The research reported in this thesis has been carried out under the auspices of SIKS, the Dutch Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems. Preface Here I present the result of my last four years of hard work. When I started the process I had the idea to learn more and to satisfy my curiosity. In the end I think I can say that I succeeded. There is however much more to a Ph.D. than s...

objective: experiencing ‎pleasant events during daily life ‎has a significant positive role in ‎the personal mental health and ‎acts as a keystone for “behavioral ‎activation” (ba) interventions. ‎there are serious differences in ‎the pleasant event schedules in ‎different cultures and countries. ‎we aimed to develop a persian ‎checklist of pleasant events ‎‎(pcpe) to provide and validate a ‎cu...

It has been claimed that corpus-based TTS is unworkable because it is not practical to include representative units to cover all or most of the combinations of segments and prosodic characteristics found in general texts, a problem characterized as Large Numbers of Rare Events (LNRE). We argue that part of this problem is in its formulation, and that a closer look, including investigations into...

What a Difference a Y Makes: Female and Male Nascent Entrepreneurs in Germany In western industrialized countries men are on average more than twice as active in entrepreneurship as women. Based on data from a recent representative survey of the adult population in Germany this paper uses an empirical model for the decision to become selfemployed to test for differences between women and men in...

Random walks with long-tailed increments have many important applications in insurance, finance, queueing networks, storage processes, and the study of extreme events in nature and elsewhere. See, for example, Embrechts et al. (1997), Asmussen (1998, 1999) and Greiner et al. (1999) for some background. In this paper we study the distribution of the maximum of such a random walk over a random ti...

The planing of sustainable development and of economic activities in the marine environment requires long term information about the prevailing environmental conditions. For the design of marine and coastal protection structures detailed knowledge on local wave conditions is an essential prerequisite. To estimate the risk which emerges from local wave conditions knowledge on both, the wave clim...

People tend to overestimate their comparative likelihood of experiencing a rosy future. The present research suggests that one reason for this error is that when people compare their likelihood of experiencing an event with that of the average person, they focus on their own chances of experiencing the event and insufficiently consider the likelihood of the average person experiencing the event...