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Apollo’s Gifts. Dutch Songbooks for the Urban Youth of the Eighteenth Century
No full textThis article aims to contribute to our knowledge of informal urban singing culture in the Netherlands, especially within the context of youth subcultures. Hundreds of songbooks from the period of the Dutch Republic (the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) evidence such a singing culture. In this article I will focus on a hitherto lesser known complex of popular secular songbooks from the middle of the eighteenth century, which will be referred to as Apollo’s gifts. The first songbook in this series is Apollo’s Kermis-gift (Apollo’s Kermesse gift), published in The Hague in 1740 by Jan van den Bergh and followed by two sequels. Other books of the series are Apollo’s St. Nicolaas gift (Apollo’s St. Nicholas gift; Leiden 1741), Apollo’s Nieuwe-Jaers-gift (Apollo’s New Year gift; The Hague 1742), and Apollo’s Vastenavond-gift (Apollo’s Carnival gift; The Hague 1745). They remind us of the important function of informal public singing at annual feasts such as the Kermesse, New Year’s, St. Nicholas and Carnival. The entire population participated in such celebrations, including the elite and the middle classes who imitated the elite, as can be deduced from the songbooks. Apollo’s gifts also reminds us that these feasts were not merely folklore in the countryside but also a part of urban daily life.
Consistent errors in first strand cDNA due to random hexamer mispriming
No full textPriming of random hexamers in cDNA synthesis is known to show sequence bias, but in addition it has been suggested recently that mismatches in random hexamer priming could be a cause of mismatches between the original RNA fragment and observed sequence reads. To explore random hexamer mispriming as a potential source of these errors, we analyzed two independently generated RNA-seq datasets of synthetic ERCC spikes for which the reference is known. First strand cDNA synthesized by random hexamer priming on RNA showed consistent position and nucleotide-specific mismatch errors in the first seven nucleotides. The mismatch errors found in both datasets are consistent in distribution and thermodynamically stable mismatches are more common. This strongly indicates that RNA-DNA mispriming of specific random hexamers causes these errors. Due to their consistency and specificity, mispriming errors can have profound implications for downstream applications if not dealt with properly.
Van vriendendienst naar wetenschap. Edities van 19de- en 20ste-eeuwse correspondenties nader bekeken.
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Likeness and Likeliness: Exploring Multidimensional Classification for the Multiverse of Information
No full textThe downsizing dilemmas of European employers
No full textIn times of economic crisis, managers often take drastic measures to survive. This column presents new research on the preferences of managers from across Europe when faced with ‘downsizing’. It seems that, when recession bites, the instincts or ‘animal spirits’ of employers that were previously suppressed by prosperity or considered to be outdated resurface. European employers predominantly resort to offering early retirement packages (and to a lesser extent buy-outs) in response to the threat of downsizing, exacerbating, in the long run, the problems associated with Europe’s ageing population. The only notable exception to this rule is the response of Danish employers, who prefer to tackle this problem by reducing the working hours of their employees.
Planktonic ciliate community structure in shallow lakes of lowland Western Europe
No full textTemperate shallow meso- to eutrophic lakes can exist in one of two alternative states with contrasting foodwebs, referred to as the clear-water and the turbid state. We describe the planktonic ciliate communities of such lakes based on a survey of 66 northwestern European lakes. Ciliates were enumerated and identified to species level according to the quantitative protargol staining technique. Ciliate biomass was on average twice as high in the turbid than in the clear-water lakes. The ciliate communities were dominated by oligotrichs and protostomatids, and no differences in functional composition or α-diversity could be detected between turbid and clear-water lakes, although β-diversity tended to be higher in the latter. At the species level, however, community structure strongly differed between turbid and clear-water lakes, and several indicator species could be identified for the different lake categories. Variation partitioning showed that nutrient status did not explain ciliate community structure independent of the alternative states, while lake area was identified as an additional structuring factor for the ciliate communities. These results stress the importance of the ecosystem structure in shaping ciliate communities in temperate shallow lakes and suggest that nutrient status has little direct effect on ciliate community structure in such lakes.
