Expansion

Next let us consider the second paradigm—“The Limited Earth.” The problems caused by the fact that the Earth is limited are far-reaching. These include not only energy, resources, global warming, air pollution, water pollution, ground pollution, food, and water, but also—if we think broadly—such problems as the widescale spread of infectious diseases of people and livestock. The reason is that the probability of virus mutation and transmission increases along with the probability that wild animals come into contact with livestock, livestock with other livestock, humans with livestock, and so on. And in turn, the probability of contact on the limited surface of the Earth increases in proportion to the square of the population density.

The generalized linear model (GLM) is reviewed and the log-linear models are integrated in this family. For GLMs, maximum likelihood estimation, model fit, and model selection are discussed. In the GLM framework the analysis of incomplete tables is more straightforward. The quasi-independence model is defined and illustrated in

R

. Furthermore, the family of generalized log-linear models (GLLMs) is briefly presented and a GLLM is illustrated with a representative example in

R

.

Zur erfolgreichen Umsetzung von Markenerweiterungen in grundlegend neue Märkte, die keinen technisch-funktionalen Zusammenhang aufweisen, müssen Vereine die Marke ins Zentrum der strategischen Ausrichtung stellen. Starke Vereinsmarken, die den ganzheitlichen Ansatz der identitätsbasierten Markenführung berücksichtigen, können bei der Implementierung neuer Geschäftsmodellinnovationen eine wichtige Steuerungs- und Orientierungsfunktion übernehmen (strategischer Kompass) und zudem als Identitätsanker fungieren. Der identitätsbasierte Markenmanagementansatz berücksichtigt dabei nicht nur die bereits bestehenden heterogenen internen und externen Interessensgruppen von professionellen Sportvereinen, sondern bezieht auch die neuen Zielgruppen mit ein, die durch Markenerweiterungen erschlossen werden sollen.

Wound healing is a complex and natural process in all living organism as a restorative response to tissue injury. After damage, the healing process is passed through various stage of regeneration such as blood clotting, inflammation, proliferation, and remodeling. The processing time is depends upon the nature of wound. Honey, animal fat, and herb extract were used in the ancient time to cure the wound. But with the drastic progress in science and technology, the all existing concept has been changed. Recent studies on wound healing mechanism prove that biopolymers like cellulose and chitin have the ability to healing the wound. This kind of biopolymers and its derivatives opens up a plethora for researchers for wound healing applications. Principles of science and technology have an important role in the area of biomedical research, which leads to the relevance of nanotechnology in this field. This Chapter discusses the importance of nano cellulose, chitin, and its derivatives on wound healing applications.

In 2019, the overall operating conditions of Zhongguancun listed companies were stable. The number of newly listed companies has reached the new high, and the STAR Market plays the pivotal role; The stock market has raised collectively, and the total market value of Zhongguancun listed companies has reached a record high; The performance has grown steadily, and domestic listed companies have performed better than Hong Kong stocks and US stocks; R&D investment and output continue to increase, and the industry characteristics are obvious; More than 70% of corporate liabilities are current liabilities, and their solvency is higher than that of the whole country; Cash and cash equivalence continue to grow, and private enterprises are relatively difficult to finance; Accounts receivable continue to grow, and the turnover rate is lower than the national level; The number of employees continues to rise, and the per capita output is excellent and reflects industry differences. In the face of the above situation, this report states: increase the intensity of debt clearing and reduce the scale of accounts receivable; Broaden financing channels and increase capital to support private enterprises; Further reduce the tax burden of enterprises and reduce the pressure on enterprises.

As the industry leader and industrial chain leader, ZLCs include mature large companies such as Baidu and JD, as well as high-growth companies such as China Transinfo, Lakala, and Leyard. In order to show the high growth of ZLCs, In order to present the basic outlook of high-growth companies and the factors behind their fast development, this section starts with revenue and net profit indicators, then chooses companies with a compound growth rate of more than 30% in operating income and net profit in the past three years, and analyzes the company’s basic information and core competitiveness. The data shows that there are 26 ZLCs that meet the above criteria. Excluding Glory Sun Land, whose performance has increased significantly due to backdoor listing, the remaining 25 high-growth listed companies are introduced as follows (listed in no particular order)

At the beginning of 2020, the sudden outbreak of pneumonia in COVID-19 brought a great impact on the economic and social development of China and the world, which affected the operating performance of Zhongguancun listed companies. However, they did not fear difficulties and actively fought against the epidemic by relying on their own resources and technological advantages, which reflected a great sense of social responsibility. The data shows that, the overall performance of listed companies in Zhongguancun declined in the first quarter of 2020, but 30% of enterprises mainly based on STAR Market and health care industries achieved contrarian growth; The asset-liability ratio of 90% companies is at a reasonable level, and the asset-liability ratio of private enterprises is significantly lower than that of state-owned enterprises; R&D expenditure has increased steadily, leading enterprises have obvious R&D advantages, and high-tech industries attach importance to R&D; The cash flow situation is damaged, the willingness to invest is reduced, and the amount of funds raised is greatly increased; The risk of equity pledge still exists.

The NEEQ market is an important link in the construction of a multi-level capital market, and it plays an important role in establishing financing channels for SMEs and improving the macroeconomic system. This report takes Zhongguancun NEEQ enterprises as the main research body. It systematically analyzes the number of NEEQ enterprises, capital market performance, profitability, debt issuance, innovation capacity, and the actual tax burden borne by enterprises, and objectively presents Zhongguancun NEEQ enterprises’s growth characteristics and existing problems. The data shows that due to the impact of the economic downturn and the increase in the number of delisted companies, the overall development status of Zhongguancun NEEQ enterprises in 2019 is not optimistic, but the performance of continuing operating enterprises is relatively stable, and the corporate tax burden is significantly reduced. Deepening reform of the NEEQ brings new opportunities for enterprises.

Biomedical composites or biocomposites refer to the artificially synthesized heterogeneous materials that are composed of two or more ingredients with different chemical and physical nature where one component is a biopolymer. These composites are shown to have various biomedical applications ranging from bone tissue engineering, dental restorations, wound healing, and drug delivery. Though various inorganic materials such as hydroxyapatite and β-tricalcium phosphate have been tested and used clinically for bone regeneration and restoration, they have their own advantages and drawbacks. Nanosilicates are one of the most abundant natural inorganic mineral components present in the earth’s crust, in the form of mineral clay, which have recently gained importance in modern-day biomedical research. Montmorillonite, Kaolinite, and Halloysite are the three common natural nanoclays being used in various biomedical research. Laponite® is the most used synthetic nanosilicate used for various biomedical research. Though mineral clays have been used directly and extensively in traditional medicines for various ailments, their nanosilicate forms separately have shown promising results in bone tissue engineering, dental restoration, drug delivery applications, and wound healing research.

Paul Embrechts wird 1989 auf den Lehrstuhl für Versicherungsmathematik an die ETH Zürich als Nachfolger des international bekannten Versicherungsmathematikers Hans Bühlmann berufen. Ausschlaggebend ist, dass er sich auf das Gebiet der Martingaltheorie und Versicherungsmathematik spezialisiert hat. Doch nun soll er den Studiengang Versicherungsmathematik an der ETH um die Finanzmathematik erweitern, wofür es zu dieser Zeit noch keine Lehrprogramme oder entsprechende Lehrbücher gibt. Er hat den Spagat zu bewältigen, einerseits die Interessen Schweizer Banken zu berücksichtigen, die den Anschluss an die internationale Entwicklung suchen, und andererseits den Anforderungen eines akademischen Studiengangs der Finanzmathematik zu genügen. Risiko Management macht er zu einem neuen Forschungsschwerpunkt.

Consider the model:IS-Curve: x = − α r − r ̄ , α > 0 $$ x=-\alpha \left (r-\bar {r}\right ),\alpha >0 $$ Phillips Curve: π ̇ = δ x δ > 0 $$ \dot {\pi }=\delta x \quad \delta >0 $$ MPR: i ̇ = λ i ∗ − i , λ > 0 $$ \dot {i}=\lambda \left (i^*-i\right ),\lambda >0$$ , i ∗ = r ̄ + π + ϕ π − π ̄ $$i^*=\bar {r}+\pi +\phi \left (\pi -\bar {\pi }\right )$$ .

The fiscal policy rule is given by: f = g − τ + i b = a + α b > 0. $$\displaystyle f=g-\tau +ib=a+\alpha b>0. $$

The representative agent maximizes the objective function: ∫ 0 ∞ β ( t ) u ( c ) d t $$\displaystyle \int ^{\infty }_0\beta (t)u(c)dt $$ subject to the constraints a ̇ = r a + y − c $$\displaystyle \dot {a}=ra+y-c $$ a ( 0 ) = a 0 given $$\displaystyle a(0)=a_0 \ \text{given} $$

Moving information, goods, and people at ever-increasing speed and efficiency contributed to the innovations that brought about industrial revolutions. Memorials honor inventors in electricity and electronics, telecommunications, computation, mining and steel production, geology, chemical engineering, biotechnology, civil engineering, transportation, and innovations in chronometry as well as those who applied the new technologies for defense and invented holography. Some of the names of honorees are Leonardo, Benjamin Franklin, Sir Francis Ronalds, Lord Kelvin (again), Hertha Ayrton, Guglielmo Marconi, John Logie Baird, Charles Babbage, Countess Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, William Smith, Henry Bessemer, Sir Charles Lyell, Alfred Nobel, Chaim Weizmann, John Rennie, James Walker, Sir Marc Isambard Brunel, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Sir Joseph William Bazalgette, James Henry Greathead, James Watt, Richard Trevithick, Robert Stephenson, Sir George Cayley, Count von Rumford, Sir Henry Thomas Tizard, and Dennis Gabor.The memorials manifest the inclusiveness of the British scientific community and also of British society with regard to immigrants. Furthermore, there appears hardly any political bias in recognizing achievement as there has been hardly any in letting all those gifted and willing to work thrive. There were a few exceptions; the time of the Restoration, in the 1660s, comes to mind only to underline the lack of political considerations over time. Another negative example is the persecution of some creative individuals on account of their sexual orientation. Alan Turing is a conspicuous example whose recognition in terms of memorials is also on the rise. A point here concerns women scientists who have been underrepresented in scientific life and in memorials, but, hopefully, this is changing. It is demonstrated by a number of examples in this book that science and the prerequisite education, whether formal or self-education, aided people of disadvantaged social status in crossing social boundaries and rising to high societal positions.A large number of memorials are presented in the following pages. There are two additional venues relatively seldom mentioned though they represent an exceptional wealth of memorials to scientists. One is the National Portrait Gallery that does not charge admission to visit where the images of many of the scientists, explorers, medical people, and innovators are on display. The other is Westminster Abbey, serving as a mausoleum for the remains of many of the most distinguished Britons and displaying memorials to many whose remains rest elsewhere. It is possible to visit it for a fee. Both these venues eminently augment our collection.A final note concerns the titles and nationalities that our description uses. We indicate “Sir” or “Dame” as they are part of the names, but rarely others unless some exceptional circumstance warrants it. Also, we do not distinguish the national origins among the British, viz., English, Scottish, Irish, or Welsh.

Consider the following model of a small open economy (Mundell-Fleming-Dornbusch model): p ̇ = δ d − y $$\displaystyle \dot {p}=\delta \left (d-y\right ) $$ d = k + α e + p ∗ − p − β i $$\displaystyle d=k+\alpha \left (e+p^*-p\right )-\beta i $$ m − p = − γ i + ϕ y $$\displaystyle m-p=-\gamma i+\phi y $$ i = i ∗ + ė e $$\displaystyle i=i^*+\dot {e}^e $$ ė e = ė . $$\displaystyle \dot {e}^e=\dot {e}. $$

Suppose that investment depends on the real income level according to: i = i r − π e , y $$\displaystyle i=i\left (r-\pi ^e,y\right ) $$ Does the IS curve always have a negative slope?

In the past years, natural gas has expanded its significance as an energy source mainly due to its low carbon emissions and low competitive prices as result of new technologies. Furthermore, the regional and global natural gas markets have also been significantly influenced by domestic and international socioeconomic conditions and politics. This chapter discusses the main drivers for the evolution of natural gas markets and the modeling approaches that have been taken to understand such evolutions at regional and global levels. Thereafter, we focus on two well-known natural gas models, a global model (World Gas Model) and a regional model (North American Natural Gas Model). We provide the mathematical formulations and discuss the modeling paradigms that are behind both models. In order to demonstrate the usefulness of these models, we present a numerical case study using the North American Natural Gas Model (NANGAM). We conclude with an outlook of future research and examples of historical energy system transformations due to the appearance of natural gas as a competitive energy source.

We discuss three directions for future research in sustainable natural resource management. These directions are drawn mainly from our research experience and expertise in the energy sector and other natural resource areas. First, we believe that future sustainability and resilience in natural resource management can be enhanced through better utilization of outcomes from process- or physical-based climate change models, such as Global Climate Models. Second, directly related to the electric power sectors is a better harnessing variability and unpredictability via flexibility, transmission, and storage. Third, future natural resource management should consider interdependence of multiple systems, such as power, natural gas, and water systems, through co-optimization of these interdependent systems. We elaborate each of these three future research directions in this chapter.

By purchasing political risk insurance (PRI), investors can successfully strengthen their position in the host state, allocating the burden of political risk to third parties (insurance agencies). PRI is provided by international organisations, such as the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) and state-sponsored insurance agencies, known as export credit agencies (ECAs) or public insurance agencies. This chapter focuses on the insurance schemes of NEXI, Japan’s officially sponsored ECA, which plays a dominant role in providing PRI to Japanese nationals. The benefits of insurance agencies providing PRI schemes go beyond cash indemnification. PRI mechanisms include various policy requirements, operational conditions, and performance standards that not only influence the engagement of the insured investors, but also shape the regulatory authority of host governments and affect local communities. PRI plays a particularly crucial role in the governance of energy projects due to the complexity of this sector and its importance to states and local communities. However, there are policy and operational implications of PRI provision in the governance of energy projects with an adverse effect on local communities. In response, most insurance agencies like NEXI, have taken measures for socially and environmentally responsible investments, requiring their insured clients to comply with various social and environmental standards and establishing surveillance mechanisms and in-house grievance facilities. Even if these practices are moving in the right direction, their true functionality and effectiveness have not yet been proved.

National courts are actors in investment arbitration since they influence the functioning of investment arbitration and are themselves in turn influenced by investment arbitration. The influence of national courts on investment arbitration is larger than the influence of other international courts and tribunals, since national law is part of the applicable law in investment arbitration and national courts are authorised to interpret and apply national law. National courts influence investment arbitration by competing for jurisdiction through the exhaustion of local remedies, umbrella clauses, and the fork-in-the-road rule. National courts facilitate investment arbitration by enforcing awards and at the same time disrupt it when rejecting enforcement or issuing anti-arbitration injunctions. Investment tribunals can restrain national courts by issuing anti-suit injunctions. Above all, they can review the decisions of national courts on grounds of denial of justice, fair and equitable treatment, the effective means test, and indirect expropriation. The the relationship between national courts and investment tribunals is such that the later have the last word, although the role of national courts as actors is certainly noteworthy.

China’s current development model presents an over-emphasis on short-term economic gains over long-term sustainable development. As business activities play a crucial role in creating and solving such problems, firms are increasingly encouraged to take the initiative to contribute to the future. However, most companies in emerging economies are competing in the world market based on cost advantages. These firms, being predominantly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with limited resources, tend to favour short-term financial gains over long-term sustainability. It is clear that firms with a short-sighted focus on economic gains are not truly sustainable and those aiming for sustaining success need to balance various sustainability initiatives to meet current targets without compromising future prosperity. This chapter aims to provide insights on the status quo of sustainable development in the context of emerging economies’ manufacturing sector. A systematic review of theories and empirical studies was conducted to clarify the research pathways on sustainability. Case studies with eight Chinese automotive companies were also carried out, and future research directions are proposed based on the findings.

The rapid improvement in production technology over the last two decades has reduced the difference in quality of products produced by competitors. This has resulted in a paradigm shift in the outlook of firms from a product-centric view to a more customer-centric view. Consequently, after-sales service or warranty is high on the agenda of firms in a service supply chain. In general, firms offer service contracts that guarantee a quick turnaround time for repair of faulty components, while ensuring full functionality of their returned product. In this chapter, we focus on such contracts from an inventory management perspective in a multi-echelon service supply chain. The customer returns arrive at various service centers spread over a region. The repair activity essentially involves identifying the faulty component, and replacing it with a repaired component (if available) or with a new component. The faulty components are then collected and sent to a common repair center. The repaired components are then returned to the service centers, where they shall be used to satisfy demand generated by future returns. The problem is modeled using M/M/1/K queueing system, and we derive properties of the total cost function.

The use of fractional-order controllers to drive dynamical systems to a desired/target configuration became extremely popular in the last decade, with many studies stating that they present superior performance when compared to the integer-order counterparts, especially for nonlinear systems. Following this trend, the purpose of this chapter is to verify the possibility of improving the performance of the control of an inverted cart-pendulum system using fractional-order integrators. The strategy is to employ the classical pole location linear method to calculate the gains of the controller and then to compare the performance between integer-order and fractional-order integrators, the last one that are calculated using an optimization method.

