At the department of electrical and electronic engineering of Fontys University of Applied Sciences we are defining a real-life learning context for our students, where the crossover with regional healthcare companies and institutes is maximized. Our innovative educational step is based on openly sharing electronic designs for health related measurement modalities as developed by our students. Because we develop relevant reference designs, the cross fertilization with society is large and so the learning cycle is short.
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In recent studies on the association between education and fertility, increased attention has been paid to the field of study. Women who studied in traditionally more “feminine” fields, like care, teaching, and health, were found to have their children earlier and to have more children than other women. A point of debate in this literature is on the causal direction of this relationship. Does the field of study change the attitudes towards family formation, or do young adults with stronger family-life attitudes self-select into educational fields that emphasize care, teaching, and health? Or do both field of study preferences and family-life attitudes arise before actual choices in these domains are made?We contribute to this debate by examining the relationship between fertility expectations and expected fields of study and occupation among 14-17 year-old adolescents. We use data collected in 2005 from 1500 Dutch adolescents and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) to examine the associations between expected field of study and occupation and fertility expectations. Our results show that expectations concerning fertility and field of study are already interrelated during secondary education. Both female and male adolescents who expect to pursue studies in fields that focus on care and social interaction (like health care, teaching etc.) are less likely to expect to remain childless. This holds equally for girls and boys. In addition, girls who more strongly aspire to an occupation in which communication skills are important also expect to have more children. We did not find any relationship between expectations of pursuing a communicative field of study and occupation and expectations of earlier parenthood.In addition, among boys, we find that the greater their expectation of opting for an economics, a technical, or a communicative field of study, the less likely they were to expect to remain childless. Boys who expected to study in the economic field also expect to have their first child earlier, but boys expecting to pursue a technical course of studies expect to enter parenthood later. We also found that those who expect to pursue cultural studies are more likely to have a preference for no children, or if they do want children, to have them later in life.Overall, our findings suggest that the processes of elective affinity between the communicative fields of study and work on the one hand and fertility on the other hand are more or less comparable for boys and girls. With respect to the other domains, we find, apart from the gender differences in the relation between fields of study and childlessness, hardly or no gender differences in the expected timing of parenthood and the number of children. The genders do differ in their level of preference for communicative and economics-related fields of study and occupation, but if they do have the same preference, the association with fertility expectations is more or less similar.
MULTIFILE
The 'AgroCycle' project investigates whether a cooperation of farms can become self-sufficient in energy and fertilization by using manure and organic waste streams for the production of energy, green fuel and green fertilizers by means of anaerobic digestion (AD). In the project, the project partners aim to link the nutrient cycle (from manure to digestate to green fertilizer) to a self-sufficient energy system (biomass to biogas to green fuel for processing the land) through the combined production of biogas and green fertilizers. The financial feasibility of a bio-digester is highly dependent on the use and economic value of the digestate. This combined approach increases both feasibility and sustainability (environmental impacts and CO2 emissions). To explore the feasibility of the aforementioned concept, use is made of the existing 'BioGas simulator' model developed by Hanze UAS to simulate the technical process of decentralized production of biogas and the economic cost.
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