small eastern town on the war front he became part of the culture of this rapidly developing city, where he was trained as a jeweler and merchant by wealthy relatives. He would work together within this ...

HNLMS Zuiderkruis (1975-2012) was the second Fast Combat Support Ship of the

Royal Netherlands Navy. Primarily intended for Replenishment At Sea (RAS=UNREP operations) fueling Nl Task Group and NATO units. As a modern design Zuiderkruis enabled a “one stop replenishment” and carried also AVCAT, fresh water and

stores/spare parts. A helicopter deck facilitated VERTREP.

The Aarhus Convention entered into force more than 20 years ago. It lays down the pillars of environmental democracy, that is a governance systems where citizens and civil society organisations are fully involved in the decisions affecting the environment we all live in. On the one hand the Convention drew on the experience of those jurisdictions where environmental concerns run deeper. On the other hand, once enacted, it was expected to bring about important changes in those jurisdictions wh...

After World War II huge land consolidation projects measuring thousands of hectares were carried out in West-Frisia. Large scale excavations of Bronze Age settlement sites were carried out resulting in a convincing model for the Bronze Age habitation of West-Frisia. This model envisaged settlement sites situated on creek ridges in an open almost treeless landscape. After a sudden change in climate c. 800 cal BC parts of the landscape were inundated, peat bogs developed and West-Frisia was aba...

This pioneering study charts the one-way traffic of cultural and historical objects during five centuries of European colonialism. It presents abundant examples of disappeared colonial objects and systematises these into war booty, confiscations by missionaries and contestable acquisitions by private persons and other categories. Former colonies consider this as a historical injustice that has not been undone.Former colonial powers have kept most of the objects in their custody. In the 1970s ...

In the past decades, diversity has become a popular catchphrase in theoretical, policy and public discourses in Canadian cities. This study seeks to add to our understanding of urban diversity, as perceived and experienced by those who inhabit, frequent and govern urban areas. The study further makes use of a variety of qualitative and participatory techniques (i.e. qualitative interviews, roundtable talks, participant observations, and focus groups) to gather rigorous empirical data on livin...

The aim of this issue of A+BE is to propose urban design guidelines to positively influence the heat islands in Dutch cities and regions. As an architect and urban planner, the challenge was to provide a series of spatial planning guidelines that had to be open enough to be compatible with other urban planning priorities and accurate enough to mitigate the Urban Heat Island (UHI). This thesis is thus marked by this tension between a generic reflection on the integration of scientific findings...