Caetano, Naa Mallmann Lima, Luiz Eduardo MeloVenturi-type devices can vary from minor adjustments in their geometry to more complex engineering adaptations, depending on their industrial application: automotive, food, agricultural, oil, among others. Thus, their study still becomes necessary nowadays. And the computational modeling aggregates as an important additional tool for investigation and determination of flow variables as the pressure recovery, that affect stability and performance in the processes that apply the Venturi principle. Therefore, this numerical study aims to analyze the flow pressure recovery in Venturi-type devices. In this analysis, flows turbulent, incompressible, and isothermal were assumed. The governing equations involved are the Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes equations. Three types of k–epsilon models were employed to solve the turbulence. One commercial software for computational fluid dynamics, which uses a finite volume method in the discretization of the governing equations, was used to obtain the solutions. The simulations’ results were compared to experimental data for the pressure and showed a satisfactory concordancy, aiming to demonstrate the applicability of the computational model developed.

This paper presents the application of the Hilbert-Huang transform as a tool for signal analysis. The Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) enables the analysis of nonstationary and nonlinear data being a combination of the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) and the Hilbert Spectral Analysis (HSA). A noise assisted data analysis method, called Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD), based on the statistical properties of white noise, was used to overcome EMD problems like mode mixing, and successfully deal with the scale separation. The EEMD was applied to each velocity signal to obtain a collection of Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMF). Vortex shedding in turbulent flows past circular cylinders represents a canonical problem suitable for validating new approaches in experimental analysis, as it has well known features. Experimental data in form of time series from hot wire signals of the turbulent flow past circular cylinders in an aerodynamic channel are employed for the analysis. Cylinder had a diameter of 32 mm. The Reynolds numbers varied from 1.05 × 104 to 3.28 × 104. EEMD provided the localization of particular events in time-frequency space, allowing a complete physical interpretation of the dynamic processes at the corresponding flow scales. The Hilbert Spectral analysis provided an accurate representation of the amplitude-frequency-time distribution of the flow. The most energetic IMFs and the corresponding flow scales were identified from the Mean Square Energy of the IMF components. The application of HHT to the analysis of the hot wire signals obtained in the turbulent wake behind cylinders showed that it is a useful tool for the analysis of turbulent data, allowing the identification of turbulent structures and flow scales.

Pereira Miguel, Luccas Oliveira Teloli, Rafael de Silva, Samuel daThis chapter presents a new methodology through a harmonic balance method to identify the parameters to describe the hysteresis effect in bolted joints using the Bouc-Wen model. The main idea is to adopt a priori smoothing procedure in the restoring force that divides it into smooth polynomial intervals that describe, separately, the loading and unloading hysteresis cycles. This previous step allows us to obtain a closed-form analytical solution through the harmonic balance method to a nonlinear system with a weak hysteretic restoring force based on its parameters. The methodology is illustrated on the BERT benchmark, that consists of a cantilever aluminum beam with a bolted joint connection at its middle. The experimental displacement amplitudes are used as input of an inverse problem in which the output is the parameters obtained through an optimization procedure. The advantage of this approach is the direct use of the harmonic balance equations on the objective function. The results show that the identified Bouc-Wen model can adequately describe the hysteresis effect of the bolted joint.

Do Prado, Thiago G. Piccirillo, Vinus Tusset, Angelo Marcelo Janzen, Frederic Conrad Balthazar, Jose ManoelThis paper presents a study of an electrical circuit with a (PbTiO3) ferroelectric capacitor modeling for a Landau-Devonshire potential subjected to variations in external temperature. With this study, we find transitions between periodicity and chaos depending on the variation of the external temperature of the circuit. Besides the time-delay feedback control is applied to the system in order to stabilized the unstable period orbits inside of a chaotic attractor.

In Chapter 4 , we used the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins to control an LED and to receive information from an ultrasonic sensor. In Chapter 5 , we looked at the Arduino and discussed why it is a better option for general GPIO functions. We connected the ultrasonic rangefinder and an LED to the Arduino and learned how to pass data between the two boards.

Plattformbetreiber werden in der Gründungsphase mit einigen betriebswirtschaftlichen Herausforderungen konfrontiert. Die Grundprobleme beim Aufbau und der Steuerung digitaler Plattformen sind zwar generell bekannt, deren Ausprägungen sind jedoch individuell. Das Ziel dieses Beitrags ist es, anhand der Fallstudie der Transportlogistik-Plattform Transporeon betriebswirtschaftliche Fragestellungen, mit denen Betreiber von Plattformen im Business-to-Business-Kontext nach der Gründung konfrontiert werden, sowie jeweils mögliche Lösungsansätze aufzuzeigen. Herausforderungen stellten die Nutzerakquisition, das Preismodell, die Weiterentwicklung der Plattform sowie der bestehende Wettbewerb dar. Jedoch konnten nicht alle aus dem Business-to-Customer-Kontext bekannten Steuerungsmechanismen innerhalb einer Business-to-Business-Plattform angewendet werden.

Correctly interpreting an ambiguous word in a given context is a critical step for medical natural language processing tasks. Medical word sense disambiguation assumes that all meanings (senses) of an ambiguous word are predetermined in a sense inventory. However, the sense inventory sometimes does not cover all senses or is outdated as new concepts arise in the practice of medicine. Obtaining all word senses is therefore the prerequisite work for word sense disambiguation. A classical method for word sense induction is string expansion, a rule-based method that searches the corpus for full forms of an abbreviation or acronym. Yet, it cannot be applied to ambiguous words that are not abbreviations. In this paper, we study methods that can semi-automatically discover word senses from a large-scale medical corpus, regardless of whether the word is an abbreviation. We conducted a comparative evaluation of four unsupervised data-driven methods, including context clustering, two types of word clustering, and sparse coding in word vector space. Overall, sparse coding outperforms the other methods. This demonstrates the feasibility of using sparse coding to discover more complete word senses. By comparing the senses discovered by sparse coding with those in senses inventory, we observed new word senses. For more than half of the ambiguous words in the MSH WSD data set (sense inventory maintained by National Library of Medicine), sparse coding detected more than one new word sense. This result shows an opportunity in enhancing medical word sense inventories with unsupervised data-driven methods.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a branch of machine learning that deals with making sequences of decisions. It refers to an agent that interacts with its environment, and receives an observation and reward. RL algorithms seek to maximize the agent’s total reward, given an unknown environment, through a trial-and-error learning process. In this chapter, we will apply RL methods to solve two fundamental feedback control problems, the linear quadratic regulator and the linear quadratic Gaussian.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has become a popular paradigm for modern day optimal performance of the network system as a result of the separation of the control component from other network elements. This enables the maintenance of the flow table structure on these devices while optimal forwarding of packets is enhanced via the central controller. Being a growing network architecture which is supposed to be able to meet up with increasing traffic demands in the future, it becomes apparently important that the mechanism that takes care of the QoS of the network demands is put in place. Such demands include the smooth running of big data transmission, D2D video exchange, Voice over IP and real-time multimedia applications which needed certain QoS requirements for optimal service delivery. However, fewer research articles have reported on the improvement on the QoS routing especially in connection with the SDN paradigm. We propose a multi-criteria routing algorithm that is based on deterministic Adaptive rendering technique called DART_MCP. Our DART_MCP QoS routing algorithm deployed Dijkstra’s algorithm to simplify the topology of the network before using multiple-criteria energy function to address the QoS requirements. We recorded a relatively stable bandwidth and user experience maximization under a low rate of network convergence in comparison with other approaches.

Ontologies constitute an exciting model for representing a domain of interest, since they enable information-sharing and reuse. Existing inference machines can also use them to reason about various contexts. However, ontology construction is a time-consuming and challenging task. The ontology learning field answers this problem by providing automatic or semi-automatic support to extract knowledge from various sources, such as databases and structured and unstructured documents. This paper reviews the ontology learning process from unstructured text and proposes a bottom-up approach to building legal domain-specific ontology from Arabic texts. In this work, the learning process is based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and includes three main tasks: corpus study, term acquisition, and conceptualization. Corpus study enriches the original corpus with valuable linguistic information. Term acquisition selects tagged lemmas sequences as potential term candidates, and conceptualization drives concepts and their relationships from the extracted terms. We used the NooJ platform to implement the required linguistic resources for each task. Further, we developed a Java module to enrich the ontology vocabulary from the Arabic WordNet (AWN) project.The obtained results were essential but incomplete. The legal expert revised them manually, and then they were used to refine and expand a domain ontology for a Moroccan Legal Information Retrieval System (LIRS).

This study expands digital research in the humanities by using NooJ to examine Phrasal Verb (PV) usage in the complete works of the nineteenth-century British author Charles Dickens and his American counterpart Herman Melville. The goal is to ascertain if PVs are indeed a characteristic feature of early American English. To compare the PV usage of these two writers, we used a specially designed NooJ grammar, electronic dictionary, and a series of disambiguation grammars, adverbial and adjectival expression filters, and idiom dictionaries. Since usage could be attributed to subject matter, we analyzed usage per 1,000 words of text in the complete works of both Melville (1.3 million words) and Dickens (4 million words), obtained from Project Gutenberg. To avoid excessive noise, the NooJ PV dictionary was limited to 1,148 expressions using the particles out, up, down, away, back, and off. The NooJ platform successfully identified PVs with a precision of 98.8% for the novels of Dickens and an overall accuracy of 98.3% for the works of Melville. After eliminating this residual noise, we conclude that Dickens uses more PVs than Melville: 3.32 PVs per 1,000 words of text as compared to 2.49 PVs per 1,000 words of text.

By combining two contrasting fields, the humanities and digital technologies, a new discipline was born – that of digital humanities. After a long period of constantly using a single approach in literary science – interpretation – in recent years, a new approach has been introduced in this field of science – an empirical type of research, that of computational analysis. Not many efforts have been made in Croatia to implement or even introduce computational analysis as a possible approach in literary studies. This paper analyzes the depiction of women in two particular short stories: “Tena” by Josip Kozarac and “Duga” by Dinko Šimunović. These texts are considered appropriate and representative because their main characters are women whose portrayals are given in great detail. That is the reason why analyzing such texts can be fruitful for deriving data for the construction of the general model. Both texts are written in Croatian, which points to one of the main purposes and intentions of this paper – the use of canonical literary texts from Croatian literature to build a model for the quantitative analysis of female characters and hopefully apply it to other texts in the future. The methods which are used in this paper are computational analysis (a quantitative approach) and interpretation (a traditional, qualitative approach) of quantitative results based on literary science. This paper represents a pilot study of sorts, in which the authors will use the NooJ environment to take the initial steps toward building the aforementioned model.

Die Diskussion um die Digitalisierung des Films ist in der Filmtheorie seit den späten 1990er-Jahren vor allem als Debatte über den Verlust der Indexikalität des Films, und damit des wesentlichen Distinktionsmerkmals filmischer und fotografischer Medien geführt worden. Erst in jüngerer Zeit ist die Frage nach den spezifischen Ausdruckspotenzialen des digitalen Bildes und damit nach den Möglichkeiten einer ästhetischen Erneuerung des Kinos im Zeichen des Digitalen und den sich daraus für die Filmtheorie ergebenden Konsequenzen in den Vordergrund gerückt.

Medienbeziehungen sind für die Herstellung medialer Identität fundamental. Seit der Frühzeit des Films wurde dessen mediale Spezifik im Medienvergleich konstituiert. Intermedialität, Remediatisierung und Medienreflexion sind verschiedene Konzepte, anhand derer das Vorkommen anderer Medien in Filmen untersucht wird, wobei sich der Fokus von der Voraussetzung von Medienspezifik zu deren performativer Herstellung verschiebt. Transmedialität interessiert sich dafür, medienübergreifende Phänomene zu denken, Multimodalität hingegen damit die mediale Einheit des Films zu problematisieren.

Die Filmtheorie formiert sich als ein Netzwerk an Argumenten und Denkfiguren über das Kino innerhalb der frühen Debatte der Intelligenz (ab 1907), die als medienkultureller Diskurs zum ersten Bewegtbildmedium (paradigmatisch für spätere Mediendebatten im 20. Jahrhundert) geführt wird. Steht dabei die ästhetische Differenz zu den Künsten noch im Vordergrund, so entwickelt sich (ab 1912) ein Filmkunstdiskurs, der zur klassischen Filmtheorie hinführt, die hier in drei Linien – Konstruktivismus, Wahrnehmungssensibilisierung und Bildgestalt – ihren Umriss findet.

Dieser Artikel stellt einige der zentralen Theoriepositionen vor, die sich mit dem Kino (a) als Raum kollektiver Erfahrung und (b) als Ort der Öffentlichkeit auseinandergesetzt haben. Einen Bogen von der frühen zur zeitgenössischen Filmtheorie schlagend, unterscheidet der Beitrag dabei eine im weitesten Sinne phänomenologische Perspektive mit Blick auf die konkrete kollektive Erfahrung des Publikums von einem eher soziologisch-politischen Blickwinkel, der auf den Begriff der Öffentlichkeit abzielt.

The German labour force is expected to shrink in the next two decades due to a decline in population. Therefore, the immigration of workers from abroad could compensate for potential negative consequences of such population decline. Is Germany competitive for immigration—i.e., do German employers pay enough to make it attractive as a destination country? We explore the wage gap between foreigners and German employees in particular and focus on different countries of origin to better understand issues related to wage setting among these groups. For this purpose, a threefold Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition is performed using comprehensive data with a vast amount of information on a large number of workers and firms. The results suggest that most of the wage gap can be explained by observed characteristics, and in most cases, very little difference remains unexplained. We provide evidence on differences specific to the country of origin which could be taken into consideration to attract people from abroad to better integrate them into the German labour market.

The Widening of human capital—expansion and contraction are essentially driven by demographic forces, modified by factors of Deepening of human capital (a more familiar concept)—has not received the attention it deserves. Starting with the modest aim of exploring this, my paper came to the conclusion that this was insufficient. On reflection, the issue of widening of human capital opens up the peopling and development dimensions of the leading crises facing humanity: above all climate change. But, there are others—notably, social inequality, including down-stream effects such as inter-country and inter-continental migration, which is amenable to policy interventions. Another is the problem of age-structural shifts, which, by contrast, are inexorable and need management, but cannot be altered in direction. Suffice to say that they involve far more than structural ageing (%’s at older ages), the one dimension that has captured popular and media attention. In reality the causes and effects of structural ageing are misunderstood, and almost no attention paid to numerical ageing (increasing numbers at any age).

The discovery of North Sea oil in the 1960s was followed by significant support for the pro-independence SNP. A devolved Scottish Parliament was established in 1999, which unionists hoped would undermine support for independence. However, in 2011 the SNP secured an overall majority, and the UK government accepted that an independence referendum should be held. While there were some disagreements about the rules, there were few grounds on which to question the legitimacy of a contest whose outcome both sides were committed to respecting and which secured the highest turnout since the advent of the mass franchise. Although a majority voted to remain in the UK, support for independence was much higher than expected when the referendum was called. The result triggered an increase in the powers of the devolved parliament, saw the SNP come to dominate Scotland’s Commons representation, and failed to end the debate about independence.

Switzerland has had more referendums related to Europe than any other country. These matter qualitatively because EU relations are sensitive and central to Swiss politics and also raise questions about direct democracy. They also have implications for Europe but have rarely been studied. Remedying this requires examining the evolution of Swiss EU policy since referendums have played a crucial part in its changing evolution. 17 referendums are then analysed, covering the three forms of constitutionally recognized votations. Their subjects include matters directly related to EU relations, other issues indirectly affecting European policy and rules on direct democracy. All are examined for their effects, origins, results and significance, along with the arguments used in the closely fought campaigns. They divide into four phases, reflecting the evolution of Swiss–EU relations and reveal changing patterns of influence with Euroscepticism now being challenged by newer forces. Critical questions remain to be decided.

This chapter explores the most common type of EU-related referendum, the accession referendum, which has been the subject of surprisingly little scholarship. Arising in the context of an EU enlargement, the accession referendum has become the constitutional norm for legitimating membership of the EU. Unlike other types of EU referendums, it very rarely fails to deliver a pro-EU outcome with only one country out of 17 having ever rejected accession. Apart from generating higher ‘Yes’ vote shares than other types of EU referendums, the accession referendum also generally has higher levels of participation and lower levels of polarisation among political parties. Yet its very success in delivering legitimation and the expansion of the EU is likely to give way to its demise as the boundaries of the EU crystallise and its raison d’être disappears.

This chapter starts by considering, in Sect. 1.1, properties of high-dimensional cubes and balls; we will use many of these properties in other sections of this chapter and in Chap. 3 . In Sect. 1.2, we discuss various aspects of uniformity and space-filling and demonstrate that good uniformity of a set of points is by no means implying its good space-filling. In Sect. 1.3, we consider space-filling from the viewpoint of covering and pay much attention to the concept of weak covering, where only a large part of a cube (or other set) has to be covered by the balls with centres at given points, rather than the full cube as in the standard covering. In Sect. 1.4, we provide bibliographic notes and give additional references.

