Unity is Strength – this was the core statement made by Syrian freemasons already in 1876 when spreading their ideas all over the Syrian lands. With this phrase in mind, in this book Dorothe Sommer... Show moreUnity is Strength – this was the core statement made by Syrian freemasons already in 1876 when spreading their ideas all over the Syrian lands. With this phrase in mind, in this book Dorothe Sommer analyses early masonic lodges that existed in the late Ottoman Empire showing how Syrian freemasons used the lodges to reach out to other Syrians. Freemasons in Syria wanted to form a sense of unity inside Ottoman Syria; a unity that could act as a bridge to span religious cleavages and to ultimately help to produce inter-confessional sociability. European freemasonry, outside of the Western sphere of direct influence, developed a life of its own and paradoxically promoted a new sense of self-perception among Ottoman Syrians. Consequently, this analysis directly contradicts previous research carried out in the field of colonial freemasonry, according to which the lodges served as vanguard for Western purposes of occupation and domination. Additionally, freemasonry during Ottoman times was the first and by then the only institution that overcame religious cleavages outside Beirut and attracted more participants than any other society or fraternity. In this, it was unique and warrants an in-depth study. Show less
The main question of this study is whether a disregard of the law by the governement is discernible. In this thesis 'disregard of the law' means any government action which ignores applicable... Show moreThe main question of this study is whether a disregard of the law by the governement is discernible. In this thesis 'disregard of the law' means any government action which ignores applicable legal norms without a serious justification. Four questions have been researched. In the first place a definition of ‘disregard of the law' has been given, also in order to enable the observation of this phenomenon. In the second place the question was posed whether disregard of the law actually takes place and whether it is incidental or might be considered a practice. The third question concerns the way in which disregarding the law occurs in the interaction between ministers and government lawyers. The role of the government lawyers in these processes is also investigated. The final question regards the matter of cause and effect. The focus is in particular on the impact of the disregard of the law on the profession of the government lawyer. This study aims at setting a research agenda. It introduces the phenomenon of disregard of the law in government and shows that this phenomenon occurs in practice, more often than occasionally Show less
We investigated the clinical and radiographic disease course of hand osteoarthritis as well as determinants of poor clinical outcome and radiographic progression over a period of six years in 289... Show moreWe investigated the clinical and radiographic disease course of hand osteoarthritis as well as determinants of poor clinical outcome and radiographic progression over a period of six years in 289 patients with hand osteoarthritis. Because these patients had osteoarthritis at multiple joints this enabled us to not only assess the association between progression of osteoarhtiritis in different hand joints groups but also between progression of hand osteoarthritis and osteoarthritis change at the knee. In addition, genetic factors in hand osteoarthritis progression were investigated as well as the influence of illness perceptions. The hand osteoarthritis subsets erosive osteoarthritis and thumb base osteoarthritis are further characterised. In the last part of the thesis the clinimetric properties of a pain score for osteoarthritis and radiographic outcome measures for hand osteoarthritis are evaluated. Show less
Over the last decades several disciplines relevant to medicinal chemistry and preclinical drug discovery have made gigantic leaps; this includes chemistry, biology and measurement of bioactivity.... Show moreOver the last decades several disciplines relevant to medicinal chemistry and preclinical drug discovery have made gigantic leaps; this includes chemistry, biology and measurement of bioactivity. Better techniques have led to massive amounts of data. Moreover, sources of chemical and bioactivity data have become available in the public domain. Hence there is a need for new techniques combining and mining these data sources. This thesis focuses on computational methods combining data from these disciplines and demonstrates that the sum of these methods leads to better quality predictions than models using the individual data sources. One of the techniques central in this thesis is proteochemometric modeling, a machine learning approach linking chemical descriptors and protein descriptors to a biologically relevant output variable. This output variable describes the activity of molecules on biological macromolecules and hence proteochemometric models can make relevant predictions for both unseen molecules and unseen macromolecules (e.g. novel viral mutants). Secondly we present a novel technique that is able to combine information from multiple crystal structures in such a way that shared and unique pharmacophoric features can be isolated and visualized. Approaches presented here have been validated prospectively and have been shown to be widely applicable. Show less
