September 25, 2013

Utrecht’s Hoog Catharijne shopping mall turns 40 today

Filed under: Architecture by Orangemaster @ 1:45 pm

The Hoog Catharijne shopping mall in Utrecht, which encompasses the largest and busiest train station of the Netherlands, is turning 40 today. In 2016 it will also feature one of the world’s biggest bike garages.

Hoog Catharijne is currently being rebuilt, and a large part of the area around the train station is under construction. The buses below change places every couple of weeks and the traffic needs human help at street level to get going. Hoog Catharijne is one of the busiest Dutch shopping malls, and according to many, not one of the prettiest. When travelling across the country, popping out at Utrecht Central Station to go shopping for clothes or gifts without going outside in the pouring rain is a real plus.

Here’s the promotional video of what it will look like fully rebuilt in 2019 presented in Dutch is a sales pitch with a lot of ‘experience this’ and ‘discover that’. It has an all-white, fit and young cast as well, which doesn’t reflect reality. Sailing over the Catharijnesingel does sound cool: digging up canals is trendy because waterfront property is expensive. Charging up your electric car for free has to be a good thing although I can imagine that for the price of parking your car indoors, it isn’t a strong selling point.

Watch the old school 1970s promotional video for Hoog Catharijne in Dutch featuring key expressions as ‘oriented towards the future’ and mentions of Postwar rebuilding.

(Link: www.nrc.nl, Photo of Hoog Catharijne by Jeroen Bosman, some rights reserved)

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September 24, 2013

Festive aardvark celebrates the city of Arnhem

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 12:40 pm

Rotterdam’s Florentijn Hofman does it again in a big way, this time in a festive manner with the ‘Feestaardvarken’ (‘Party aardvark’) made mostly of metal and concrete.

The Feestaardvarken is a 30-metre-long concrete sculpture which looks like an abstract aardvark with a golden party hat. The work was made specifically for this site and commissioned by Burgers’ Zoo and is a present for the 100th year anniversary of the zoo to the city of Arnhem.

‘Party aardvark’ is a play on words of ‘feestvarken’ (‘party pig’ in Dutch), while aardvark is an Afrikaans word also used in English meaning ‘earth pig’.

(Link and photo: www.florentijnhofman.nl)

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September 23, 2013

More large-scale scientific fraud uncovered at Dutch university

Filed under: Science by Orangemaster @ 8:32 am

Diederik Stapel, the country’s most notorious scientific fraudster, has some competition. Stapel had some 36 cases of confirmed fraud when we wrote about him in 2012, up to 55 at some point.

And now a former professor of the VU University Amsterdam, Mart Bax, has apparently published at least 61 documents of fake research in 15 years. He was quite crafty and managed to recycle his work under fake names, lie about awards and surely more things that will be excavated soon.

The biggest difference so far is that Stapel was still working as a professor when he got caught and Bax has been away from his university for some 11 years.

Here’s a how to fake it when you’re a fraudster scientist.

(Link: www.dutchnews.nl)

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September 19, 2013

The Netherlands is European prince of empty office space

Filed under: Architecture,General by Orangemaster @ 11:13 am

The Netherlands is a European market leader of being stuck with empty office space, with 15% of all office buildings being unoccuppied. Amsterdam clocks in at 18% all on its own, with only Athenes, Greece being worse off at 20%, making it the king.

Since the office buildings have a high value, they cannot be easily converted into much needed living space, which is still considered to be ‘urgent’. In Amsterdam North students live in containers when they could be living in converted office space.

According to the city of Amsterdam, a healthy office market should be around 4-8%, allowing for moving, renting and selling. The city claims it is trying to convince office building owners to transform their buildings into incubators for smaller businesses as well as limit the amount of new buildings being built.

(Links: marketupdate.nl, www.vastgoedmarkt.nl, Photo of Rotterdam, KPN building by Roel Wijnants, some rights reserved)

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September 18, 2013

Get married for free in Amersfoort on 11 December 2013

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 3:26 pm

For those of you shopping for a free wedding like the ones offered in Beuningen and Arnhem a few years back, the city of Amersfoort, Utrecht (where painter Piet Mondriaan was born) is offered free weddings on 11-12-13-14-15, or 11 December (12) 2013 (13) at 14:15 to five lucky couples.

The mayor himself, Lucas Bolsius, will be handling the ceremony and every couple can have their own reception for 12 people (the rest of the guests have to pay for their food and drinks) in fun places like the Amersfoort Zoo.

Mail the city at trouwen@amersfoort.nl and tell them why you should get a free wedding. The couples will be chosen on 9 October.