This chapter introduces concrete as a construction material. Currently, it is the most widely used building material in the building and construction industry. Definitions of the term according to ASTM, ISO, and EN standards are presented. Constituent materials of concrete (mainly cement, aggregates, and water) are then discussed, including the definitions and types of admixtures, which nowadays contribute to the pefroduction of cost-effective and durable concrete structures. Additions and/or supplementary cementitious materials complete the list of constituent materials. A subsequent section is devoted to properties and tests of concrete, with emphasis on workability and compression strength, the most important properties of fresh and hardened concrete, respectively. The proportion of each constituent, named concrete mix design, is then summarized. Production of concrete, i.e., handling, batching, mixing, transportation, placing, compacting, and curing, accounts for the next group of headings of the chapter. Durability of concrete is briefly described. Thus, sulfate and acid attack, alkali-aggregate reaction, frost attack—freeze-thaw damage, erosion/abrasion, fire, and corrosion are properly explained. The next section describes precast concrete elements, which are units cast and cured in a place other than the final location in the works. It includes a brief description of structural and nonstructural elements. Subsequently, reinforced concrete, which revolutionized the construction industry in the last century, is introduced. Prestressed concrete closes the chapter, taking into account the two distinct systems of prestressing, pretensioning, and post-tensioning.

This chapter deals with the group of building and construction materials termed ceramic products. They include a variety of products such as bricks, roof tiles, wall and floor tiles, and sanitary ware. After summarizing the characteristics of the major types of raw materials used in the construction ceramic industry, the complex world of clay and clay minerals is introduced, including the geological environments of formation of these natural materials. Main groups of ceramic products are further described. Definition and types of bricks as well as their manufacturing process are discussed with the incorporation of a heading devoted to refractory bricks. Roof tiles are then considered. Wall and floor tiles are the next group of ceramic products to be summarized. Their definition and types, manufacturing process, and glazes and frits products, which are crucial in the current wall and floor tiles industry, are introduced. The last heading of the chapter is devoted to sanitary wear, of great importance in the present building sector.

This chapter provides a general overview of lime, which is one of the most commonly used alkali in the world. After a first heading devoted to the complex group of term definitions related to the lime sector, the raw materials for production of lime are reviewed, including fuels. Manufacturing processes are then described, involving quarrying and limestone preparation, calcination process, quicklime processing, and quicklime hydration. The most important type of kiln to manufacture quicklime, termed parallel flow regenerative kiln, will receive special attention. Physical and chemical properties of lime as well as the ASTM and EN tests involved in their determination are discussed. A summary of each type of lime (nonhydraulic limes, hydraulic limes, and sintered dolomite) is then listed. Environmental considerations are briefly outlined. Finally, the diverse world of construction applications of lime is summarized.

This chapter introduces the reader to the vast world of construction materials. After describing the importance of these materials today, the concept of durability is raised since it is essential to the performance of construction materials. Product standards, used to guarantee the quality of materials, are further taken into account. To finish the chapter, the concept of sustainable construction is considered as well as that of life cycle assessment, the most widely used tool for assessing the environmental impact of products over their life cycles.

This chapter draws attention to terrazzo, which has been a surfacing material for hundreds of years. After definition of terms, raw materials to manufacture terrazzo are described, including type of aggregate, bonding agents (mainly Portland cement and resinous products) to hold the aggregates in place, and coloring pigments to obtain the desired final color. Later on, terrazzo systems (sand cushion, bonded, monolithic, and thin set) are outlined and the four main terrazzo types (standard, venetian, rustic, and palladiana) are discussed. The main characteristics of precast terrazzo tiles are then considered, including the production process, properties, and testing. The main applications of terrazzo constitute the last heading of the chapter.

This chapter introduces the reader to the world of wood and wood-based products. After summarizing the main definitions and used terminology, main types of wood are discussed, including differences between hardwood and softwood. Structure, chemical composition, and main properties of wood are further addressed. The behavior of wood to fire is also introduced. Then, processing of wood is explained, including peeling process to manufacture veneers. Wood-based products (plywood, wood-based panels, and glued laminated timber) are further described. Biodeterioration of wood by fungi and insects is taken into account in view of paramount importance in wood products. Consequently, wood preservation (wood preservatives and preserving methods) is explained. The last headings of the chapter are devoted to cork: origin, main properties, processing methods, and construction applications.

This chapter provides description of different types of plastics used in building and construction. In a broad sense, the utilization of plastics in building and construction can be focused on two main markets: buildings and civil engineering. The first market is discussed here while plastics applied to civil engineering; that is, geosynthetics will be described in the next chapter of the book. The most important types of polymers used in building and construction (polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride, polycarbonate, and polyurethane) are summarized at the beginning of the chapter. Main features of raw material for plastics (petroleum) are developed below, including geology and distillation of petroleum. Although the use of plastic is everywhere in buildings, four major applications (roofing systems and house wraps, piping, insulation, and glazing, windows, and doors) are outlined at the end of the chapter.

This chapter draws attention metals and alloys used in construction. After explaining the differences between ferrous and nonferrous metals and alloys, the chapter follows up with the production processes of ferrous metals and alloys, describing ironmaking (blast furnace) and steelmaking (basic oxygen or electric arc furnace) in a summary way. Main characteristics of cast irons (white, gray, malleable, and spheroidal cast iron) and steel are further summarized, including steel recycling (steel is the most recycled material in the world). Corrosion of metals is described, and stainless steel, which is a consequence of corrosion issues generated in steel, is also discussed. Main metal forming processes (rolling, drawing, forging, and extrusion) are then commented. At the end of the chapter, a brief description of nonferrous metals and alloys, especially the aluminum and copper ones, is included.

This chapter introduces glass as building and construction material. First of all, raw materials used in the manufacture of glass are presented, silica sand being the most important raw material for glass making. Next heading is devoted to the classification of glass types by chemical composition. Soda-lime silicate glass is the most important type in building applications. Manufacturing processes of glass products are described. Later on, the main types of basic glass products used in construction are considered: flat (float) glass, tempered glass, laminated glass, insulating glass, curved glass, glass wool, and glass blocks and pavers. Finally, recycling of glass is summarized.

This chapter provides an introduction to aggregates, which are the most consumed natural resource after water. The chapter begins with the main definitions of the term, including those from ASTM, EN, and ISO standards. Next heading establishes the main types of aggregates according to the production method: natural, manufactured, or recycled. Natural aggregates can be further subdivided into sand and gravel, and crushed stone. Geological occurrences of natural aggregates (different possibilities since natural aggregates are generated by a great variety of geologic processes) are then discussed as well as the main extraction methods used in sand and gravel and crushed stone exploitation. The principal processing techniques used in aggregate production (crushing, screening, and washing) are described. Then, this chapter describes the properties of aggregates and their associated tests, organized them into five main groups: general, geometrical, mechanical and physical, thermal and weathering, and chemical properties and tests. A heading devoted to aggregate for use as railway ballast is included whereas other important applications of aggregates such as concrete, mortar, and roads are taken into account in the corresponding chapters. The environmental considerations of aggregate quarrying are finally kept in mind because aggregate is extracted close to major centers of demand (e.g., big cities) to minimize cost of transport.

This chapter discusses mortars for the building and construction industry. As in the case of concrete, mortar is manufactured by mixing aggregates, cementitious materials, water, and admixtures and additives if required. Definitions dealing with mortars are first presented, followed by the principal methods to classify types of mortars. Description of constituent materials of mortar is then carried out, including some data about mix proportions of the mortar constituents. Further headings are devoted to properties and tests of mortars, with emphasis on the most important properties of both fresh and hardened mortars. The chapter continues with a brief description of the dry mix mortar production process, including raw material storage, dosing, and mixing. The main types of mortars, i.e., masonry and rendering, are discussed in an abbreviated form at the end of the chapter.

This chapter draws attention to all topics related to cement, actually the most important hydraulic binder in construction processes. It starts with the description of raw materials and their essential features. The manufacture of cement is further summarized, from quarrying and preblending of raw materials to kiln burning operations and final blending and grinding of clinker with gypsum and admixtures. The four main phases of clinker (alite, belite, aluminate, and ferrite) are described as well as the chemical reactions taking place in the kiln. Bogue calculations with the objective to predict the final composition of clinker are discussed. The main types of hydraulic cements according to ASTM, EN, and ISO standards are then commented. At the end of the chapter, environmental considerations of cement manufacture are taken into account, including the utilization of alternative fuels for burning and the carbon capture and storage process of the CO2 generated in the kiln.

This chapter provides a description of the different types of concrete that have been developed to extend the range of properties of the conventional concrete described in ► Chap. 9 . Some of these properties are accomplished utilizing alternative materials, e.g., lightweight and heavyweight aggregates, changes in mixture compositions, i.e., no-fines concrete, or an extensive use of admixtures, i.e., high-strength concrete or self-compacting concrete. These types of concrete are usually grouped under the term special concrete, the five most important types being fiber-reinforced concrete, high-strength concrete, self-compacting concrete, lightweight concrete, and sprayed concrete. A sixth type termed stamped concrete is discussed although it represents a specific application of concrete in pavement industry rather than a proper special concrete.

In the chapter, we generalize, for electrons of high energy, the asymptotic theory exposed in Chap. 10 . We present and justify the asymptotics of tunneling characteristics as the narrow diameters tend to zero.

In this chapter, we consider a two-dimensional waveguide that coincides with a strip having $$n+1$$ n + 1 narrows of small diameter $$\varepsilon $$ ε . All narrows are of the same shape and are spaced from each other by equal distances. Parts of the waveguide between two neighboring narrows play the role of resonators. The wave function of a free electron satisfies the Dirichlet boundary value problem for the Helmholtz equation in the waveguide. Near a simple eigenvalue of the closed resonator there are n resonant peaks of height close to 1. We let $$\varepsilon \rightarrow 0$$ ε → 0 and obtain asymptotic formulas for the resonant energies and for the widths of the resonant peaks at their half-height. The behavior of the transmission coefficient in a neighborhood of a resonance is described.

In this chapter, we consider electron propagation in a waveguide with two cylindric outlets to infinity and two narrows of small diameters $$\varepsilon _1$$ ε 1 and $$\varepsilon _2$$ ε 2 . The boundary of the waveguide is assumed to be smooth. The electron motion is described by the Helmholtz equation. The electron energy is supposed to be between the first and the second thresholds. We generalize and implement the asymptotic approach developed in Chap. 5 . The basic results are presented by Theorem 10.4.5.

This chapter explains the main characteristics and the manufacturing process of agglomerated stone, also termed engineered stone. Important topics are definition of this material according to EN standards, raw materials used to manufacture the product, and main production methods. Stone aggregates and mineral fillers, bonding agents, coloring agents, and additives are mixed together to make aggregated stone. The two different production methods to manufacture aggregated stone (discontinuous block process and semi-continuous slabs process) are outlined below. Properties and testing are considered in the chapter, and applications of engineered stone constitute the last heading. These applications include kitchen and bathroom countertop, floating floors, tiles for flooring, and indoor and outdoor cladding.

The waveguide occupies a strip in $$\mathbb {R}^2$$ R 2 having two identical narrows of small diameter $$\varepsilon $$ ε . An electron wave function satisfies the Helmholtz equation with the homogeneous Dirichlet boundary condition. The energy of electrons (spectral parameter) may be rather high, i.e. any (fixed) number of waves can propagate in the strip far from the narrows. The spectral parameter varies in the vicinity of a degenerate eigenvalue of the resonator and is separated from the thresholds, in other words, the number of scattering channels remains constant. The purpose is to describe an asymptotics of the transmission coefficient at the specified values of the spectral parameter.

This chapter introduces stone as construction material. First of all, a state-of-the-art information about terminology used in the stone sector is presented, incorporating ASTM, ISO, and EN definitions. Dimension stone types are then discussed according to several of the existing classes (granite, marble, and slate), including commercial and geological definitions. A further section is devoted to quarrying methods, covering the types of quarries and the techniques used to cut and extract the rocks. At the end of the heading, the Finnish method to mine granite and marble rocks is described. Following the chapter, dimension stone processing operations at the factory are shown; slate is specially considered because its processing operations are quite different to those used in granite and marble processing. The description also includes the several finishing surface methods applied to the exposed surfaces of dimension stone in order to achieve the desired aesthetic and/or performance characteristics of the stone. A next section describes the physical and mechanical properties, test methods, test standards, and main regulations for the different stone construction products. Durability of stone is briefly considered and the content of the last heading is devoted to the description of the main characteristics and uses of these construction materials.

There are little or no records of regions in Sub-Saharan Africa involved in key energy transition programs. Nearly all the countries in the sub-Saharan African region and developing countries rely on fossil fuels and low-efficiency hydro systems for energy generation. With a global shift towards more sustainable, cleaner, and renewable forms of energy generation, these countries must seek new ways to transition from their reliance on old methods to more modern and efficient means of energy generation. In addition, there is a severely negative impact from the generation of energy using these inefficient and environmentally harmful methods. The consequences are far-reaching as the health and economic life of the inhabitants of the region are negatively affected. Furthermore, the theft and vandalism of energy generation and transmission infrastructure and social insecurity in the region has led to very low efficiencies in capacity leading to huge wastes of natural and human resources. This chapter explores the feasibility and necessity of energy transition in the Sub-Saharan African region. It also analysis both the prospects and challenges that are faced by the people and the governments in the region while proffering solutions. Analysis of the situation is made through empirical evidence from studies and previous research works. The findings indicate that sustainable energy transition in Sub-Saharan Africa is achievable but is intricately woven with several pertinent environmental factors and that the general progress and development of nearly all facets of the environment relies heavily on the energy transition of the region which must be made timely.

Energy security has evinced a prime role in shaping prospects of economic and social development with its intrinsic relationship with environmental security due to convergence of energy generation and distribution with so many factors like global governance, economic development, affordability, equitable and sustainable energy transitions, environmental protection, environmental politics, water security, air pollution, climate change, conflicts, and environment-induced migrations. Pakistan has energy requirements of more than 75 million tons of oil equivalent (MTOE) in 2019 which is experiencing exponential increase due to growing population and changing lifestyle. The country is currently relying on thermal energy and imported fossil fuels to meet energy requirements. The share of coal in primary energy has been increased in recent years. The construction and operational phase of energy projects have significant threats to environmental security due to soil erosion and compaction, chemical spills and debris disposal, air emissions, noise and wildfire. It also shapes the terrain by damaging vegetation cover, terrestrial ecosystems and wetlands. The impacts further include dislocation of species, disturbance in migratory corridors and changes in breeding areas of wildlife. These projects also affect the water quality and modify drainage patterns causing aesthetic disruption and changes. Archeologically and culturally important sites are also being disturbed on the pretext of improving socio-economic conditions. Furthermore, climate change is reshaping the nexus of energy with environmental security in Pakistan. Resultantly, there may be a paradigm shift due to energy insecurity, geopolitical conflicts in the region, consumer’s access to affordable energy, environmental injustice and insecurity. Pakistan already lacks renewable energy but inefficient use, line losses, energy-inefficient infrastructure and technologies challenge the government to meet the targets of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 7), pillar 4 (Water, energy and food security) of the Pakistan Vision 2025. Hence, Pakistan has to establish a good framework of governance for thermal power sector, upgrade its existing energy infrastructure, diversify energy recourses, introduce energy-efficient technologies, develop minimum standards for power generation, explore renewable and competitive energy market, identify low carbon power generation methods, subsidize alternative and renewable energy (ARE) technologies, balance energy mix, improve fuel efficiency, manage energy demand, invest on research and development, aware the people and regulate consumer’s behavior and practices to achieve optimum energy security and environmental security.

In most megacities of Latin America and the Caribbean, the population and economic growth, the inefficient use of resources and energy, and the high levels of carbon dioxide emissions have led to due to unsustainable solid waste management and inequities in the access to sanitation services and energy access, and thus to several negative consequences like air and water pollution. One of these megacities is the Metropolitan Region of Buenos Aires (RMBA), Argentina, where the main treatment of solid waste is its final disposal in landfills. Thus, its recycling rates are low and its energy use is even lower. In industrialized countries, the production of Solid Recovered Fuel (SRF) is a common practice. In contrast, in Argentina, SRF is produced by only one commercial and industrial waste (C&IW) treatment center for the cement industry. This chapter describes the production and quality of this SRF and the characteristics of the waste streams that are currently sent to landfill that could be incorporated into that production. In addition, the potential uses of SRF in the RMBA to replace natural gas are analyzed in three possible scenarios. The results for scenario 1 showed a current production of 32 t per month of Class II SRF, which allows a monthly replacement of 33,722 m3 of natural gas in the cement industry. The results for scenario 2 showed that 177.4 t per month of Class III SRF could be added and generate 210.97 MWh per month of electricity, replacing 86920.5 m3 per month of natural gas. Finally, the results of scenario 3 showed that the incorporation of the co-generation of electricity and heat for industrial use could replace 172379.23 m3 per month of natural gas with SRF.

