February 2004 - Association of Dutch Businessmen

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DUTCH DESK 2004, Dutch Media/Newspapers Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum opens exhibition in Shanghai Art Museum The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam will open an exhibition at the Shanghai Art Museum until February 20. The exhibition Encounters with Modernism, shows 75 masterpieces from the collection of The Stedelijk Museum. Encounters with Modernism is part of Stedelijk’s international art tour, which the museum started in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, in 2003. The Dutch museum showed a collection of the work from artists of the CoBrA group in the Hermitage. Encounters with Modernism is a review of the Western art from the period of Mondriaan until now. The exhibition shows work from Kandinsky, Picasso, Pollock, De Kooning and Warhol and from contemporary artists like Jeff Koons, Rineke Dijkstra, Andreas Gursky and Aernout Mik. 70 pct of Dutch living apart together do not intend to ever marry Some 70% of the Dutch couples, aged over 50, who have a LAT (Living Apart Together), relationship, did not intend to ever marry. This are results from a survey carried out by the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistic (CBS). Some 40% of the couples having a LAT relationship and aged between 40 and 50, also did not intend to marry in the future. Most Dutch choose to live together after they have passed the age of 25 and have a relationship, that lasted for at least three years. A total of 83,000 marriages were registered in the Netherlands in 2003, which stood for a 3% year-on-year decrease, compared to the 85,000 marriages in 2002. The reduced number of marriages is attributed mainly to the worsened economic situation in the country. People are willing to marry only if they are financially secured. Social Minister rejects JOVD’s Liberal of the Year Award Minister of Employment and Social Affairs Aart Jan de Geus rejected to accept the Liberal of the Year Award of the independent Dutch Youth Organisation for Freedom and Democracy (JOVD). De Geus is a member of the ruling coalition party Christian Democrats (CDA) and identifies his policy not as liberally inspired nor orientated. Instead his Policies are led in accordance with the Christian-democratic moral principles and therefore he has refused to accept the liberal award. The Liberal of the Year Award is granted annually for distinguished political contributions to the Dutch society. JOVD is the oldest political youth organisation in the Netherlands, founded on February 26th, 1949. 222 Dutch donate organs in 2003 Some 222 Dutch donated postmortem their organs for transplantation in 2003, Dutch Transplantation Foundation (NTS) announced. The number of organ donors in 2002 stood at 202, the foundation reported. The number of organ donations still fails to face adequately the national needs and the transplantation waiting list in December, 2003 consisted of 1,411 people. According to the current Dutch law for donation of human organs, a preliminary document has to be issued by a person, giving permission for postmortem use of his healthy organs for transplantation. The law is five years old and does not keep up with the demand for organs, NTS said. Cases of testicle cancer in Netherlands increased by 40 pct The number of cases of testicle cancer among Dutch men increased by some 40 pct for the period 1990-2000, according to a recently published report by the Dutch Cancer Register. The increased trend is also observed in other western European counties, although no particular reasons can be found. Testicle cancer is most often discovered among men aged between 20 and 45. The reasons for development are so far unknown, with an exception of the recently discovered genetic predisposing factors. Also, men, whose testicles are located improperly in the scrotum, run greater risk to develop testicle cancer. UMC researchers to perform fertilisation treatment Researchers at the St. Radboud University Medical Centre (UMC) in Nijmegen, will perform fertilisation treatment on couples by taking sperm cells directly from the testicles and placing them in the uterus. The research on the new fertilisation method was carried out by the medical biologist L. Ramos with the support of the Dutch Health Ministry. The method concerns male fertility inhibition occurring when the production of sperm is intact but the sperm channels are blocked and no sperm cells can be delivered via normal ejaculation. Medical specialists have succeeded to extract healthy sperm cells directly from the testicle and to implant the most appropriate one in the female uterus via the Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection Method (ICSI). Van Gogh exhibited at Dutch Schiphol The museum at Schiphol airport opened a temporary exhibition, Van Gogh And The Modern Masters. A self-portrait of van Gogh from 1887, together with seven other paintings from Dutch artists like Breitner, Toorop and Bauer, will be exhibited in the museum until April 18, 2004. The museum is an annex of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and reported 130,000 visitors in 2003. The museum, whose entrance is free, aims at 180,000 visitors in 2004, director R. de Leeuw said. The Rijksmuseum annex, which was opened in 2002, has a permanent exhibition of paintings from the Dutch Golden Age period (1550-1650). Defence Ministry compensate family of killed Iraqi The Ministry of Defence is ready to pay compensations to the family of an Iraqi citizen, who was shot death by a Dutch sergeant-major in an incident in Iraq on December 27, 2003.The family of the Iraqi has so far not contacted the local authorities for information on the issue. The Dutch sergeant-major, 43, shot the Iraqi in the back without warning, suspecting him for plundering. The crime of the Iraqi has not been proven so far. 10 Vol.14 • No. 2 • February 2004