(Link: www.z24.nl, Photo by ValentinaST, some rights reserved)

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September 17, 2013

Dutchman breaks world cycling record at 133,78 km/h

Filed under: Bicycles,Dutch first by Orangemaster @ 1:36 pm

Dutchman Sebastiaan Bowier has broken the previous 2009 record of Canadian cyclist Sam Wittigham by just 0.6 km/h by reaching a speed of 133,78 km/h, making him the fastest cyclist in the world. Students from the Delft University of Technology and the VU University Amsterdam joined forces to beat this record in a high-tech recumbent whizzing through the Nevada desert in the United States. The speeds were measured over a distance of 200 metres, after accelerating on an eight kilometre straight road. It’s the special coating of the recumbent that gave it 90% less wind resistance than a normal bicycle.

Wil Baselmans, the second cyclist of the Delft/Amsterdam team also reached a world class speed of 127,43 km/h, making him the third fastest man on earth, right after Bowier and Wittingham.

(Link: www.hptdelft.nl)

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September 13, 2013

Amsterdam makes list of worst cities for pickpocketing

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 9:08 am

When I saw this list, I tried first to guess which cities would be on it. Barcelona for sure, having been there and having heard how bad it was, and then I assumed some South American city, but had not guessed Buenos Aires specifically.

What I didn’t expect was Amsterdam. I mean, there are so many other bigger European cities, but then a dense city centre probably does make for easy pickings. The article mentions drunk tourists being an easy target and I can picture that.

On a side note, I lost my wallet last Sunday for the first time in like 12 years after a very long weekend, albeit in a good part of town, and only noticed it the next day. Someone picked it up and brought it to the nearest police station and called me, so all good.

(Link: www.escapehere.com. Illustration: fragment of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Conjurer)

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September 12, 2013

Canadian cities are adopting the Dutch woonerf

Filed under: Architecture,Automobiles,Bicycles by Orangemaster @ 9:37 am

woonerf

Toronto was probably the first Canadian city back in 2010 to build a Dutch-style ‘woonerf’, streets where the boundaries between the areas for drivers, cyclists and pedestrians have been removed, and now Montreal and Ottawa are adopting them as well. They’ve also adopted the word ‘woonerf’, a typical Dutch word and construct from 1934 to go with it.

When I was learning how to drive here I had to learn everything about these special residential zones where the driving speed is ‘at a foot’s pace’ (about 15 km/h, although it isn’t actually specified) and where a car must give right of way to all other drivers (including cyclists) upon entering and all other road users upon exiting. As well, any drivers coming at you from the right in a woonerf have right of way, and parking is only allowed where indicated.

(Link: www.bnr.nl, Photo by Payton Chung, some rights reserved)

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September 11, 2013

People posing as doctors and doctors commit major fraud

Filed under: General,Health by Orangemaster @ 9:45 am

People posing as doctors and people who have set up fictitious health care institutions have been defrauding Dutch health care insurers out of millions of euros by submitting false invoices for services never rendered.

The fraud is apparently childishly easy to commit using the personal codes of practicing physicians that have been ‘lending out’ the right to use their code to crooks for a piece of the action. However, the whole practice was uncovered when a woman in Rotterdam defrauding the system got caught using the code of a doctor who just happened to be in jail at the time. Some crooks have gone so far as to use the codes of doctors who are retired and even deceased.

According to just one health insurer who claims to have hundreds of these cases, this could be the biggest form of fraud in the entire country. The company responsible for handing out the codes does not do any checking after it a code has been given, making it easy to defraud health care institutions who are in fact responsible for reporting any fraudulent use of the codes.

It’s one thing for crooks to piggyback on the personal codes of doctors, which makes us point fingers at the total lack of security related to these codes, but it makes me really uncomfortable to know that doctors are actually joining in to this fraud to make some quick cash.

(Link: www.rtlnieuws.nl)

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September 10, 2013

Astronaut André Kuipers does voice-over work for Disney

Filed under: Film by Orangemaster @ 10:53 am

Dutch astronaut André Kuipers is taking an interesting step in his career. He has been asked to do voice-over work for the Dutch version of the Disney animated movie Planes, a spin-off/continuation of Pixar’s hit movie Cars.

Kuipers, 54, will be speaking the role of Bravo, a Boeing F/A-18E Super Hornet originally being spoken by American actor Val Kilmer. He said he finds it difficult because you see the images and you really have to pretend it’s you.

Having a closer peak at the voices for the American version, Julia Louis-Dreyfus who many of you know as Elaine Benes from 1990s’ sitcom Seinfeld will be voicing Rochelle, a French Canadian racing plane originally from Québec that used to deliver mail faster than any other plane, says Louis-Dreyfus in an interview. The flag and paint job to be localized in 11 countries, which means they’ll pick other minorities. I wonder what they’ll pick in the Netherlands.

(Link: www.nieuws.nl, Photo: NASA)

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