The global challenges faced by the humankind encompass access to clean and affordable energy for all, shifting to the green development path and tackling the consequences of climate change. Success in addressing the related goals relies on the concerted efforts of society at large, whereby researchers may offer new solutions and media could raise awareness and organize public discussions. This chapter examines the policy landscape created for addressing the global energy and environment goals, as defined in the international documents. Moreover, the chapter analyses attention given to these goals by researchers, business and media. More specifically, the chapter focuses on goals set in the legally binding universal agreements and conventions formulated and adopted by the United Nations: “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” (SDGs or SG), the Paris Agreement (PA), the “Future We Want” Resolution (FWW), and the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation (JPI). Research methods include policy analysis and the smart big data analysis of thousands of publications on the topic. The authors highlight controversial policy issues, as well as relatively low attention to global energy challenges on behalf of mass media. Researchers address these challenges much more often, however, focus primarily on a few SDGs. The outcomes underline further steps to be taken by global and national policymakers.

Globally, governments are planning for a sustainable energy infrastructure to deal with negative climate change and to ensure a low-carbon future. In the developed world, energy generation expansion plans are designed so that the infrastructure can be adaptable to new technologies, reliable, affordable, and sustainable. In contrast, the developing world is trying to keep up with their anticipated levels of GDP growth, and to accommodate these needs energy has the utmost priority. Consequently, these nations are planning for long- and short-term energy generation infrastructures. Most often, these future generation expansion plans are not effective from a sustainable point of view, as they do not explicitly consider the existing resources. This is due to the absence of an appropriate sustainable energy infrastructure planning framework (SEIPF). There are thus two objectives of this chapter: first, to propose an SEIPF and second, to apply this SEIPF to an assessment of the future power generation expansion plan of Bangladesh as a case study. This proposed framework would be suitable to (i) assess and minimize the overall costs along with cascading impact mitigation, (ii) identify environmentally sound technologies, (iii) explore resource options to ensure sustainable development, (iv) warrant reliable and affordable electricity generation, and (v) identify an optimized sustainable electricity generation system. The proposed framework would be helpful for developing countries, in particular, in designing a sustainable electricity generation system, where plans are at the initial stage or under development.

End of poverty, the number one Sustainable Development Goal, focuses on ending all kinds of poverty all over the world. The elimination of all forms of poverty continues to be the biggest problem facing humanity today. The most important problems that have been encountered since the beginning of the energy use are the increasing risk of deterioration of energy supply, energy production and energy poverty. The problem of energy poverty among them is widely mentioned in the literature. In general, the studies on the subject focus on how the problem is defined worldwide, its size, its consequences, the obstacles to the elimination of the problem and some solution opportunities. The term “energy poverty” can refer to two different socio-economic issues, depending on the geographical scope of its application: energy affordability in higher income and developed states; inadequate access to “modern” energy services in most low income or developing countries”. Poor people pay a high price for the energy they use, either in cash or by labor. In addition, poor households spend more on energy than wealthy people, not only because their income is much smaller, but also because the fuels and equipment they use are much less efficient than modern fuels and equipment. No country has been able to diminish energy poverty to a great extent without increasing energy use. Decreasing the global inequality in energy is key to reducing income, gender and an inequality in other dimensions such as rural/urban income gaps. From this perspective, the importance of the relationship between energy poverty and sustainable development will be discussed by making comparisons by taking the country cases into consideration in the context of energy efficiency and renewable energy. The regional understanding of these concepts will also be discussed in this context.

Electricity access is a key aspect of achieving Sustainable Development Goal 7. Alleviating poverty by increasing the availability of grid connections, system reliability and generation capacity is a key driver of economic growth. However, 2.7 billion people still rely upon unsustainable wood fuels (such as charcoal) for heating, lighting and cooking. A sustainable transition to low carbon energy has positive health and social benefits (e.g. reductions in air pollution, deforestation and carbon dioxide emissions); and secondary economic benefits from energy supply service jobs (such as installation and maintenance jobs), market disruption and innovation (from community decentralised systems, for example), and reduced labour and time costs (such as reducing costs associated with mobile phone-charging). However, representing electricity access in terms of numbers of grid connections over-simplifies the energy access challenge—hiding unreliability, community exclusion from planning processes, and potential socio-environmental damage from energy sources (e.g. from coal-use), and complex political-institutional and socio-technical system relationships. This two-part chapter examines first the benefits of electricity access provision for developing countries, and second focuses on resolving these challenges through examination of the case of Mozambique—a low income, high resource abundance nation that is undergoing rapid electrification. The chapter explores the colonial history of Mozambique and its influence upon energy technology socio-technical system development across the diverse physical and cultural geography of the country; the effects of internal political conflict and contestation; and the impact of large-scale foreign investments, especially in extractive resources. We conclude by discussing how the changing political economy of Mozambican energy production, distribution and use at the national and regional level has yet to significantly transform everyday energy practices in rural and urban areas. The majority of the Mozambican population remains dependent on environmentally insecure fuelwood (in rural areas) and charcoal (in urban areas), especially for cooking. The consumption of biomass is of concern to authorities because of rapid deforestation, particularly within the hinterland of major cities. Moreover, fuel supply chains remain disconnected from the electricity generation and distribution systems and the extraction of resources such as coal or natural gas. Recommendations for policy, technology implementation and development practice are discussed throughout.

It has been over 50 years now that Marshal McLuhan used the term global village which describes the idea of global coexistence with influences from international communication, culture, travel, and trade and commerce. The COVID-19 pandemic has most recently cemented the planet's status of a global village as the virus originating from the Chinese city of Wuhan has virtually paralyzed the whole world. The global energy and environmental scenario is another befitting indicator to manifest the concept of a global village.

South Africa is amongst the largest economies in Africa and is considered the most industrialised country in Africa. One of the primary reasons for industrialisation has been affordable electricity that was made available for manufacturing. South Africa accounted for 32% of the electricity generated in Africa in 2015, of which 92% was generated from coal. However electricity access and penetration within the local population was still lagging (at 86% in 2018) in spite of relatively large volumes of generation. In order to address the lopsided nature of electricity access, national policy prioritised access to electricity, which meant diversifying the nature of electricity from primarily thermal generation to include renewable sources. As part of the diversification, South Africa embarked on an ambitious renewable energy programme that involves private participation. As of 2017, South Africa generated 41% of wind energy, 56% of solar PV and 62% of solar thermal energy, for electricity generation on the African continent. The penetration and prevalence of renewable electricity generation is bound to increase considering the abundance of resource in the region. While renewable energy plants are environmentally less harmful due to limited emissions, limited information is available about the effects of utility scale renewable power plants in developing countries. This chapter aims to provide an investigation into the potential external (or unaccounted) effects of utility scale renewable plants particularly from a developing country perspective, where utility scale adoption is relatively new and where plant data is not readily available. The chapter aims to provide a comparison of external effects and external costs of renewable technologies with external effects and external costs of conventional thermal electricity generation within South Africa. Based on data considerations, a life-cycle based approach is employed, where possible. The investigation compares three power plants employing different technologies, namely coal power, on shore wind power and concentrated solar power (CSP). The results of the analysis indicate that environmental costs (USD 2.76 c/kWh) from coal fired electricity are significantly high by more than an order, whereas non-environmental impacts that include human health, have lesser variation depending on the technology. Wind power was observed to have the least impact and cost across totalled environmental and non-environmental impacts (USD 0.08 c/kWh). While investigation of the coal plant was limited to the generation stage, a full life cycle analysis was considered for other technologies. It was seen that the extraction and manufacturing stages of renewable technologies have a higher share of impacts whereas operations and maintenance had the least, which was prominent for the CSP plant, that had a total impact cost of USD 0.23 c/kWh. It is expected that, with more developing countries adopting utility scale renewable plants, such energy-environmental impact assessments within a developing country context will be useful in understanding localised impacts on the environment related to energy generation activities.

Energy is imperative for accelerating economic development and improving lives by raising living standards. However, accelerating fossil fuel extraction or increasing imports to boost rapid industrial activities or accelerate economic development do not provide the desired socioeconomic benefits. On the contrary, some of the economic gains are offset by environmental damage. The counterbalancing concepts of energy security and environmental security have relative meanings that vary based on the national resource- and economic-context in which it is discussed. The countries in Latin American have distinct advancements and advantages which vary across the region, including almost universal access to electricity, a high proportion of which is generated renewably. On the other hand, extensive inequality, marginalization, corruption, and regional conflict are limiting the extent to which living standards are raised for the burgeoning population. The drive to generate public revenues by participating in international energy markets may be causing Latin American countries to deplete their hydrocarbon reserves too rapidly, which threatens both environmental and energy security. Indeed, even if a complete shift to renewable energy were possible in the near future, though it would improve environmental security, it would not guarantee energy security, which is a significant concern to Latin American governments. There are several possible risk mitigation strategies through which a country (either importing or exporting) can secure energy supply and promote measures to protect the local environment. However, there are many risks opposing effective implementation in Latin America. Heavy fuel subsidies tend to increase domestic demand, increase consumption of local fuel, more rapidly deplete domestic reserves, and ultimately reduce fuel export revenues. Failing the balancing act of resource nationalism vs. energy security, this is the paradox in which Latin America finds itself. Latin American countries face several particular challenges in driving sustainable economic development. This chapter documents the energy and environmental security challenges faced by Latin America.

The chapter discusses the present day energy situation in Cameroon. It focuses the current energy practices, potentials and official government policies. It also dwells at large on the other potentials that are yet to be exploited. About 95% of conventional energy supply in Cameroon is from hydro sources while about 2.7% is obtained from the burning of fossil fuels. The hydro potential (estimated 20 GW) and 115 Terawatt-hours per year is the second largest in sub-Saharan Africa after the Democratic Republic of Congo. Of this potential, only 3% is currently being exploited. Cameroon forest area occupies about 25 million Ha covering almost 50% of the country. The electricity potential from biomass has been estimated at about 1 GWh. The majority of Cameroonians use biomass for cooking and the estimate for national access to clean cooking solutions is at 23%. Biomass constitutes 66.7% of national energy consumption. Wind energy has not been commercially exploited in Cameroon. A few isolated studies of wind potential have been studied and published. Trends indicate favorable wind speeds for commercial exploitation in the northern and coastal areas with an average wind speed of 5–7 m/s at some sites. In most regions, however, the average wind speed is only about 2–4 m/s at a height of 100 m. The solar radiation in the southern part of the country is about 4.5 kWh/day/m2 while the northern region has values around (5.8 kWh/day/m2). Only about 50 decentralized PV systems with backup battery banks have been installed in Cameroon. One of the most untapped potential is that of vegetable oils either as SVO or biodiesel. The country if blessed with so many oleaginous grains that can act as substrates in an elaborate biodiesel production program.

The global demand for food, freshwater and fuel is continuously increasing. The cultivation of salt resistant energy plants including halophytes can be an appropriate choice to exploit saline land and water resources which are often regarded as unsuitable for crop cultivation. Utilization of halophytes, conservation of freshwater and agricultural lands can help in improving food and fodder production in the developing countries. These countries can adopt saline agriculture on marginal lands to produce bioenergy for electricity generation. The salt affected soil reclamation by using halophytes can be a good strategy to develop a sustainable soil reclamation strategy. The global availability of one billion hectares of saline soils with vast areas located in the developing countries can be utilized for energy crop cultivation to meet renewable energy demands. This practice could have direct or indirect potential impacts such as mitigating GHG emissions through carbon sequestration, as well as wider positive impact on ecosystem protection and biodiversity enhancement. In order to improve the lignocellulose composition in biomass, introduction of genetic manipulation techniques can be used in stress tolerant energy feedstocks. Similarly, plant metabolism could be optimized by using agronomy and genetic manipulations to develop new crops for saline land. Constructed wetlands can be used to cultivate halophytes thus providing multiple benefits of wastewater treatment and bioenergy production. Currently the major aim is to evaluate the potential of halophytes for wide economic use in arid and semi-arid regions in the light of progressive shortage of freshwater resources and soil salinization. This book chapter covers topics pertinent to water conservation, food security, biofuels/bioenergy production to mitigate climate change impacts for sustainable development and benefits of cultivating halophytes on marginal land.

This chapter first summarizes the content of the book and discusses key results. Subsequently, a multitude of promising future branches of research is outlined. On the one hand, this concerns possible theoretical extensions of the model and the numerical studies. On the other hand, proper experiments are suggested for the validation of the numerical results. Thereby, the focus is on cubic minerals.

The quest for achieving energy security has dominated the agenda for growth, supremacy and sovereignty of most developed and developing countries. The developed countries fall back to many of the developing countries for sourcing of energy supplies. The extraction of the materials, refinement, transportation and recycling or end-life deposition of the used materials constitute a complex chain of processes. This study emphasized the state of energy and environmental security in Nigeria. The findings showed that, with about 5% growth rate in Nigeria, the rise in population demands higher energy consumption. Aggressive action towards achieving energy security has a severe consequence on the environment, which is moderated by economic, social and political influence. Regional and national frameworks and strategies have been designed to manage the nexus between energy and environmental issues. The study recommended the establishment of a unitary and robust body for Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), with adequately trained indigenous staff to tackle the reckless and unethical use of the environment from the project conception stage. A special marine guard as a mitigating measure to energy infrastructure vandalism is necessary. However, to achieve success, collaboration with the leadership of the oil-producing communities through participatory governance is inevitable.

Southeast Asia (SEA) is composed of Brunei, Myanmar, Cambodia, Timor-Leste, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. The population is forecasted to expand by 20% with the urban population alone growing by over 150 million people which is the driving force behind the region’s growing energy demand. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and six other countries in the Asia–Pacific region comprising of: Australia, the People’s Republic of China, India, Japan, Korea and New Zealand forming the ASEAN + 6 group, whose share of global energy demand is expected to reach 40% by 2040 making this region the world’s most dynamic economically. Southeast Asia’s supply of energy comes from more than 50% of fossil fuels (led by oil, coal and natural gas) and 17% from renewables but the supply is now depleting fast as these countries have become net importers of oil rather than exporters since 2018. The region is also relatively well endowed with renewable energy sources particularly in hydro and solar and other types of renewable energy (such as geothermal found mainly in the Philippines and Indonesia). Although this region has set out a target to contribute 23% of its primary energy supply from renewables by 2025, conventional fossil energy still dominates the regional energy mix. Energy security has now become an issue as it affects Southeast Asia’s efforts to secure their energy requirements in a sustainable manner environmentally and economically. Continuous reliance on energy imports, especially of oil and gas, to sustain economic growth serves as an example of Asia’s energy insecurity. Natural gas security has also become a concern in the region, as it is expected to account for 85% of the growth in global gas trade between now and 2040. The energy impacts on environmental systems and climate change have strong links to energy security. More than 60% of global carbon dioxide emissions are produced from energy supply and transport. Continuing to subsidise the cost of energy to citizens over the course of the next ten years will not be sustainable. It becomes necessary to reform some present policies and formulate new policies to ensure the energy security of these countries. Governments in the region also need to employ alternative energy sources and collaborate to maintain energy security not only for their own countries, but for the rest of the region as well. Recent reports by the World Economic Forum (WEF) have favorably focused on ASEAN countries based on their current energy systems and readiness to adapt to future needs. This chapter therefore, discusses on the current scenario of energy in the light of climate change, sustainability in environment, energy security issues and economy in ASEAN + 6, barriers, possible solutions, and case studies of mitigation efforts as well as policies laid out and implemented with specific examples from Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam and the Philippines.

Android ransomware is seen in the highlights of cyber security world reports. Ransomware is considered to be the most popular as well as threatening mobile malware. These are specsial malware used to extort money in return of access and data without user’s consent. The exponential growth in mobile transactions from 9.47 crore in 2013–14 to 72 crores in 2016–17 could be a potential motivation for numerous ransomware attacks in the recent past. Attackers are consistently working on producing advanced methods to deceit the victim and generate revenue. Therefore, study of Android stealth malware, its detection and analysis gained a substantial interest among researchers, thereby producing sufficiently large body of literature in a very short period. Manual reviews do provide insight but they are prone to be biased, time consuming and pose a great challenge on number of articles that needs investigation. This study uses Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), an information modelling technique to deduce core research areas, research trends and widely investigated areas within corpus. This work takes a large corpus of 487 research articles (published during 2009–2019) as input and produce three core research areas and thirty emerging research trends in field of stealth malwares as primary goal. LSA, a semi-automated approach is helpful in achieving a significant innovation over traditional methods of literature review and had shown great performance in many other research fields like medical, supply chain management, open street map etc. The secondary aim of this study is to investigate popular latent topics by mapping core research trends with core research areas. This study also provides prospective future directions for heading researchers.

