Background
In expert centres, surgical resection rates for patients with locally advanced pancreatic cancer (LAPC) after induction chemotherapy have increased beyond 20% with subsequent 25% 5-year overall survival (OS). In the Netherlands, however, the historical low 8% LAPC resection rate compared with 23% in international expert centres reflects a relative reluctance to perform resections. Thereby, opportunities to achieve long-term survival in appropriately selected patients may be missed. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether nationwide implementation of international multidisciplinary best practice for LAPC management is feasible while maintaining surgical safety benchmarks (in-hospital/30-day major morbidity <50% and mortality ≤5%).

Methods
A multidisciplinary protocol was designed in collaboration with four international experts and prospectively implemented nationwide within the Dutch Pancreatic Cancer Group (DPCG) (2022–2024). This observational cohort included consecutive patients diagnosed with LAPC, defined by DPCG criteria. Eligible patients had radiologically non-progressive disease after ≥4 months of multiagent chemotherapy. All patients who underwent resection were included in this safety analysis. A predefined subgroup analysis included patients with National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) LAPC. Primary outcomes included in-hospital/30-day major morbidity (that is Clavien–Dindo grade ≥IIIa) and mortality. The expected number of resections was 53.

Results
Overall, 180 patients with LAPC underwent surgical exploration, of whom 155 (86%) underwent resection in 11 centres. Most resections (74%) were performed in the three LAPC surgical centres. An extended resection was performed for 77% of patients, including portomesenteric venous (60%), multivisceral (23%), and arterial (21%) resections. The in-hospital/30-day major morbidity rate was 44% and the mortality rate was 0.6%, both within pre-established safety benchmarks. Benchmarks were also reached for patients with NCCN LAPC (49% major morbidity and 2% mortality).

Conclusion
Nationwide implementation of the international best practice for LAPC was feasible with nearly three times more resections performed than expected, while morbidity and mortality remained well within predefined safety benchmarks. ... Read more

The critical variational setting was recently introduced and shown to be applicable to many important SPDEs not covered by the classical variational setting. In this paper, we extend the critical variational setting in several ways. We introduce a flexibility in the range space for the nonlinear drift term, due to which certain borderline cases can now also be included. An example of this is the Allen–Cahn equation in dimension two in the weak setting. In addition to this, we allow the drift to be singular in time, which is something that naturally arises in the study of the skeleton equation for large deviation principles for SPDEs. Last but not least, we present the theory in the case of Lévy noise for which the critical setting was not available yet. ... Read more

In contemporary Western society, death has been pushed out of communal life. Dying has moved into professional settings, care for the deceased has been handed to specialists, funerals have been standardised and commercialised, and grief is increasingly framed as an individual condition with an expected endpoint. Together these form one movement: a reduction of dying to a medical event, of the farewell to a service, of grief to a condition. What this displaces is not only a set of practices but a way of making meaning together.

This project asked how design can create space for grief in public without reducing or prescribing what it should look like. It began from the goal of reclaiming public space in which the bereaved and their communities could share grief, and sharpened that during the research: to create conditions in which grief can be expressed, shared and lived with, in relation to the dead and to those around the bereaved, without that relation having to be explained, resolved or fitted to a recognised form of mourning.

The research combined a literature review across sociology, psychology, anthropology and philosophy with interviews with practitioners working around dying, farewell and grief, conversations with people carrying losses of their own, and field trips. These were clustered into patterns in how loss is lived. The design phase worked through making: a booklet carried by the designer's own family on a trip after a loss, a set of ideas developed into two concepts, and an exposition walked by fifteen visitors.

Across the practitioners ran a refusal of that reduction; what each of them restores is not death itself but the relationships around it. The bereaved showed the same from the inside: bonds that do not end but change shape and are actively kept, described with joy and in the same breath called vague or strange. That gap, between what is fully real from the inside and barely legible from the outside, became what the design addressed. It led to the rouwdier, a word joining rouw (grief) to dier (animal): a particular and changing way someone continues to live with a loss, appearing as a habit, an object, a place, a shared moment, or as something that never settles into a form. The fifteen visitors gave shape to nineteen of them. What a rouwdier was differed widely; what it did recurred across that difference.

The outcome is a travelling exposition in which the rouwdieren of others stand side by side, each in the medium its maker chose, with room to give shape to one's own. It offers recognition rather than participation, and is a proposal grounded in what the testing showed rather than an evaluated design. ... Read more

Animated textile forms - three-dimensional woven textiles that inherently change shape - hold potential for climate-responsive architecture, but scaling them beyond product scale remains poorly understood. This thesis investigates that scaling through Material Driven Design, combining tinkering, digital modelling, and parametric testing. Findings show: (1) scaling is not linear. Material densities and internal forces do not scale proportionally with size; (2) counterforce is central. Animated behaviour depends on the opposing mechanism, not the active material alone; (3) at architectural scale, structural and animated textile layers can be separated to preserve their respective qualities. The thesis contributes a parametric design space for animated textile forms at architectural scale. ... Read more

The installation of an offshore wind farm is a costly, weather sensitive operation, carried out by specialised vessels with high day rates in sequences repeated at every turbine location. A small error in the duration estimate of a recurring activity accumulates across the campaign, translating directly into cost. The reliability of an installation planning depends on the quality of activity duration estimates and on how well their variability is captured.
At Heerema Marine Contractors, activity durations used in planning are well established, but their spread is not. The in house planning tool Palaemon is supplied with an assumed probability distribution type and a minimum duration fixed at 90% of the target duration, neither of which is derived from recorded data. A review of industry and scientific planning tools identifies shortcomings such as insufficient model complexity or excessive computational time, but these are not a limiting factor at Heerema Marine Contractors. Planning quality instead depends heavily on the activity duration input given, in particular the spread of the durations. This thesis therefore develops a methodology that derives this input from historical data, covering a static pre project approach and a dynamic approach updating the planning during execution.
Historical data from two installation projects is prepared and assessed through quality checks, revealing that inconsistencies stem from the absence of standardised activity and delay definitions rather than isolated recording errors. A standardised recording approach is proposed, several requirements of which have since been adopted, measurably improving the quality of the data collected.
Three analyses are then applied to the prepared data. A statistical and outlier analysis shows outliers are predominantly caused by delays rather than the installation work itself, and correcting rather than discarding them yields the most representative dataset. A probability distribution analysis demonstrates that the chi-square goodness of fit test is unsuitable, since its outcome depends on an arbitrary bin count, so the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test is used instead. Across eight datasets, many distributions cannot be statistically distinguished from the data, allowing a small standard set to be used rather than a distribution per activity, with the Johnson SU distribution fitting best overall. A learning curve analysis establishes that a learning effect is present and quantifiable in repeated installation cycles, so a single duration estimate cannot represent every project cycle.
These analyses are integrated into a static planning model and a real time update model. In the static model, delays, breakdowns and marine operations are first removed from the historical durations, a learning curve is fitted to describe the systematic decline across cycles, and durations are corrected so a probability distribution can be fitted to the remaining variation. A planning is then generated by sampling durations from the fitted distribution, reapplying the learning curve factor per cycle, and reintroducing delays and breakdowns. This is demonstrated on an actual project, though implementation and validation remain future work. The methodology replaces assumed planning inputs with inputs derived from evidence, so activity duration spread can be represented based on what has actually been recorded. ... Read more