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Development and characterisation of a continuous freeze-drying technology for unit doses
No full textThe overall aim of this thesis is the evaluation, development and characterisation of a continuous freeze-drying technology based on spin freezing. Freeze-drying or lyophilisation is a low temperature drying technique used to convert labile solutions into solids of sufficient stability. Today, freeze-drying is in the pharmaceutical industry mainly used to dry biopharmaceuticals and prolong their shelf live. The market share of biopharmaceuticals has increased so much over the past decade that 9 of the 20 best-selling drugs in 2019 were biopharmaceuticals. However, many biopharmaceuticals encounter stability issues when formulated as an aqueous solution. Refrigeration of these labile products is the simplest solution to prolong their shelf live. However, securing a cold chain is challenging and costly. Therefore, freeze-drying can be used to dry these unstable aqueous biopharmaceutical formulations. Currently, freeze-drying is a batch-wise process and is slow, inefficient, poorly controlled and costly. Therefore, spin freeze-drying is developed to overcome these hurdles. The freezing step in the spin freeze-drying technology is based on spin freezing which starts with the rapid rotation of vials filled with an aqueous formulation. Subsequently, freezing is initiated via a jet of cold gas to lower the temperature of these rotating vials. This finally results in a thin, cylindrical, frozen product layer with a large surface area for sublimation and hence a 10-40 times higher drying rate. During drying, IR-mediated heat transfer is used instead of conduction as in batch freeze-drying. The effect of these process changes is investigated in detail in this thesis
The influence of body movement on musical sense-making in primary school children : a multimodal approach in music education
No full textAs increasingly confirmed within the paradigm of embodied music cognition, the body shapes the way listeners perceive and make sense of music. Accordingly, this Ph.D research project aims to understand the role of body movement on children’s musical sense-making through two empirical studies setup in an educational ecological setting of primary school. In both studies, the children’s graphical representations of the music and their verbal explanations of the drawings were used to probe children’s musical sense-making.
The first study investigated how and in what way a verbal vs. bodily interaction with the music influences the children musical sense-making. Results offer relevant insights into the role of body movement to enhance the identification of more musical features and their temporal organization. Based on the findings of the first study, a second study was carried out to investigate the influence of different qualities (discrete vs. continuous movements) of bodily interactions with music on children’ music meaning formation. Findings of the second study show that based on the quality of movement interaction the children changed the categories of visual representations, arousal, and number of voices of the music described.
At a meta- perspective level, the adoption of a multimodal approach (e.g., bodily, visual, and verbal) emerged to be an effective mean to enhance a deeper music understanding. In addition, body movement appears to be a viable way to foster a creative listening through creative navigation of the musical affordance landscape
Vestibular infant screening (VIS) - Flanders : implementation of a standard vestibular screening protocol for hearing-impaired children in Flanders
No full textBéton Brut : André Bloc and the architecture-sculpture debate
No full textIn the 1950s, artists, sculptors and architects began to use the mass availability of concrete to create a previously impossible fusion of architecture and sculpture. This dissertation engages this understudied moment in the history of modern art, focusing on the mutual influences between sculpture and architecture as they engaged with concrete. It pays particular attention to those works that left the concrete “brut”—that is, “raw” or unfinished—and thus produced a rough aesthetic that has become an icon of post-war art. This roughness also signified the abandonment of art as a pristine object for private viewing, as these artists used the flexibility and cheapness of the material to create large-scale public projects. This research traces this movement from its conceptual and material roots in the 1930s into its height from the mid-50s to early-70s. In so doing, it shows how fundamental the use of concrete was to the development of a new architectural-sculptural form, and, in turn, how their interdisciplinary and socially-focused practices form an overlooked genealogy of the arts in the present.
The roots of this period lay in what can be called the architecture-sculpture debate, and are connected to André Bloc, who served as an instrumental and intermediary figure through the magazines he founded: L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui (Architecture of Today; 1930–present) and its spin offs, Art d’Aujourd’hui (Art of Today; 1949–1954) and Aujourd’hui Art et Architecture (Today Art and Architecture; 1955–1967). These magazines became a way to distribute images of these new overlaps between architecture and sculpture. In these journals, readers came into contact with the basic concepts of the debate—especially the idea of the “synthesis of the arts” and the social role of aesthetics—as well as examples of architectural sculpture and sculptural architecture. Bloc's initial interpretation of the synthesis of the arts was to create a new monumental form of art by combining painting and sculpture with architecture. His ideas can largely be traced back to Sigfried Giedion's theories on monumentality and how artists and architects could work together.
The study then moves on to discuss key figures in this debate including Groupe Espace, Joop Beljon, Jacques Gillet, Mathias Goeritz, Claude Parent, Jacques Moeschal, Pierre Székely, and Bloc himself. These figures worked on an international scale, creating both works and networks. The dissertation traces how concrete spread through magazines, conferences, and the exchange of ideas, and explores in detail some of their major creations. It thus brings to life this largely forgotten debate that formed around the nexus of concrete, public projects, the combining of art and architecture, and the broader goal of a synthesis of the arts. Through this, we come to see the uniqueness of the architectural-sculptural debat in the shaping of post-war art
The algorithmic state of mind : a human rights frame for governing news recommendation
No full textIn recent years, online news distributors (online news media, social media, search engines and news aggregators) started engaging in ‘news recommendation’ practices. This means that they deploy recommender systems to curate users’ news overviews. Such systems automatically (de)select and (de)prioritise items to be displayed in user interfaces, thus deciding which ones are visible (to whom) and in what order.
This research asks whether news recommendation has any negative and/or positive implications in terms of human rights, by creating risks and/or opportunities for their enjoyment. Where there is a risk, the use of recommender systems may require regulation. In case of an opportunity, such systems could potentially be used as a tool to achieve public policy goals. Against that backdrop, this dissertation establishes a human rights frame for governing news recommendation