This is the introductory chapter. Given the complexities of the nature of interface between the new technology and the socio-economics of India, the present volume draws upon interdisciplinary scholarship and diverse professional pursuits; contributors and editors belong to computer and information sciences and also social sciences, management and development studies. By presenting a set of studies largely dealing with the issues and concerns of digitalization in India, this volume is an attempt towards appreciating the policy challenges at the ground level. While technological applications may have opened up possibilities their actual access by users could be dependent on the institutional framework within these functions. Moreover, there exist aberrations within the socio-economic context which could act as potential barriers to obtain the benefits of a transformative technological advancement.

Since about the turn of the millennium there have been massive transformative changes in the computer and information science (CIS) discipline requiring substantive overhauling of existing systems of technical education—curricula, courses offered, teaching skills, supportive infrastructure and, importantly, placement possibilities. Even as the Indian CIS education system (in terms of number of institutions offering such courses, enrolment, placement, etc.) has been on a growth path at least since the mid-1980s or so in recent decade a series of disruptive technologies have necessitated a complete revamping of the existing curricula and methods of imparting education under the CIS discipline. This has led to different educational institutions responding differently—some seeing this as beyond their capabilities while others hoping to catch up with the new dispensation. Addressing the major churning taking place in the sphere of professional education in CIS in India, this paper has made an attempt at empirically tracking the contours and extent of changes as may be surmised from the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) data, mainly. The study takes into account a wide variety of CIS courses those are/were offered in technical institutions in India over about the last couple of decades and analyses the implications of such performance of the CIS education in India. State-level disaggregated data are analysed and are supplemented with policy measures at national and subnational levels in addressing the challenges of disruptive technologies in education.

Weaving together the literature on technology evolution, information society and digital economy, this chapter argues that several intrinsic structural features of many digital markets make them inherently exclusionary. These, together with the strategies used by digital innovators and fast followers to sustain their competitive advantages and prevent new entry, cause the adverse incorporation of developing country economies into these markets and lead to asymmetric benefits for them. This presents new challenges to the Indian economy in the ability of its firms to survive. Despite the large canvas of new opportunities offered by digital technologies, digital technologies can therefore entrench some of the existing inequalities in technology access and use, and also generate new inequalities. With data as the prime driver of several new digital technology systems, policy choices in the digital space will decidedly influence India’s digital transformation trajectories in the services, manufacturing and agricultural production spaces, as well as their societal outcomes. In particular, the national data governance regime, in relation to data ownership, security standards and data access, has a critical role to play. In order to ensure that emerging technology and business models promote competition and broader developmental benefits, the government also needs to formulate stronger antitrust policies, which acknowledge the economy-wide implications of control by digital monopolies. Reformulating trade, investment and technology policies to reflect the above concerns also come in the ambit of the institutional/regulatory shake-up that is urgently needed to allow secure, sustainable and equitable digital transformation by India.

The financial services sector in India has been at the centre of the country’s digital transition and the slogan of financial inclusion, its primary driver. The first wave of this revolution occurred in the 2000s when the foundation of an all-encompassing payment architecture was laid and the Aadhaar project launched. The second wave of financial inclusion that started around 2015 leveraged the Aadhaar and payments infrastructures to open bank accounts (under a scheme called Jan Dhan Yojana or JDY) on a mass scale and made all government benefit payments digital and direct-to-account. The financial inclusion programme of India currently rides on what is known as the JAM number (Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile) trinity. However, many of the concerns about the privacy and security vulnerabilities of the Aadhaar architecture still remain unaddressed.

Around eighty million households in the country suffer serious deprivation in India. The Union and State Governments of India have introduced various social security schemes and programmes intended for the well-being of these marginalized sections of the country. While most evaluations of the implementation of schemes blame their unsatisfactory performance on leakages in the system, lack of information concerning these schemes is also a major factor behind the same. Congruent with rapid developments and expanse of information and communication technologies (ICT), the world has witnessed a strong inclination towards informed societies. Governments across the world, including the Indian Government, started leveraging ICT to improve their public outreach. However, varying degrees of digital development, access to ICT, differentiated informational requirements and the digital divide have posed challenges to the same. Taking cognizance of these challenges as well as India’s rising Internet user base, many informational platforms like Haqdarshak, Schemopedia and India Iris have been developed in recent times. The GIS-Enabled Entitlement Tracking system is a similar effort undertaken by the Foundation For Ecological Security in association with the Ministry of Rural Development India and United Nations Development Programme to promote information democracy. The platform enables better first mile (usually termed as the last mile) delivery of social security schemes through a strategic mix of online and offline activities like a collation of information about benefits, eligibility criteria as well as concerned authorities related to various state and centrally sponsored schemes, capacity building, promotion of local leadership, etc.

Oil hydrocarbons are widespread in soil which causes contamination and is a major threat to the ecosystem. In the total oil production around the world, about 10% of it is percolating into the environment which causes pollution. The maximum amount of oil-contaminated soil sites had not been rehabilitated, as the remediation process is expensive though these contaminants possess extreme threats to the environment and alter the geotechnical properties. It is necessary to remediate and reclaim the contaminated soil to improve its properties by suitable methods for the safe and economic construction of structures on it. Bioremediation of these contaminated soil is found to easy, safe, and cost-effective and yields promising results with higher efficiencies. It is an eco-friendly technique in which the biological agents are used to transform the contaminated soil into non-toxic forms. The nitrogen sources from the microbes are used to support the microbial biodegradation of the hydrocarbons. In this research, an attempt has been made to remediate the contaminated soil using bacteria, cow dung, and goat manure independently and to study their interaction with the physical and chemical characteristics of the remediated soil. The results obtained confirm that the oil content has been drastically brought down, as the remediation stimulants are introduced in the contaminated soil.

Fog Computing has emerged as an area that provides an efficient platform for computing to support sustainable development. This latest computing paradigm could be an expansion of cloud computing. The main focus of fog computing is to decrease the load on the cloud due to an extreme number of IoT devices increased in the last few years. Sustainable resource allocation is the most promising challenge in fog computing that can save bandwidth, reduce latency, and energy consumption. In this article, a comprehensive review is done on resource allocation techniques used by many researchers in fog computing to find shortcomings for further improvement. The future direction and research gaps are also discussed at the end, so the author can easily find the way to do future research.

An experimental program was undertaken for determining the feasibility of demolition concrete waste for utilization in subbase, base, and binder course of flexible pavement. Marshall mix design and retained stability test were conducted for predicting the performance of recycled concrete aggregates (RCA)and thermally treated recycled concrete aggregates (TRCA) in binder course as dense bituminous macadam (DBM) in comparison to natural aggregates (NA).DBM mixes containing RCA and TRCA observed satisfactory results, though the optimum bitumen content (OBC) was more as compared to mixes containing NA. OBC for mixes containing NA, RCA, and TRCA was observed as 5.15%, 5.95%, and 5.83%, respectively. Thermal treatment of RCA had a positive impact on its properties resulting in improved results in the context of optimum bitumen content and retained stability but had a negative impact on Marshall stability. Compaction and California Bearing Ratio test results concluded that RCA was meeting the required specifications for utilization in the subbase/base course.

Centralised water, wastewater and stormwater systems have been implemented for urban municipal services for over 100 years as a common practice. These systems centre around human health protection, reliable and safe water supply and flood management. The sustainability of current urban water systems is under pressure from a range of challenges including population growth, urbanisation, climate change impacts, system capacity constraints and aging infrastructure. Globally, centralised water systems and services are required to respond to current environmental, economic and social challenges. The current level of urban water services can’t be provided within the existing centralised systems’ approach without a significant increase in investment to enhance system capacity, improve level of treatment and rehabilitate the existing centralised systems. To address these issues, urban water services are now being implemented with Integrated Urban Water Management (IUWM) approaches. IUWM considers all parts of the water cycle, which can be natural or man-made, surface or sub-surface within an integrated system based on fit for purpose concept. Under IUWM approaches, decentralised and distributed water, wastewater and stormwater systems are being promoted either in combination with centralised systems; or alone as the sustainable solution for urban water servicing. These systems can deliver multiple benefits including water conservation, stormwater quality improvement, flood control, landscape amenity and a healthy living environment. Centralised urban water systems are beginning to undergo a transition, where decentralised systems will play a major role in the long-term sustainability of these systems by addressing current challenges.

Concrete is a strong and comparatively cheap material for construction of infrastructures worldwide, and it is the second most consumed product on earth after water. Major drawback, however, is the huge production of cement, which is one of the components of concrete, leading to approximately 7% global anthropogenic CO2 emissions and on that account, the development of sustainable concrete is urgently needed for environmental reasons. Self-healing bacterial concrete receives increasing attention in recent years and has ability of self-repair. In this present paper, various other self-healing techniques are described, and their respective pros and cons are tabulated. Healing mechanism of bacterial concrete, bacteria used in the concrete for crack repair their special characteristics, effect of bacteria on concrete properties, cost of bacterial concrete and various applications of self-healing bacterial concrete are also discussed.

In an ion beam plasma system, the effect of the magnetically quantized degenerate trapped electron (Particle) and positron (Antiparticle) on small-amplitude ion acoustic solitary waves are studied with the help of the Korteweg–de-Vries (K–dV) equation. Here, the magnetized positive ions and beam ions are considered as non-degenerate. The effect of magnetic quantization, degenerate temperature, normalized positron concentration, normalized ion beam concentration along with other relevant physical plasma parameters of the origin of astrophysical plasma environment, on solitary wave propagation is studied, especially in the non-linear regime. On the other hand, in the linear regime, the dependency of frequency and wave number on the above-mentioned plasma parameters are discussed. It is found that both compressive, as well as rarefactive type solitary waves can exist in such a plasma environment. Three different modes of propagation, the fast beam and slow beam mode and the inherent ion acoustic mode co-exist in such plasma system and the role of different degenerate plasma parameters on these wave modes are also discussed in detail. The normalized positron concentration and, velocity, as well as normalized ion beam concentration along with different degenerate plasma parameters, has an astounding control on the polarity of the solitary wave as well as the amount of compression and rarefaction, a typical plasma wave mode would undergo. Within the chosen degenerate and non-degenerate plasma parameters, for a compressive (rarefactive) fast beam mode, the slow mode appears as rarefactive (compressive). For some typical combinations of degenerate parameters, the fast mode can propagate with a hypersonic phase velocity which shows distinctive characteristics with positron density.

The ion acoustic (IA) solitary wave (SW) propagation in collisional plasma is presented, in presence of magnetic field. The considered plasma is consisting with mobile positive and negative ions and nonthermal electrons. Using the reductive perturbation technique, the basic set of fluid equations are reduced to a three-dimensional damped Zakharov–Kuznetsov (DZK) nonlinear wave equation. The dissipation generated by ion-neutral collision is taken into the consideration. It is observed that the solitary wave amplitude diminishes with time as the ion-neutral collision frequency increases. Also, the characteristic features of rarefactive solitary wave amplitudes are observed for the parameters like negative ion concentration ratio ( $$ \mu_{n} $$ μ n ) and nonthermal electrons ( $$ \alpha_{e} $$ α e ). This analysis is suitable for understanding the astrophysical plasma environments.

We know that mathematics has wide applications in the areas of environmental science, medical science, ecology, biology, etc. One very useful term in the problem of prey–predator relation is the Lotka–Volterra predator–prey equation. Especially the differential equation plays a very important role in all areas of science. But it is also true that maximum biological and chemical problems are defined in form of some unknown functions. Here, in this paper, an environmental case involving two related populations of prey and predator species is discussed. As the classic Lotka–Volterra assumptions are imaginary, it is assumed that there is logistic behavior for both the existing species. We see that the number of two populations are too much dependent on each other.

The features of the well-known tanh method and its detailed mechanism is discussed which is basically used to derive shock and solitons solutions of different non-linear trapped Burgers’, non-linear Burgers’ equation and different non-linear trapped K-P equation, as well as non-linear K-P equation. All the necessary mechanisms along with their procedures are discussed. We expect this article to be suitable for the targeted audience.

Free convection of an electrically conducting micropolar fluid past a permeable stretching surface is considered in the present analysis. The crux of the investigation is the study of velocity slip boundary condition that affects the flow behavior. In addition to that the temperature profile enhances with the inclusion of dissipative heat energy, thermal radiation and the heat generation/absorption parameter. Employing suitable similarity variables, the governing equations are transformed to nonlinear ODEs and numerical treatment such as fourth-order Runge-Kutta method in conjunction with shooting technique. Physical behavior of several contributing parameters for the flow phenomena, local skin-friction coefficient, the wall couple stress, and the local Nusselt number are presented via graphs and further described in the results and discussion section.

In this paper, we present a pair of iterative methods for solving a system of nonlinear equations. Both methods are constructed without using the second-order derivative. It is further shown that these iterative methods possess third and fifth order convergence respectively. Finally, some numerical experiments are given to confirm our theoretical findings.

The paper presents a comprehensive review of transverse vibration of axially travelling string. Axially travelling string includes many mechanical systems such as conveyor belt, aerial tramways, magnetic tapes, textile fibres, band-saw blades, thread lines and pipe conveying fluid. The analysis of transverse vibration of axially travelling string has theoretical as well as industrial significance because it is the simplest representation of the gyroscopic system. In the paper, the major emphasis is given on different types of modelling, the governing equations and the method of analysis of axially travelling string. In the discussion of linear model of axially travelling string, the paper describes about governing equation, modal analysis and response solution. In the discussion of non-linear model of axially travelling string, the paper discusses about governing equation, the method of analysis using direct perturbation method and the discretised perturbation method and numerical methods based on Galerkin discretization. A discussion is also made on the modelling of the dissipative mechanism by considering string as viscoelastic material based on Kelvin viscoelastic model. The paper also describes about linear and non-linear parametric excitation of axially travelling string which occurs due to tension and velocity fluctuation.

The aerodynamic characteristics of a hypersonic aircraft determine its trajectory and performance of flight, and the aerodynamic characteristics are impacted by the contour of the hypersonic aircraft.

The technology on non-contact measurement of wind tunnel is a new and advanced optical measurement technology. It has the advantages of non-contact, unchanged model contour, high precision, high resolution and high measurement efficiency, compared with traditional technology of sensor point measurement. The development of aircraft design requires wind tunnel tests to provide more accurate and comprehensive data. The technology on non-contact measurement of wind tunnel can not only improve data accuracy, but also improve test efficiency. It is an important development direction in the field of wind tunnel testing in the future.

This chapter reviews facets of the recent socio-economic history of Vietnam in an international context. The country has shown a remarkable transition from a low- to middle-income country. Vietnam has set ambitious economic and social development objectives, to continue these achievements. Trade has been a key ingredient in attaining government targets in past. the future trajectory remains uncertain. Important challenges to continue this growth arise from persistent low labour productivity, an aging society and endemic corruption.

Although the concept of setting aside specific pieces of land to be administered under different forms of low has been pursued for various reasons throughout history, the popularity of the special economic zone (SEZ) really took off when the Chinese government demonstrated that it was possible to use them as a means of raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty without making any concessions to political plurality. This chapter explores the ways in which Vietnam has sought to follow a similar path and the difficulties that have been encountered in trying to do so.

The aim of this chapter is to unpack Barack Obama’s foreign policy. It shows that Obama was not remarkably alternative to capitalism and the US ruling class establishment. Nonetheless, his global and regional worldviews have produced some discontinuities compared to the Bush and Trump administrations. In particular, the chapter lays several connected arguments. Obama, contrarily to the opinion of many observers, conducted a coherent grand strategy. This entailed a review of US strategic priorities based on a changing world order. The result was an off-shore balancing approach where pragmatism and diplomacy were preferred to democracy promotion and heavy military interventions. The practical effect of this approach was twofold. On the one hand, Obama sought to diminish the US commitment in the Middle East and Europe. On the other hand, he focused more on the Asia-Pacific with a comprehensive hedging strategy toward China that conflated military, economic, and diplomatic policies.

The aim of this chapter is two-fold. On the one hand, it reflects at an empirical level the first layer of the theoretical framework outlined in Chapter 1, the systemic level. This is the geopolitical context within which both Obama and Trump have had to lead US foreign policy. On the other hand, it provides an empirical analysis of how the post-Cold War order has evolved into a less US-friendly order. This chapter reviews debates on the crisis of the Liberal International Order and it develops an analysis of the changing balance of economic power between the United States and China. Then, it explores geopolitical dynamics in the Middle East, the Eurasian supercontinent, and the Indo-Pacific. It argues that the geopolitical world order has become post-American because of the uneven geographical development of capitalism and the rise of China is a highly strategic region of the world, the Western Pacific.

This chapter provides the reader with a picture of US grand strategy in order to help the reader navigating through Obama’s and Trump’s foreign policy in Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 . This task is achieved by exploring the history of US grand strategy, the debate on the US empire and the tension between economic and security interests. The chapter argues that US grand strategy is best conceptualized as a global sphere of influence that conflates global geoeconomic openness and national geopolitical primacy, and that different administrations will seek a different balance between these two interests. However, a crucial limit of the global sphere of influence is that it cannot function without integrating other national economies into the Liberal International Order. This dynamic leads to blowbacks such as the rise of geopolitical rivals which have to be contained. From this viewpoint China represents a formidable challenge to US grand strategy.

