University of Groningen

About: University of Groningen is a education organization based out in Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Context (language use). The organization has 36346 authors who have published 69116 publications receiving 2940370 citations. The organization is also known as: Rijksuniversiteit Groningen & RUG.

Intrinsic motivation in a new light

Abstract: Economics is solidly based on the workings of incentives. Extra rewards will increase and extra costs will decrease the frequency of a particular type of behavior. In sociology, Weber had pointed to a kind of behavior that was presumably not steered by incentives: value-rational behavior, found in religions and strong reasoned convictions. Because of an increasing rationalization of the world, Weber saw this kind of value-rational behavior slowly displaced by what he called goal-rational (zweckrational) behavior. Though often a popular topic of discussion, the displacement of value-rational by goal-rational behavior had never led to a viable research program within sociology. Instead, it was psychologists who had discovered a related issue of ‘intrinsic’ versus ‘extrinsic’ motivation. For intrinsically motivated behavior, there is no apparent reward but the behavior itself. The psychologists had been able to forge a booming program over many years. On this basis, Frey (1997) reintroduced the issue back into the social sciences which, in turn, drew attention to the work of these psychologists. Within psychology, the research by Deci (1971) and Lepper et al. (1973) was a pioneering stab at behaviorist theory by pointing to situations in which rewards decrease rather than increase the frequency of behavior. This work had spawned a thriving research paradigm (Deci and Ryan 1985)1 and a host of studies. Briefly, the findings converge to the following. Expected tangible rewards tend to reduce intrinsic motivation whereas praise and other posi-

Multi-Ethnic Genome-wide Association Study for Atrial Fibrillation

Abstract: Atrial fibrillation (AF) affects more than 33 million individuals worldwide1 and has a complex heritability2. We conducted the largest meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for AF to date, consisting of more than half a million individuals, including 65,446 with AF. In total, we identified 97 loci significantly associated with AF, including 67 that were novel in a combined-ancestry analysis, and 3 that were novel in a European-specific analysis. We sought to identify AF-associated genes at the GWAS loci by performing RNA-sequencing and expression quantitative trait locus analyses in 101 left atrial samples, the most relevant tissue for AF. We also performed transcriptome-wide analyses that identified 57 AF-associated genes, 42 of which overlap with GWAS loci. The identified loci implicate genes enriched within cardiac developmental, electrophysiological, contractile and structural pathways. These results extend our understanding of the biological pathways underlying AF and may facilitate the development of therapeutics for AF.

Green Chemicals: A Kinetic Study on the Conversion of Glucose to Levulinic Acid

Abstract: Levulinic acid has been identified as a promising green, biomass derived platform chemical. A kinetic study on one of the key steps in the conversion of biomass to levulinic acid, i.e., the acid catalysed decomposition of glucose to levulinic acid has been performed. The experiments were performed in a broad temperature window (140–200°C), using sulphuric acid as the catalyst (0.05–1 M) and a initial glucose concentration between 0.1 and 1 M. A kinetic model of the reaction sequence was developed including the kinetics for the intermediate 5-hydroxymethyl-2-furaldehyde (HMF) and humins byproducts using a power-law approach. The yield of levulinic acid is favoured in dilute glucose solution at high acid concentration. On the basis of the kinetic results, continuous reactor configurations with a high extent of back-mixing are preferred to achieve high levulinic acid yields.