Background: The purpose of this study is to increase our understanding of environmental correlates that are associated with route choice during active transportation to school (ATS) by comparing characteristics of actual walking and cycling routes between home and school with the shortest possible route to school. Methods: Children (n = 184; 86 boys, 98 girls; age range: 8–12 years) from seven schools in suburban municipalities in the Netherlands participated in the study. Actual walking and cycling routes to school were measured with a GPS-device that children wore during an entire school week. Measurements were conducted in the period April–June 2014. Route characteristics for both actual and shortest routes between home and school were determined for a buffer of 25 m from the routes and divided into four categories: Land use (residential, commercial, recreational, traffic areas), Aesthetics (presence of greenery/natural water ways along route), Traffic (safety measures such as traffic lights, zebra crossings, speed bumps) and Type of street (pedestrian, cycling, residential streets, arterial roads). Comparison of characteristics of shortest and actual routes was performed with conditional logistic regression models. Results: Median distance of the actual walking routes was 390.1 m, whereas median distance of actual cycling routes was 673.9 m. Actual walking and cycling routes were not significantly longer than the shortest possible routes. Children mainly traveled through residential areas on their way to school (>80 % of the route). Traffic lights were found to be positively associated with route choice during ATS. Zebra crossings were less often present along the actual routes (walking: OR = 0.17, 95 % CI = 0.05–0.58; cycling: OR = 0.31, 95 % CI = 0.14–0.67), and streets with a high occurrence of accidents were less often used during cycling to school (OR = 0.57, 95 % CI = 0.43–0.76). Moreover, percentage of visible surface water along the actual route was higher compared to the shortest routes (walking: OR = 1.04, 95 % CI = 1.01–1.07; cycling: OR = 1.03, 95 % CI = 1.01–1.05). Discussion: This study showed a novel approach to examine built environmental exposure during active transport to school. Most of the results of the study suggest that children avoid to walk or cycle along busy roads on their way to school. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12966-016-0373-y
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International education is a relatively new field and until recently, there was no formal education to prepare practitioners. This means that people working in international education are a colourful and diverse group, coming from a wide range of disciplines, which definitely adds to the attraction of the field. I call international education a field rather than a discipline since it is composed of a variety of established disciplines, such as languages, educational sciences, psychology, business, anthropology, history and even, in my case, classical archaeology. For this lecture, I have chosen to return to my original discipline and discuss global learning as the stages of an archaeological excavation. Cutting though the subsequent layers represents a history of international education but also my own professional history. By digging deeper down, layer after layer, I hope to uncover the essence of global learning in order to make its benefits available for all our students. This lecture consists of four sections. In the first section, I want to go back to the time when archaeology was a new discipline and see what we can learn from the research conducted at that time. In the second section I will reveal the layers of internationalisation and global learning until we come to the layer that we are currently exploring. In the third section, I will look at some of the factors and trends that will have an impact on global learning in the years to come. This shows that circumstances are quite different from when the excavation started and that global education is therefore dynamic. Finally, I will discuss what research the Research Group Global Learning will conduct, how and with whom, in the coming years.
Twirre is a new architecture for mini-UAV platforms designed for autonomous flight in both GPS-enabled and GPS-deprived applications. The architecture consists of low-cost hardware and software components. High-level control software enables autonomous operation. Exchanging or upgrading hardware components is straightforward and the architecture is an excellent starting point for building low-cost autonomous mini-UAVs for a variety of applications. Experiments with an implementation of the architecture are in development, and preliminary results demonstrate accurate indoor navigation
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