The aim of this chapter is to tackle Trump’s grand strategy. It is argued that although Trump was elected on an anti-globalist agenda, he did not ‘drain the swamp’ as he promised, nor he substantially undermined the pillars of post-WWII US grand strategy. Furthermore, the long-term objectives of his foreign policy were in continuity with those of Obama. Yet, the way Trump executed US grand strategy showed a great deal of tactical discontinuity compared to his predecessor. Based on his America First agenda, Trump pursued with equal energy to Obama a policy of off-shore balancing. He continued to maintain a posture of disengagement in the Middle East and Europe—with some contradictions—while choosing the Asia-Pacific and China as a priority. Yet, informed by his nationalist and conservative worldview, he did so by partnering up with Saudi Arabia, insulting European allies, and starting a trade war with Beijing.

The lack of a rigorous Marxian theory of the state and the international has caused much discussion about what a Marxist theory of imperialism and International Relations would look like. The aim of this chapter is threefold. Firstly, it makes the reader familiar with theories of and debates on imperialism in the early twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. Secondly, it reviews theories of imperialism seeking to highlight strengths and weaknesses. Thirdly, it provides the theoretical framework for the empirical chapters of the book. Ultimately, this chapter maintains that because capitalism develops unevenly at the spatial, institutional, and ideological level, a Marxist theory of the international can incorporate political concepts from mainstream theories of IR. It is suggested that such theory should develop an ‘operational code’ of political elites’ ideologies that accounts for their views of the geopolitical world order, capitalism and the ruling class, and power.

In this chapter, the author links high levels of youth anxiety with a security dilemma affecting people in the Global North. Using examples from Australia and Canada, it is argued that some wealthy societies experience a dual ontological-physical security dilemma whereby the enactment of a dominant national identity is directly linked to practices that harm the self and others. Meanwhile, political efforts to transform those identities pit younger people against older generations opposed to such change. The result is the (re)production of insecurity for everyone, but particularly younger people who will bear the brunt of current failures to effectively address the sources of contemporary global and human insecurity. Thus, a commitment to ontological security-seeking can result in the maintenance of harmful and destructive practices linked to that identity. The chapter ends by discussing the International Relations classroom as a site where security, state practices, national identity, anxious young people, and possibilities for social transformation intersect.

Staff development is not only the declared favourite activity of most HR professionals, but one of the few all-round positive terms in HR, indeed in the entire field of business administration. It involves the promotion and professional development of employees and thus aims to secure the future of the organisation. In order to achieve the necessary qualifications, employees are taught knowledge, mindsets, behaviours and skills. In addition to the benefits that the supervisor and, as the case may be, the entrepreneur as the employer expect from it, the career and the employability of the employee are also at stake. When it comes to imparting skills, the age factor in staff development has several facets: This is reflected in the fact that an employee who is 55 years old today is unlikely to still be working productively in 10 years’ time unless they engage in continuous training; or because the same 55-year-old will not absorb new knowledge in the same way as a 25-year-old. And finally: do training initiatives after a certain age still pay off from an organisational point of view?

Quantitative, financial models of any kind and for any purpose have in common the use of probabilistic time series, being therefore concerned by the points developed in Chaps. 1 and 2 , that is, by stationarity and accuracy of the selected data. To these two issues, we ought to add a third one, that is to say, the quality of the model: to what extent is its output fitting with its objective, in an accurate way? This concern is called model risk. Indeed, any such model must be based in practice on a set of hypotheses as realistic as possible, destined to more or less simplify—to make it tractable—its formulation. All the more, for models in the field of social sciences, involving human behavior. Both stationarity and accuracy features are considered in modelling asset spot prices, derivative prices, forecasting tools such as the ARCH family models, and the particular case of credit derivatives.

It is widely believed that populists benefit from crisis situations. This chapter discusses the literature on crises and populism from a theoretical perspective and provides a novel framework of analysis for addressing the study of the COVID-19 crisis in the light of its (de)politicization. This framework allows the study of the politicization of the COVID-19 issue by populists looking at the divide between the political and the non-political status of the issue, disputes about different stakes and their relative priority in managing the crisis, and issue-specific and policy-related contentions about COVID-19. The general research question is whether populists in Europe used the COVID-19 issue to gain centrality in the political field and/or to push forward new opposition lines. A further related question is to pinpoint whether populists reacted in a similar way across countries or whether they adapted their response according to their institutional role.

The staff management process begins with the effective deployment of employees. But what is effective? Does it mean effective in relation to the current needs of the department, or indeed the company? Or does it relate more to the individual employee? Managerial work primarily involves wide-ranging communication processes in which the manager must listen and provide continuous feedback to their employees. How frequently and in what form should this be done? What significance does remuneration have for the management process and what role does the line manager play in this? Here too, we need to take the changes in the labour market into account and soften the rigid rules of the past in favour of a situation-specific approach to individual needs.Diversity management as a management concept does not aim to eliminate differences within the workforce in terms of age or ethnic origin, but rather strives to use them in a targeted manner as strategic success factors.And last but not least, what role does the company culture play in managing employees? Especially in difficult times, such as the current coronavirus crisis, the sensitivity of managers is very much called for—because leadership ultimately also means ensuring the well-being of employees. Dealing with the individual work-life balance of their staff will be one of the most important challenges facing managers today.

This book is concerned with restorative justice conferencing embedded within the prosecution of environmental offending and not as an alternative to it (a back-end model). This chapter will explore three case studies of conferencing in this context—Canterbury Regional Council v Interflow (NZ) Ltd [2015] NZDC 3323 (Canterbury, New Zealand; water pollution); and, Garrett v Williams (2007) 151 LGERA 92 and Chief Executive, Office of Environment and Heritage v Clarence Valley Council (2018) 236 LGERA 291 (New South Wales, Australia), cases involving Aboriginal cultural heritage. These New South Wales cases are the only examples of restorative justice conferencing in the prosecution of environmental offending in Australia. Collectively, these cases provide guidance for the future use of restorative justice conferencing in an environmental offending context.

A binary conceptualisation of justice is achieved in the prosecution of environmental offending with minimal to no offender and victim voice, interaction, and input, leading to the questioning of the sufficiency of that binary conceptualisation. Drawing on various approaches to harm under green criminology (environmental justice, ecological justice, climate justice, species justice, and earth jurisprudence/deep ecology) a third conceptualisation of justice is devised—justice as meaningful involvement. As well as exploring justice as meaningful involvement, this chapter explores how it can be achieved through restorative justice conferencing. Vital for its acceptance amongst the legal profession, government and judiciary is the fact that conferencing does not displace justice as procedure and justice as outcome, thereby leading to the achievement of justice as a tripartite conceptualisation.

This chapter conceptualises the work of environmental/green victimology and its focus on victims of environmental harm. Green criminology has been slow to engage with victims of environmental harm and crime. This may be a result of the view that environmental crime is not real crime, in that it is not intrinsically bad because some harm to the environment is lawful and licensed. It may also derive from the fact that it may take many years for the effects of the offending to be felt and therefore is viewed by some as victimless. This means that many victims of environmental crime will not be recognised as such, will not participate in the resolution of the crime, and will not receive compensation for the harm suffered.

The rapid transformation in technology has led to an increase in options and similar products for consumers, and therefore, consumers have the chance to access products faster and easier. For this reason, branding is an important concept for marketing activities that affect consumers’ purchasing decisions. In product and service marketing, brands’ logos are among the main distinguishing features of that product or service. Logos become the brand’s identity and play a role in helping consumers distinguish the brand from other competitors. In this study, the question of how the brands with high brand value applied the logo design change in the context of simplification strategies was started. For this purpose, logo design changes of the most valuable brands in different segments of the world have been investigated in order to obtain data about the role of brand value on brand logo redesign. In order to collect the products of the luxury segments under a single logo, they chose simple, large font, and legible designs, and global brands choose a logo that minimizes the risks that may arise in the global competition, and food businesses use designs consisting of lively, colorful, and brand products.

Chino Basin includes a large area of designated critical habitat for endangered species, which is also a valuable wetland and green space in the middle of the heavily urbanized and developed landscape. State and federal agencies along with local actors including the Chino Basin Watermaster have implemented an adaptive management program for habitat conservation efforts for threatened and endangered species in Chino Basin. In addition, there are several groundwater contamination sites (“plumes”) in Chino Basin, which have necessitated the development of pumping and treatment options to contain and remediate them. Protecting and improving groundwater quality in the basin has become part of the location and operation of the desalter facilities described in Chap. 11 . Overall, Chino Basin groundwater management has had to adapt to and incorporate contamination remediation and habitat preservation.

This is the first in a sequence of chapters focusing explicitly on the adaptive management of Chino Basin under the OBMP and Peace Agreement. It begins with the continued urbanization process and its effects on water use, groundwater recharge, and wastewater production. These were all important drivers to which groundwater management in Chino Basin had to adapt. Another was the changes to the price and reliability of imported water supplies. Those supplies had become important elements of water supply and basin management in the second half of the twentieth century, but by the 2000s it was apparent that they were becoming uncertain as well as more expensive. One way of adapting to that circumstance was increased reliance on the reuse of treated wastewater, but that came with its own constraints and challenges. Another adaptation has been a renewed investment in facilities for stormwater capture for basin replenishment, through the implementation of a Recharge Master Plan, with periodic updates. Another adaptive management program was designed and initiated for understanding and stopping land subsidence. Together, these new endeavors illustrate the more active and adaptive approach to basin management while also highlighting how demanding it is.

Conflict and compromise with downstream water users in Orange County, California, has been a defining characteristic of and shaping influence on groundwater use and management in Chino Basin. The period from the 1930s through the 1950s described in this chapter featured recurring litigation with Orange County interests, which spurred further organization and collaboration among Chino Basin water users including the formation of numerous water districts. Groundwater reliance in Chino Basin intensified, which contributed to the beginnings of groundwater overdraft there. By the mid-1900s, studies by the California Department of Water Resources sharpened water users’ understanding of what was and was not possible in terms of the development and use of local supplies and contributed to the start of imported water use in the Santa Ana River watershed.

One critical and ongoing challenge of groundwater management in Chino Basin has been balancing on one hand the need and desire to avoid excessive groundwater depletion and, on the other hand, the need to avoid exporting excessive and/or poor quality water from the basin and creating negative impacts on the Santa Ana River and water users downstream. Groundwater quality throughout the watershed is regulated by the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board. In the 2000s, Chino Basin parties, led by the Chino Basin Watermaster and Inland Empire Utilities Agency, negotiated with the Regional Board to design a new approach to basin management known as Hydraulic Control. This management concept involved adjusting groundwater levels within the basin to limit the outflow of poorer quality groundwater, increasing the extraction, treatment, and reuse of degraded groundwater, and enlarging the reuse of treated urban wastewater for groundwater recharge. Building, financing, and expanding the groundwater treatment facilities – known as “desalters” – and reaching agreement among the Chino Basin parties about how to lower groundwater levels in part of the basin, maintain groundwater levels in the rest of the basin, and allocate the costs and benefits of the new management approach led to the negotiation and adoption of “Peace II,” a set of additional agreements added to the earlier Peace Agreement.

A core element of adaptive groundwater management is revisiting and reassessing basin conditions, in order to determine whether aggregate levels of pumping can be sustained or need to be adjusted. Conflict is likely to arise if basin yield that is available for use has to be reset downward and pumpers have to share in the reduction. In the 2010s, the reevaluation of Chino Basin’s yield resulted in a recommended downward adjustment, which triggered a lengthy process of difficult negotiation which included court filings. Another downward adjustment was made in 2020. Also during 2018–2020, Chino Basin leaders and stakeholders undertook updates to the Optimum Basin Management Program (OBMP), and the development of a Storage Management Plan in light of numerous changes that have occurred since 2000. This chapter covers these recent episodes in Chino Basin’s experience with the realities of adaptive management.

Although the controversy of the 1990s focused on the identity and composition of the watermaster, the broader issues were about the overall approach to managing the basin. From 1998 through 2000, the parties and other stakeholders in Chino Basin forged a new management program – the Optimum Basin Management Program (OBMP) – and negotiated a “Peace Agreement” that provided a framework for how they would implement it. It was the launch of an adaptive groundwater management approach in Chino Basin. The OBMP and Peace Agreement embodied a more active approach to managing water levels, basin replenishment, the reuse of treated wastewater, the improvement of water quality, and redressing land subsidence. It would require an intensive data gathering and analysis effort, actions on multiple issues – some simultaneously, some sequentially – and continual monitoring, feedback, and adjustment.

In Art. 107 Abs. 2 und Abs. 3 AEUV ist ein Katalog von Ausnahmebestimmungen enthalten, der abschließend ist. Dabei differenziert der Vertrag zwischen zwingenden und fakultativen Ausnahmen. Liegt einer der in Art. 107 Abs. 2 AEUV genannten Tatbestände vor, so sind die insoweit gewährten Beihilfen bereits von Vertrags wegen mit dem Binnenmarkt vereinbar. Art. 107 Abs. 3 AEUV enthält dagegen Tatbestände, in denen die Kommission Beihilfen für zulässig erklären kann. Die Genehmigung dieser Beihilfen ist insoweit in das Ermessen der Kommission gestellt. Von großer praktischer Bedeutung sind hierbei die Tatbestände, die wirtschaftliche Gründe für die ausnahmsweise Zulässigkeit von Beihilfen umschreiben (Art. 107 Abs. 3 lit. a)–c) AEUV).

Nach Art. 107 Abs. 1 AEUV sind staatliche oder aus staatlichen Mitteln gewährte Beihilfen gleich welcher Art, die durch die Begünstigung bestimmter Unternehmen oder Produktionszweige die Wirtschaft verfälschen oder zu verfälschen drohen, mit dem Binnenmarkt unvereinbar, soweit sie den Handel zwischen Mitgliedstaaten beeinträchtigen. Tatbestandliche Grundvoraussetzung für das Eingreifen dieses Verbots ist, dass eine Beihilfe vorliegt. Der Wortlaut dieser Vorschrift enthält jedoch keine Legaldefinition des Begriffs der Beihilfe. Diese ist auch nirgendwo anders im AEUV zu finden.

Wie die unternehmensbezogenen Wettbewerbsregeln verlangt das Beihilfenverbot eine Verfälschung des Wettbewerbs. Sie muss zumindest drohen. Damit muss sie ebenso wenig wie im Rahmen des Kartellverbots tatsächlich eingetreten sein, sondern nur absehbar bevorstehen. Dass in Art. 107 Abs. 1 AEUV die Bezweckung einer Wettbewerbsverfälschung nicht eigens genannt wird, ist von daher unschädlich. Wird sie nämlich bezweckt, droht sie regelmäßig, außer es handelt sich um einen untauglichen Versuch. Dann aber fehlt schon die Eignung, die auch im Rahmen von Art. 101 Abs. 1 AEUV vorliegen muss. Dass die Begriffe der Verhinderung und Einschränkung des Wettbewerbs fehlen, verkürzt den Tatbestand deshalb nicht, weil die Verfälschung im Rahmen von Art. 101 Abs. 1 AEUV den Auffangbegriff bildet.

In the digital age, cities are more and more organized around platform economies. These digitally based platforms are redefining urban life and transforming our relationship with space and people, with the consequences becoming more and more evident, currently even exacerbated by the Covid-19 crisis.The aim of this article is therefore to analyze the ongoing transformation, using the 3-P-Model, developed in the book Three Pillars of Organization and Leadership in Disruptive Times: Navigating Your Company Successfully Through the 21st Century Business World (Wollmann, P.; Kühn, F.: Kempf, M. (Ed.) (2020); Cham/CH: Springer Nature), and identify the urban dimension of platform economy leaders, such as Airbnb, to measure its economic and social impact.The first part of the article focuses on some generic characters of the business model of platform economy leaders such as the model’s creative aspects, its geographical dimensions, and its global nature.The second part focuses on the costs and benefits of an urban economy based on digital platforms and, in particular, the case of Airbnb. Through a theoretical analysis of the case of Venice city, we investigate different issues like the production of a monoculture industry linked to tourism; the “digital gentrification” of the urban centers linked to the increase in costs of living and housing prices, changing employment dynamics; and the “devitalization” of public space.On the basis of the preceding considerations, the final section attempts to give some different governmental and entrepreneurial responses to the consequences of the platform economy business model.It is becoming evident how important broad discussions on the real sustainable purpose of cities to be strived for by the city authorities are, how difficult the journey is that cities are going through at present with the platform economies as a driver, how critically some influences of platform economy business have to be highlighted, and what this demands of all stakeholders: authorities, citizens, and the public and private sectors.

In this chapter, the editors consider the key outcomes of the articles in the book and analyze which fundamental results are common in the articles, which exciting and surprising additions or new facets to complete the Three-Pillar Model (abbreviated: 3-P-Model) or make it better applicable were developed, and which new 3-P-perspectives are worthy of further more detailed consideration in the future. The chapter contains both a cross-chapter section with general and fundamental results at a higher level and a part containing the most striking results per chapter.

