Search

The “Color Circle” is an important chromatic Gestalt in the visual arts. There is not really a formal equivalent in conventional colorimetry. The fact that the hues can be linearly ordered and that such an order is necessarily periodic was intuited by artists in the early 19th century, but only formally explained by Ostwald and later Schrödinger a century later. As with musical keys, various metrical orders are in common use. Is there such a thing as a “well tempered” order? We consider this an issue for experimental phenomenology. We discuss an attempt based on observations by 30 (nonartist) observers.

Introduction and Objectives: Hepatic encephalopathy (HE) is a frequent complication of cirrhosis and may cause cerebral damage. Neurodegenerative diseases can induce the release of neuroproteins like neurofilament light chain (NfL) and glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) in body fluids, including blood plasma. We investigated whether NfL and GFAP could serve as potential diagnostic plasma biomarkers for overt HE (oHE). Materials and Methods: We included 85 patients from three prospective cohorts with different stages of liver disease and HE severity. The following patients were included: 1) 34 patients with primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) with compensated disease; 2) 17 patients with advanced liver disease without oHE before elective transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt (TIPS) placement; 3) 17 intensive care unit (ICU) patients with oHE and 17 ICU patients without cirrhosis or oHE. Plasma NfL and GFAP were measured using single molecule assays. Results: ICU oHE patients had higher NfL concentrations compared to pre-TIPS patients or ICU controls (p < 0.05, each). Median GFAP concentrations were equal in the ICU oHE and pre-TIPS patients or ICU controls. Plasma NfL and GFAP concentrations correlated with Model for End-Stage Liver Disease (MELD) scores (R = 0.58 and R = 0.40, p < 0.001, each). Conclusions: Plasma NfL deserves further evaluation as potential diagnostic biomarker for oHE and correlates with the MELD score.

Climate adaptation and water management, in particular flood risk management (FRM), in the Netherlands are strongly integrated policy domains. The observed and expected effects of climate change in the Netherlands will create a variety of pressures, particularly in relation to sea-level rise, increasing river discharges and changing precipitation patterns. Whereas the focus in the Netherlands until recently was mainly and successfully on minimizing the probability of flooding (‘the fight against water’) and preparedness in case of a flood threat, in the course of time other strategies aimed at mitigating the effects of potential floods have gained a more prominent position (‘living with water’). As a result, FRM measures increasingly demand more space and more diverse actors became involved in Dutch FRM. This has increased complexity and fragmentation in the responsibilities for Dutch FRM, which resulted in an increasing need for communication, coordination and collaboration between different public and private actors in order to secure the effectiveness of FRM.