POP AND DROP A QUESTION IBM vs. Kasparov Pop & Drop is the successor to the column ‘Who the pen fits’. The revised idea of this new colomn is that the propspective authors don't need to come up with an interesting topic to write about. This column basically involves answering a question which was raised in the previous issue of the ADB magazine by a member of the Dutch business community and raising a new question at the end of the article, addressed to another person. Question to Frans Paul Fremeijer, IBM “In 1997, Gary Kasparov played his famous (second) match against the IBM chess computer ‘Deep Blue’. Kasparov was defeated by the computer, but allegedly only because IBM kept fiddling with the software between matches. The day after the victory, IBM stocks rose fifteen percent. Are Deep Blue and relating chess projects of strategic commercial interest to IBM, or should this be seen as more of a pet project?” Answer This is a most interesting question and it affects the core of IBM’s strategy, particularly on research & development. I will try not to make advertising on IBM’s R&D results and what IBM does with those results, but this historic event was in more than one way an important milestone for IBM. For one thing, in that time IBM was recovering from a major shock of losing its dominant position in the marketplace of IT, it was reporting huge losses and people were questioning the future of the company. The world of IT and the players in the field had changed dramatically and IBM was slow to respond. For hundreds of thousands of IBMers this was a difficult period and positive news about the company was critical for employee morale. Gerstner in those days decided that reorganizing & downsizing was necessary, but R&D were a fundamental competitive advantage for the future, so in fact the money spent on projects like Deep Blue increased and continues to increase. Fundamental and applied research is still the basis of many things IBM does. The second reason why the Chess Victory was important was because the result itself was a victory for the researchers that were part of IBM’s Deep Blue project. In that time a cleverly clustered network of many Unix computers being able to perform hundreds of millions of moves per second and therefore overcoming the disadvantage against Kasparov’s capability to combine intuition, experience & creativity was an achievement in itself. Nowadays IBM’s fastest clusters of supercomputers are many thousand times faster and more intelligent, being able to predict weather (still under improvement...), simulate nuclear explosions or find patterns in huge amounts of data that will help financial analysts, medical research or education purposes. In some ways the Kasparov defeat created a shift in thinking about Computing Power (or artificial intelligence) versus human intelligence. It was a metaphor for a possible future evolution of human society in a world of networks (to pessimists it was also proof that machines previously only casting in movies would be capable of outsmarting humans leading to suppression of them by the machines). To optimists however it was a milestone that promised the application of super computing to a broad range of human needs. This is what justifies the spending behind Deep Blue and what has now resulted in a platform within IBM called Deep Computing that searches the appliance of super computing power to economic and human value. So even though initiatives like Deep Computing are still important for IBM, the true value is now found in applying IT with real business value. When Deep Computing can at its worst be characterized as a technical exercise, the challenge indeed is to explain how businesses or government institutions can do things better by using IT. The only way to achieve that is with the help of people understanding the customer’s business. To IBM as a technology company this has been a major shift over the past many years. It means for example that people who used to be in white suits in sterile labs all the time are now also being positioned at customers, to help analyze problems together with business consultants and create solutions that are a combination of research, best practices and business models. The challenge of effectively applying IT to businesses is common to all large or small consultancy firms, for IBM combining Fundamental Research such as Deep Computing or Grid Computing with Business Consulting capabilities is the competitive advantage. New question from Frans Paul to Robert Sunderman, ING “The days that foreign management and expertise was key to be able to have a successful bank in Singapore are over, when 5 years ago Dutch banks had substantial number of expats working here, management is now in local hands and only few Dutch people are left. How does this effect the international career aspirations of Dutch employees who would like to work and live abroad?” You will read the answer in our next edition. 11 Vol.14 • No. 2 • February 2004
Page 1 and 2: February 2004 MITA 373/03/2001 Lear
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Page 13 and 14: IMPRESSIONS 3. Develop, build Exerc
Page 15 and 16: EMBASSY INFO Official Signing of Me

February 2004 - Association of Dutch Businessmen

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