A compass for the travelling organization helps to keep an eye on the resources and their connectivity inside the company, but also includes the connectivity with the ecosystem and the wider environment; both are described in this article as multidirectional connectivity. A collaborative process of building and using the compass ensures a shared entrepreneurial mindset and supports the commitment to the joint journey, which is here understood as organizational transformation toward a transformative organization—far beyond any well-known experiences of continuous improvement or episodic change traumata. The Three-Pillar Model proved helpful to understand and frame the considerations in this article.

The editors explain that the structure of the book is strongly based on the defined categories for detailed cases on the three-pillar model (abbreviated in the following as “3-P-Model”) application as a further development of the approaches and experiences previously published in Three Pillars for Organization and Leadership in Disruptive Times: Navigating Your Company Successfully Through the 21st Century Business World (Wollmann et al. 2020), i.e., on the one hand, extending the scope to the public sector, for example, and, on the other hand, focusing more strongly on concretization and practical application in various industries.The editors give a brief overview of the key content and outcome of the various contributions, frame them, and highlight links between articles. This chapter is important for the reader to decide which articles are most interesting for them and in which order they want to explore the broad spectrum of articles in the book.

On the base of their broad industry experiences in different companies, Marie Theres Schmidt and Dieter Fellner developed a case study on challenges faced by fast-growing MedTech companies. The continuous strive for breakthrough medical innovations requires an agile mindset and the readiness to embrace change. Global demographic changes lead to a growing demand for innovative diagnostic and treatment options in the coming years inducing MedTech companies to explore the space while growing fast. At the same time, the medical device market will face increasing regulation to contain healthcare costs and safeguard patients’ safety requiring companies to respond to changing conditions.Regular assessment of the level of agility and resilience is key for fast-growing organizations to successfully manage the growth journey. Leaders of these organizations should establish reflection cycles to monitor success. As an outcome of Marie’s and Dieter’s experiences, the Three-Pillar Model (3-P-Model) (Wollmann, Kühn, Kempf, Three pillars of organization and leadership in disruptive times – Navigating your company successfully through the 21st century business world. Cham: Springer Nature, 2020) can be applied to facilitate the reflection cycles and emphasize challenges of the organization connected to the growth journey. This is illustrated in the interview which evaluates the three pillars based on the authors’ individual leadership experience in fast-growing organizations. The interview reveals companies’ persistent focus on improving patients’ lives as a sustainable purpose connecting employees around the globe on their joint mission. It further highlights that the sustainable purpose becomes an individual and organizational compass: the sustainable purpose provides employees with a tool, or rather an ethical standard, to respond to unforeseen changes. Thereby, the organization preserves its agility to react quickly to uncertainties and remains competitive through the ability of fast adaption to change. A strong sustainable purpose that is deeply embedded in the company’s DNA is key to ensure personal commitment and joint success on the growth journey—and frames cross-functional connectivity in fast-developing organizations.Consequently, fast-growing MedTech companies should thoroughly invest in keeping their sustainable purpose present in all areas and accessible to all employees.From a leader’s perspective: the better a fast-growing company can maintain its DNA, the more successfully and sustainably it will grow.

A subsidiary of a large enterprise goes on an innovation journey developing a new business model with the focus on consumer needs as drivers for growth and success, with the aim of becoming a fast-growing European player with international market leaders as key clients. This presupposes a significant transformation in various dimensions (purpose, vision and strategy, culture and mindset, cooperation, capabilities and skills, operations and systems/tools, etc.) for which the 3-P-Model can be perfectly applied. Especially the leadership approach or mindset as requirements for a hybrid organization—an agile start-up-like unit in a classic hierarchical organization—are of particular interest.

The authors shed light on the particularities in the setup and the development of regional subsidiaries of globally operating pharmaceutical companies and explore the relevance of the Three-Pillar Model (Wollmann, Kühn, Kempf, Three pillars of organization and leadership in disruptive times. Cham. Springer, 2020) (abbreviated: 3-P-Model). Geographic expansion brings a multitude of challenges; various internal and external factors limit the flexibility in shaping the subsidiary organization, while the diverse workforce becomes the melting pot for different expectations, motivations, feelings, and experiences. Especially the combination of the entrepreneurial mindset that characterizes a start-up with the highly regulated business environment and the traditional way of working in the pharmaceutical industry bears the risk of confusion, conflicts, and disruption of organizational development. Navigating the subsidiary organization into a successful future requires a commonly understood direction and the full alignment of leadership team and workforce on the “sustainable purpose.” The dynamic growth of the organization demands the ongoing integration of new roles and assets but also of strategic elements and processes to ensure “connecting resources.” Both “sustainable purpose” and “connecting resources” require continuous updating and adaptation to the current phase of the development journey to provide consistency and clarity for the “travelling organization.”

The authors underline the relevance of the three pillars as constituent factors in an organizational system and in daily work. In addition, the Three-Pillar Model in the reflection of the organizational system has significantly helped those involved to check and further optimize their work. The article describes in detail how a traveling organization is managed within an educationally, socially, and politically determined system. It reports on a municipal enterprise which offers and coordinates services such as daycare for children and family centers. The teams working there pursue a clear purpose based on an advanced educational concept. Connecting resources here means harmonizing efficient processes and daily working practice, continuously networking the expectations and participation of various stakeholders from children and parents to administration and politics.

Local cultures and populations finally had the chance to recover their independence and their identity, even if in a slightly ambiguous manner: the current figures of the five “stans” evidence a mix of aspects and opportunities but risks as well. The heritage of the Soviet system did indeed prove to be easier to overcome than expected (at least for aspects concerning any material impact), and the local independent states have finally been able undertake a journey of stabilization and progress.

Sometimes, human processes have a tendency to accelerate, a fact which induces unavoidable asymmetries, since the changes usually occur on different scales, in different moments and in different spaces: it is the situation which typically characterizes modernity and which, originally induced by a set of practical and technological changes, would soon exert further effects on many dimensions of the geographical reality. Colonial expansionism, and further modernist changes, would represent the major aspects of such processes, involving and affecting almost the whole world. Russian colonialism and then Soviet domination represented the main actors of these epochal changes in the CA. However, after three-quarters of a century, the Soviet empire also collapsed, leaving local populations and institutions without any reference for territorial and social organization or for cultural elaborations either. In fact, Russian and Soviet domination penetrated deep into the local cultures, so any impact, either material or immaterial, from the collapse would continue to exert an effect for an extended period.

In spite of its spatial extension and the absence of transport routes, the CA area played a central role—actually a crossroad—between the different Eurasian civilizations. Migration movements of nomadic and sedentary populations affected this region and they represented the inner core of the Silk Road, the most important commercial route between China and the West. During the centuries of the Ancient and Middle Age, two particular trends characterized the Central Asian political and socio-economic dimension: the presence and the co-existence of the nomadic and sedentary lifestyle. The process of settlement was not irreversible in this area where different types of ways of living could cyclically change. Furthermore, settled and nomadic population interacted and influenced each other in cultural and social terms and they occasionally established symbiotic relations in different timeframes of history. Due to its geographical location, Central Asia assumed a role of economic and cultural link between Asiatic cultures, especially Chinese and Indian, and Europe. The transit of most important trade routes in the world through CA was an important catalyst to regional economic development. Moreover, it represented the place where technological innovations were transmitted from east to west and vice versa. Finally, it was the meeting point of different religions and traditions, which imprinted an indelible mark on the regional culture. It is interesting to analyse the history of Central Asia since the ancient times, particularly focusing on socio-economic elements, which characterized the region throughout the centuries.

CA reality maintains a characteristic of high mobility in all senses, from a human and material point of view as well as from a cultural point of view: values, communication modes, habits, expectations, cults and religious rituals represent the basic elements of a society, but they also represent the more difficult variables that must be studied, possibly because they assume, by definition, an immaterial dimension. The basic characteristic of the current cultural pattern is characterized by two opposite tendencies, one of opening up (mainly induced by information and communications technology [ICT], international commerce and globalization) and the other is completely the opposite, of politically locking-in, prefiguring a kind of neo-national ideology—but not without its contradictions.

The human and ecologic dimensions of Central Asia (CA) are rapidly changing; this fact is due, to some extent, to the stress affecting the physical environment, characterized by endorheic conditions and continentalism, and by other elements, deriving from political-cultural changes and transformations; above all, the position of this region, considering the technological, geo-political and geo-economic situation, makes these countries appear as central or peripheral compared to the wider Eurasiatic spaces. In fact, the significance of this region has been changing continuously. In its history it has often just been a remote and neglected land. In other cases, it has been the target of expansionism, a space and cache of resources to be exploited. Seldom has it been regarded as the cradle of original cultures, which would exert their influence on the wider world.

The populations, in order to acquire a better degree of organization, aim at giving shape to the processes which characterize their life; they establish borders and further territorial elements, in order to give continuity to their actions, creating nations, states, infrastructures, regulations and whatever may be useful to stabilize a certain political configuration. Unfortunately, the geopolitical containers they use may have become obsolete—since reality continuously changes—making territorial states something to be considered as imperfect in principle. Therefore, societies are forced to pursue some new kind of dialogue continuously, on all levels, inside the sovereign state, transversally and internationally, in order to find a solution for problems which are ongoing and, which would otherwise be impossible to solve.

Reality is the continuation and development of history, and civilization is the accumulation and update of history. The ecological civilization campaign is the grandest undertaking and the most complicated and massive program in the modern world. China being the first country to propose the development of ecological civilization is both imperative and inevitable. The cause, though started in our generation, will benefit many generations to come. We should try to have a comprehensive and deep understanding of the immense and profound significance of this campaign from a historical perspective, so as to come to a thorough and correct judgment.

It has been 27 years since international climate governance was established in 1992 when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, hereafter referred to as the Convention) was signed following the enhanced climate and environmental awareness of the international community in the 1980s.

As the world is going through profound changes never seen in a century, the human civilization is also switching from industrial civilization to ecological civilization. Upholding the basic governance philosophy of ecological civilization and guided by the Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, especially the Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization, the CPC Central Committee with Xi Jinping at the core has materialized historic, epochal and all-round changes in China’s ecological civilization by promoting the green initiative of building a beautiful China.

On June 7, 2019, President Xi Jinping delivered a speech titled “Insisting on Sustainable Development and Creating a Prosperous World” at the 23rd plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

The year 2019 marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Over the past 70 years, China has promulgated a full range of environmental laws, developed an environmental legislative system with Chinese characteristics, actively participated in global environmental governance, and led the world onto the path towards environmental rule of law. A review of the 70-year history of building the environmental rule of law and an analysis of the context in which the environmental rule of law has evolved over the years can help us build confidence in the environmental rule of law in the new era and is of profound significance to China’s efforts to accelerate the development of the environmental rule of law in the new era, improve the environmental legislative system, and achieve the goals of the Beautiful China campaign.

The emergence of an industrial civilization is the historical roots of all modern conflicts. On the one hand, as Friedrich Engels said, it not only promotes the progress of material civilization, but also is conducive to the development of spiritual civilization. On the other hand, while advancing the capitalist civilization, the industrial civilization overly exploited natural resources, showing a strong anthropocentric tendency, which ultimately would lead to a deterioration of the balance between man and nature. The anthropocentric tendency of an industrial civilization emphasizes the conquest of nature by humans. This tendency allows humans to set rules for the world with peace of mind, and use such rules to develop and utilize the natural world, treating nature as a source of wealth instead of a friend.

Zero-waste city represents a model of sustainable urban development, which aims to build an ecological civilization and follows the new development concepts featuring innovation, coordination and green development.

The 18th National Congress of the CPC proposed the path of ecological civilization for China, the first time the banner of ecological civilization was held up in the world and marking a milestone in the twenty-first century. It demonstrates the confidence and commitment of the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core for seeking a path different from the western path of industrial civilization with eastern wisdom to adapt to the requirements of the times.

Ever since the 18th National Congress of the CPC, ecological civilization has been comprehensively implemented as a major national strategy with great progress made in environmental protection. Under the rigorous supervision and guidance of the central government, pollution sources have been shut down and sludge and garbage piled up for a long time quickly cleared away, but environmental problems have kept re-emerging as they also reflect social issues.

Environmental protection in China formally started 40 years ago in the 1970s. On the one hand, China has made remarkable strides in both development and environmental protection; on the other hand, it is still under tremendous environmental pressure. The country still has a long way to go before it can truly achieve green, low-carbon and sustainable development. Domestic and international environment has changed and China has much more to do to continuously promote the development of an ecological civilization and home and abroad while maintaining high-quality social and economic development.

Increasingly recognized by the international community, the Chinese paradigm for the building and development of ecological civilization provides a direction and approach for global transition from industrial civilization to ecological civilization. China has done a great job in low-carbon development and climate change mitigation, and has made outstanding contributions to achieving the Millennium Development Goals set by the United Nations. At the heart of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development are five dimensions—people, planet, prosperity, peace and partnership, collectively known as the 5P’s—for achieving harmony between man and nature. We can say that the action plan proposed in the Agenda goes beyond the three pillars of “economy, society, and environment” under industrial civilization, and it involves China’s great contributions to establishing ecological civilization. If industrial civilization could be regarded as a revolutionary innovation in human development by the West, then China’s building of ecological civilization would be a fundamental contribution to global sustainable development by adding Eastern wisdom to the cause.

The industrial civilization doubtlessly represents huge progress of mankind, but as traditional industrial mode is unsustainable, ecological civilization has become the only choice to achieve sustainable development. When we discuss ecological civilization, one typical thinking is to equate it with green industrial civilization, which hopes to resolve environmental problems through technological progress under the traditional industrial mode.

Civilization is the progress and development of human society and human nature that symbolizes the advanced cultural state and values of mankind. As the focus of ecological study has shifted to institutions and theories, the concept of ecology has also shifted from an ecological system to one that respects and integrates the laws of ecosystems.

The Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization lays the fundamental guideline for China to construct its environmental public interest litigation (EPIL) system. To follow Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization is to consciously implement its scientific outlook on nature, on ecological democracy, on green development, and on law-based ecological protection in the construction and improvement of the EPIL system. To this end, we must continue to safeguard the public interest and uphold the democratic concept of co-governance for all, prioritize prevention, safeguard national ecological security, scientifically construct a public interest litigation (PIL) system and improve relevant measures. The ultimate goal is to make EPIL a powerful weapon for building a beautiful China, a key to joint environmental protection for all, and an important means for the people’s courts to participate in state governance.

At the National Conference on Eco-environmental Protection, General Secretary Xi Jinping said “environment is a major political issue which bears upon the mission and purpose of the CPC.” This was a solemn and thought-provoking remark in that it not only directly connected environmental protection and ecological progress with the Party’s properties for the first time, but also elevated them to the highest political level.

Man has only one earth, which we didn’t inherit from our forebears but borrowed from our offspring. The current generation should never live on what our ancestors have created while leaving troubles to later generations. The four great ancient civilizations of Egypt, Babylon, India, and China all began in regions with thick forests, abundant water, and fertile soil. About 3000–4000 years ago, man established resplendent civilizations by large rivers, including China by the Yellow River, ancient Egypt by the Nile, ancient Babylon by the Tigris–Euphrates river system, and India by Indian River, which have been internationally acknowledged as one of the four major civilizations. Natural disasters and human activities caused the dramatic deterioration of ecology and sent the civilizations of ancient Egypt, ancient Babylon, ancient India and Maya from peak to perishing. Man has only one earth and protecting it is our common responsibility. There are many different nations, states, interest groups, religious beliefs and social systems in the world. What common interests and consensus do we have to maintain such a world of great diversity? Ecological civilization and sustainable development are the only way to make humans live together in harmony and rationally choose a common future. Man and earth are a community with a shared future, in which all countries should join hands to build ecological civilization. Major countries in particular should fulfill their responsibilities as such.

The convening of the first National Environmental Protection Conference in August 1973 marked the beginning of modern environmental governance in China. Almost all retrospective studies on environmental protection in China regard this conference as the starting point of modern environmental governance in the country, while, due to the lack of information and other reasons, environmental protection activities prior to this conference are rarely discussed. Even if there is such discussion, the information given is usually quite vague. However, in fact, without the long-term efforts made by the Chinese government in environmental protection before the conference, it would be difficult for the country to kick-start the environmental efforts in the modern sense smoothly in 1973. This article aims to deepen people’s understanding of China’s environmental protection efforts before the first National Environmental Protection Conference. We have found and examined sufficient historical records on the environmental protection efforts of the Chinese government during that period, and laid out the characteristics of different stages and the connections of these efforts with environmental protection activities after the second National Environmental Protection Conference.

Gansu is located at the intersection of the Loess Plateau, the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and the Inner Mongolian Plateau, and within the catchments of the Yangtze River, the Yellow River and the inland river. It is an important water conservation and replenishment region for the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, and also a blocking area where the Tengger, Badain Jaran and Kumtag Deserts converge and turn southwards.

