Publicaties

While debates surrounding economic globalization have persisted for decades, it is not necessary to take a side to appreciate that any potentially positive effects - for instance, economic growth or development - have been accompanied by numerous and varied adverse impacts on the planet and its inhabitants[1], including on human health, dignity, and quality of life. In pursuit of profit maximization and economic growth, business enterprises ...

Idioms differ from other forms of figurative language because of their dimensions of subjective frequency, ambiguity (possibility of having a literal interpretation), and decomposability (possibility of the idiom’s words to assist in its figurative interpretation). This study focuses on the Greek language and aims at providing the first corpus of 400 Greek idioms rated for their dimensions by 113 native Greek students, aged 19 to 39 years. The ...

Bearings are omnipresent in mechatronic systems such as motors and drive trains, as they are the interface between rolling and stationary components. Bearings in critical machinery are continuously monitored to detect faults in an early stage and avoid system damage and downtime. This condition monitoring is typically done with electrical accelerometers or microphone arrays. Optical fiber Bragg grating-based (FBG) sensors are ideal candidates to ...

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) plays a crucial role in assessing the integrity and performance of structures. Fibre-Bragg-Grating (FBG) technology has emerged as a valuable tool for strain measurements in SHM applications. However, FBG strain sensors are susceptible to temperature variations that can confound accurate strain measurements, potentially leading to errors in fatigue damage calculations and event detection. This research ...

INTRODUCTION: High sugar intake is associated with many chronic diseases. However, non-caloric sweeteners (NCSs) might fail to successfully replace sucrose due to the mismatch between their rewarding sweet taste and lack of caloric content. The natural NCS erythritol has been proposed as a sugar substitute due to its satiating properties despite being non-caloric. We aimed to compare brain responses to erythritol vs. sucrose and the artificial ...

Between a Garden and the World: Drawing Distinctions in a Manifold Practice: A Gardeners' Approach on Distinction, Intervals, the Aspectice and Embeddedness' explores the intersections of various practices. The research delves into four practices: an architectural practice Studio Tuin en Wereld, a teaching practice at the Faculty of Architecture KU Leuven, the practice of musical performance and composing, and finally the research practice ...

A well-known method of studying iconic words is through the collection of subjective ratings. We collected such ratings regarding familiarity, iconicity, imagery/imageability, concreteness, sensory experience rating (SER), valence and arousal for Mandarin ABB words. This is a type of phrasal compound consisting of a prosaic syllable A and a reduplicated BB part, resulting in a vivid phrasal compound, for example, wù-mángmáng 雾茫茫 ‘completely ...

In two online studies, we tested the "nature-as-reward hypothesis", which suggests that superior cognitive task performance following nature exposure reflects a general performance improvement, driven by the reward value of beautiful things. In both between-subjects experiments, participants viewed either beautiful or less beautiful images for 10 s, comprising beautiful mountain photos (vs. less beautiful mountain drawings) in Study 1 and ...

In this article, I reflect on the process of understanding and my strategies of reporting in the context of a three-year ethnographic study on non-monogamous sex and relationships in Belgium, which included interviews and participant observation in various dating sites and in support groups for people in consensual non-monogamous relationships. I draw the contours of what a research ethics that creates space for the researcher's embodied ...