Vossiuspers UvA – förlag

This book is on the visual language and meaning of a North-Dutch family portrait.

Sinds het begin van de jaren negentig geniet het multiculturalisme aanzienlijke populariteit onder politiek filosofen. Het beweert dat interne culturele diversiteit ons voor de noodzaak stelt om wezenlijk anders te denken over de grondslagen van recht en politiek in moderne samenlevingen. Het klassieke liberalisme voldoet niet meer als arbiter van levensbeschouwelijke verschillen van mening, is de consensus onder multiculturalisten. Dit boek richt zijn pijlen op die consensus. Enerzijds wordt verdedigd dat het politiek liberalisme nog steeds zijn taak van neutrale derde kan vervullen, anderzijds wordt betoogd dat het multiculturalisme, ondanks goede bedoelingen, onwenselijke neveneffecten oproept. Het hardvochtige assimilatiemodel dat in het Nederland van de eenentwintigste eeuw steeds vastere voet aan de grond krijgt, biedt evenmin gerechtigheid of oplossingen. Het harmoniseren van culturele verschillen vraagt om meer liberalisme, niet minder.

Modern embedded systems come with contradictory design constraints. On one hand, these systems often target mass production and battery-based devices, and therefore should be cheap and power efficient. On the other hand, they still need to show high (sometimes real-time) performance, and often support multiple applications and standards which requires high programmability. This wide spectrum of design requirements leads to complex heterogeneous System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures -- consisting of several types of processors from fully programmable microprocessors to configurable processing cores and customized hardware components, integrated on a single chip. This study targets such multiprocessor embedded systems and strives to develop algorithms, methods, and tools to deal with a number of fundamental problems which are encountered by the system designers during the early design stages.

As part of a wider democracy promotion effort, political parties in Georgia and Ukraine, as in most other post-communist states, have received assistance from a number of non-governmental but governmentfunded western organizations for most of the post-communist period. This assistance, however, has persistently failed to contribute to making parties in the two former Soviet republics substantially more stable, democratic, and representative. In searching for an answer to why the assistance has not been more effective, this thesis looks both at the nature of the assistance and the particularities of party politics in Georgia and Ukraine. The thesis argues that, as a consequence of domestic constraints on party development, political parties in Georgia and Ukraine were essentially unsuitable as recipients of party assistance and that, therefore, party assistance was poorly positioned to make an impact.

The urban population is becoming increasingly diverse and growing (ethnic) diversity is having a singular effect on nightlife in Dutch cities. By studying the motivation behind and nightlife choices of the young people who participate in ethno-party scenes, Boogaarts-de Bruin investigates how the changing urban population affects the supply side of the nightlife market using an analytical model she has developed and which she calls the model of structured choice. This approach is sensitive to the flexible use of the processes of agency and structure due to the systematic distinction that it makes between societal and personal factors. Accordingly, it is revealed that in order to analyze and adequately explain the nightlife experiences of and choices made by ethnic youngsters, an integrated model is required which centralizes the interaction between the structural strategies of the producers on the one hand and the personal preferences and agency of the consumers on the other. What is more, this book demonstrates that nightlife has changed because of the increasing ethnic diversity of the Dutch population. Finally, in the epilogue, the fieldwork results are discussed in light of the currently heated debate regarding the integration processes of ethnic minority young people (in nightlife).

From the end of the twentieth century onwards space has become a ‘hot topic’ in literary studies. This thesis contributes to the spatial turn by focusing on space in archaic Greek lyric (7th–5th c bc). A theoretical framework inspired by narratology, phenomenology and metaphor theory is applied to archaic lyric poems in which city, countryside and sea are of importance. Heirman argues that space is predominantly symbolic: the city is a political or an erotic metaphor, the countryside an erotic symbol, and the sea a symbol of danger. He also attempts to connect the symbolism of space with the context of the symposium, in which the lyric poems were performed: city metaphors are linked with sympotic plays of ‘guessing’, the erotic activities in the countryside reveal a projection of erotic fantasies of the symposiasts, and the danger at sea serves to reinforce the cohesion of the sympotic group.

This dissertation deals with the question: what are drivers for the demand for audit for Dutch SME companies which are not mandatory required to have their financial statements audited.

This dissertation takes as its starting point the nowadays hardly controversial idea that all knowledge is to a certain extent 'uncertain'.