Development without protection is fishing by draining the pond; protection without development is seeking fish from trees. As ecological civilization is a new form of civilization marking the orientation of the twenty-first century, its primary criterion is without doubt the advanced productive force.

1. Zhi Shen, that is, Xiu Shen, self-management, refers to self-cultivation, character-building, and strive to improve our own ideological ethics and knowledge. There are three ways to Zhi Shen: zheng xin cheng yi (rectify heart and be sincere in thoughts), Wei Xue(to learn) and Xiu Xing. Xiu xing can also be summed up as three layers. The first layer is focusing on oneself-self-cultivation and the self-improvement of leaders. The second layer is emphasising on regulating the family and ruling the state, focusing on others-self-cultivation, leaders manage lower-level managers; the third layer is to focus on the whole world- to cultivate ourselves and leaders to manage the whole enterprise. 2. Xiu De includes the virtue of getting along with others and the way of life. The virtue of getting along with others includes honesty, trustworthiness, learning from other’s strength, courage, and determination. The way of life includes the unity of words and deeds, courtesy, benevolence, and loving others. 3. Xiu Xue includes three levels of learning: the cultivation of learning ability, the cultivation of professional skills, and the study of systematic thinking. 4. There are five ways to cultivate learning ability: learning a wide range of knowledge, questioning things you learn, thinking carefully, telling right from wrong, and applying knowledge into real life. The cultivation of professional skills includes mastery and intensive learning. The learning of systematic thinking includes: Li Zhi, that is to cultivate the purpose of learning; Bo Xue, that is to cultivate the integrity of learning; Jian Chi, that is to cultivate the organic relevance of learning; Guan Lian, that is to cultivate the dynamics of learning. 5. Xiu Xing includes self-awareness, which is the awakening of self-consciousness; self-discipline, self-restraint; Shu Qing, that is to empathize, and you will feel the same. 6. Zi Xing includes three levels of content: self-knowledge, learning from other people and history. Self-discipline means being strict with oneself and treating people with tolerance. Shu Qing means distinguishing between right and wrong and being friendly to others.

1. This chapter thinks that the management of the relationship between man and nature mainly includes three parts “Complying with the Tao” (Management Based on Tao), “Following with the Rules” (Management Based on Rules), “Emphasizing the Methods” (Management Based on Methods). In the subordinate branches of Chinese management principles, these three parts are logically closely integrated and inseparable. The relationship between man and nature is the premise of all relations. Only by dealing with the relationship between them can we better handle the relationship between human and society and between human and human. 2. Shun Tao is based on the correct understanding of the world’s Tao to follow Tao’s requirements and achieve certain governance objectives of management behavior. Following the Rules is the management process in which the manager implements the management behavior, conforms to the development rules, and achieves a certain goal according to an effective way. Emphasizing on Methods is to use a variety of effective management methods, combined with the situation at the time to practice and explore, so that management behavior can fully play its role. 3. In the process of dealing with the relationship between human and nature, we should proceed from the integrity of things, use effective and expedient management methods, follow the development trend of the laws of nature, society and humanity, seize the opportunity and favorable situation, and constantly innovate, so as to make the management process more effective and reasonable. 4. In the practical management, people should constantly improve their cognitive ability and level, and improve their personal accomplishment; It is necessary to follow the development direction of the natural law, achieve the harmony between man and nature, and constantly create favorable opportunities and situations so that the internal mechanism of nature can be used in human management activities.

1. The management thoughts of the Pre-Qin period mainly include Confucianism represented by Confucius, Legalism, Taoism represented by Lao Tzu, Mohism and military thought represented by Sun Tzu, which all have great influence on the formation and development of the management thoughts of the later generations. 2. The management thoughts from Qin Dynasty to Tang Dynasty cover administration, economy, military affairs, culture and so on, showing the characteristics of inheritance and development. 3. The basic characteristic of the management thought from the Song Dynasty to the Pre-Qing Dynasty is people-oriented and the Confucianism-oriented thought of governing the country. 4. In the late Qing Dynasty, different classes had their own opinions. The landlord class reformers were the pioneers in seeking the truth of saving the country from the West; the Westernizes put forward the idea of “strengthening oneself” and “seeking wealth”; the bourgeois reformers put forward the reform measures to establish a bourgeois constitutional monarchy state; and the bourgeois revolutionaries put forward the idea of “striving for prosperity”. The macro management thought characterized by “the Three People’s Principles”. 5. The most distinctive management thought in the period of the Republic of China was the enterprise management thought of the national bourgeoisie entrepreneurs, which fused the Western scientific management thought with the Chinese traditional management thought and created the modern national bourgeoisie enterprise management model with Chinese characteristics. 6. During the period from 1949 when New China was founded to 1978 before the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, the study of enterprise management in China kicked start and was gradually established. In 1960, Mao Zedong instructed the Charter of the An Gang Company. 7. In 1961, the work of the state-owned industrial enterprises bill (namely industrial seventy) was promulgated. Before and after 1958 and in 1969, China has carried out two large-scale enterprise reform attempts and expanded the autonomy of enterprises to a certain extent. 8. During the period of enterprise transformation, the management model of the enterprise changed from production to production and operation. At the same time, it introduces and learns advanced management experience and methods from abroad. The content of management theory is gradually enriched and perfected. 9. Since 1992, under the new environment of building the socialist market economic system and the trend of global economic development, the focus of Chinese management has shifted to the reform of state-owned enterprises; the building of management talent teams; the strategy of “going out”; the strategy of overseas investment of Chinese enterprises; the encouragement of non-public ownership of businesses and the development of Chinese private enterprises; the strategy of independent innovation and the upgrading of strategic structure of Chinese enterprises.

1. Situation refers to the relative or combination of situations in each period. Situational management is a management process that analyzes, takes measures, and corrects these specific situations. Situational change has three basic characteristics: continuity, direction, and diversity, and has the basic characteristics of predictability, changeability, and prone to mutation. 2. Situation is influenced by many factors. It can be roughly divided into three categories: personnel factors, competition factors and environmental factors. According to the influencing factors and characteristics of a situation change, the situation change can be divided into three types: natural change, Li Dao (Guide a good development situation), malignant development. 3. In order to manage the natural changing situation, managers should take measures to shape and improve people and themselves to adapt to the changes and cater to the situation, so as to obtain the best management effect in a favorable situation. 4. The characteristics of Li Dao situation are often the situation that fluctuates greatly. This kind of situation change trend can be guided by the direction of good through forecasting and preparing in advance, and the best benefit can be obtained by creating a self-benefit situation. 5. In the malignant development situation, the enterprise or organization is already in or about to be in a disadvantageous situation. At this time, the managers should take measures such as breaking the old-fashioned ideas, encouraging innovation, and establishing systems to regulate them to control the malignant situation and reverse the bad situation. 6. The Shan Yin (the situation that adapts to the natural change) must accomplish three points: Adapting to the changing situation caused by their own factors, adapting to the changing situation caused by other factors, and adapting to the changing situation caused by environmental factors. There are corresponding strategies for situation changes caused by different factors. 7. To adapt to the changing situation caused by their own factors, we should achieve the goal of Zi Xing Zhi Chi—introspection and summary; Xue Er Shi Xi—continuous progress; Ren Zhong Dao Yuan—set the goal of the incoming period in the current situation. To adapt to the changing situation caused by others’ factor, we should teach students in accordance with their aptitudes, teach them in accordance with their aptitude and combine Xu Shi, Yu Zhi, Gong Shou flexibly. In order to adapt to the changing circumstances caused by environmental factors, we should not make too many comments on the changes of the external environment, conform to its natural changes and do not violate the laws of nature; we should not expect to indulge ourself in the past or follow the so-called everlasting rules; Time goes by like a stream of water, and it will never return, we must cherish the timing and make changes. 8. Li Dao (to guide the situation of good development) to do three things: identify talents and inspire them, create momentum to win, change according to interest. If a worker wants to do good work, he must first make his tools sharp. In an adverse situation, if you want to create a favorable situation, you must first choose the right person, at the right time, to create the right favorable situation in order to achieve a complete victory. 9. Identify talents and inspiring them: to oneself, to people and to managers, we need to shoot the arrow at the target and be resourceful and alert, apply clear rewards and penalties; we need to create a win-win situation: a favorable situation to achieve complete victory or to win with the smallest loss. Corresponding to the current business management, it is to do a good job of planning before the competition and avoid direct competition with competitors. Change according to interest: human nature has the characteristics of admiring good and hating bad, so we make decisions based on benefit points. 10. Zheng Qi (managing the malignant situation) should be governed from three levels: ideological enlightenment, institutional constraint and unified management. Ideological enlightenment, means when the situation is not favorable, the idea of striving for strong management to dominate and the idea of long-term benefit are the victories should be used to win; the practice of institutional constraint is to strictly govern and reform the system within its borders; unified management emphasizes the role of leaders.

1. Dealing with the Things, which is the management of an enterprise, refers to the way in which an enterprise deals with affairs during its operation. It is a systematic process through which things are Observing Things, Planning Things, and Knowing Things and Achieving Things. The ideal state of management is the long-term stability and sustainable development of enterprises. We should adhere to the principle of moderation to do things neither not in place nor in excess, the principle of rational choice to hold the two and adopt the moderation, and the principle of adoption to adhere to the law and be flexible, so as to manage the enterprises. 2. Observing Things, which is the most basic link in the management of business affairs, emphasizes a process of understanding the nature, environment, and conditions of things. Through the system dialectical, the concept of complying with nature and the method of taking reason as the basis and taking history as the mirror., we can listen to all parties and examine the situation. 3. Planning Things, which is planning, emphases the process of efforts, refers to the enterprise according to the specific situation already known, to the affairs of the planning, and the development of action strategies. Planning is the core and most important step in the management of affairs. The core problem is how to make decisions. The object of Planning Things includes Planning for oneself, Planning for others and Planning for the time. Leaders must achieve this process of “Planning Things” by three principles “Winning by judging the enemy’s situation accurately”, “Changing the strategy with changes of the enemy”, “Knowing your enemy and yourself well,”. with the concept of “benevolence”, “rite”, “profit”, “righteousness”, “honesty”, “credibility”. 4. Doing Things, its core problem is how to achieve the set goals. When the affairs’ specific situation is clarified, and the corresponding decision-making strategies are formulated, it must be implemented based on this. Adhering to the precautionary attitude of “Repairing the house before it rains rain”, “Remaining indifferent whether favored or humiliated”, and “making a prompt decision”, with the theory of constantly changing by law and the application of “Being and not-Being grow out of one another”, “Using both kindness and authority” and “Being prepared for danger in times of peace”, the company can finally get successful.

The emergence and evolution of modern science since the seventeenth century has led to three major breakthroughs in the human condition. Developments in the natural sciences spurred the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century; progress in the life sciences precipitated the Demographic Revolution in the latter half of the nineteenth century; and the emergence of the social sciences sparked the Happiness Revolution in the late twentieth century. The social sciences themselves are marked by three major achievements, including, first, widespread recognition that circumstances beyond an individual’s control cause unemployment, poor health, and poverty and therefore must be alleviated through collective action; second, awareness of the need for economic policies aimed at minimizing the financial crises and depressions associated with the rise of the free market economy; and third, understanding the necessity of cradle-to-grave social policies that address the foremost concerns for personal happiness—employment and income security, a fulfilling family life, and good health,. Together, these social science achievements are leading to a worldwide improvement in people’s feelings of well-being—to the Happiness Revolution.

As a summary measure of well-being and a guide to policy, happiness has many more merits than GDP. First, happiness is more comprehensive. Whereas GDP is confined to the economic side of life, focusing on output and business firms, happiness centers on people’s feelings about their lives as a whole and their many everyday concerns. Also, happiness is a measure with which people can personally identify, while GDP is an abstraction without personal meaning. Moreover, happiness counts everyone in the adult population equally, whereas GDP is disproportionately determined by those who have more money to spend. Finally, and perhaps most important, the evaluation of happiness is made by the persons whose well-being is being assessed, by self-reports. By contrast, GDP, as well as more recently proposed “dashboard” measures of well-being, relies on outside observers (“experts”) who themselves define well-being, construct a model, and then judge others accordingly.

This chapter examines how the newly confident and sophisticated Larrikin in Australian journalism micro-culture fared in during the era of increasingly concentrated media ownership, and the impact a commercially imperative socio-political context had on a professional value and belief system through the 1980s and 1990s. It looks at the rise of ABC TV’s Larrikin organ, Media Watch, and the law’s renewed enthusiasm for jailing journalists. It finishes with the significant legal precedents set for Australia’s freedom of the news media.

This work proposes an autoencoderAutoencoder neural network as a non-linear generalization of projection-based methods for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). The proposed deep learning architecture presented is capable of generating the dynamics of PDEs by integrating them completely in a very reduced latent space without intermediate reconstructions, to then decode the latent solution back to the original space. The learned latent trajectories are represented and their physical plausibility is analysed. It is shown the reliability of properly regularized neural networks to learn the global characteristics of a dynamical system’s phase space from the sample data of a single path, as well as its ability to predict unseen bifurcations.

An overview of the mathematical formulations used for discrete and continuous optimization are presented. These include Linear Programming, Nonlinear Programming, Integer Programming, Mixed-Integer Linear Programming, Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programming, Logic-based Optimization, Stochastic Programming, Robust Optimization, and Flexibility Analysis. Successful applications of optimization models in industry are presented in the following fields: upstream oil & gas, materials blending, natural gas, biofuels, water treatment, electricity market integration, plant reliability, and supply chain design. Ongoing projects applying computational models to optimize industrial process systems are also mentioned. Implementations of customized optimization techniques that improve computational performance and enable finding solutions to otherwise unsolvable optimization problems are highlighted. These include strengthening cuts, decomposition strategies, model reformulation, and linearization, among others.

This chapter examines literary and vernacular sources to consider how sensory experiences become encoded in dialect; looking at how words change meaning over time, how the dialect remains vital, and at the kinds of sensory experiences residents reported having. I explore the Aristotelian model of the senses, relating it to words which were present in my doctoral fieldwork and broaden the discussion of these words and their history. Using speech and writing by Black Country people, drawing on poetry, fiction and spoken data I critique the idea that the dialect is in any greater danger of becoming less vital than any other regional dialect of the UK. Using current linguistic research, I consider the future of the dialect, questioning what experiences speakers may wish to encode through language in a changing Black Country.

The article provides a perspective on how to navigate an organization with a complexity mindset through emergent changes and even crises adopting the Three-Pillar Model. The authors show approaches, practices, and tools on how to deal with “emergent elements” within an organization and how these will be ideally addressed in a “new” organizational setting that is characterized by transparency and connectivity and guided by a clear purpose since the traditional elements of an organization no longer provide the previous stable structures and mechanistic problem-solving procedures.

This chapter examines in detail the current, existing key design rules and procedures used to design and analyze the performance characteristics (efficiency, power added efficiency, gain, etc.) of radio frequency (RF) power amplifiers. The discussion starts with the concept of type (linear, nonlinear) and class (A, B, C, AB, D, E, F, G, and H) of an RF amplifier. Then the design equations of each class are enumerated, followed by a detailed discussion of performance metrics, calculation, and estimation of RF power amplifiers. Then the electronics industry standard load and source techniques are explained, focusing on how and why these two schemes are so important to successfully design and implement an RF power amplifier.

This chapter presents the rationale behind and the implementation strategy for the setup of National Competence Centres for HPC and associated technologies all over Europe. Furthermore, it will present how a national activity like this, can benefit from coordination and support activities on the European level and how all this covers the needed actions in Europe to boost the uptake and impact of HPC.

Activated carbon (AС) is used in various field of technology as a strong and reliable adsorbent. Often AC is obtained from cheap and affordable materials, e.g., from agricultural waste such as coconut shells, jute, cane sugar bagasse, sawdust, etc. The paper provides a brief overview of the methods for producing AC along with consideration of important production factors, affecting the properties and characteristics of the resulting products, comprising product activation, physical- and chemical activation, product yield and surface area of the final product.The study compares 21 different methods for obtaining AC from various materials, including the recently developed method based on Miscanthus straw, applying partial ordering methodology including the above mentioned factors as indicators. It was disclosed that the yield of the reaction product and surface area are the most important indicators with almost the same importance, while the activation temperature and the actual activation method apparently play only secondary roles. The partial order analyses further disclosed that the ‘local’ method using Miscanthus straw as starting material for obtaining AC is ranked on a place 14 out of 21. Excluding the mode of activation, the method based on Miscanthus straw is ranked 19 out of 21.

Innovation is developing to answer certain needs and the law adapts itself to this reality. Innovation thus brings corporate law to progress. In this field, the law is facing a major innovation: the outburst of concerns related to corporate social responsibility (CSR) and social finance. This chapter analyses innovation of which corporate law is the main topic of study in Canada through a staunch desire to think differently about the economic model and to strengthen the ties between trade and social missions. Based on the categorisation of Professor Frison-Roche, innovation in Canadian corporate law is studied through the ex ante and ex post approaches. On the one hand, innovation is feeble in connection with the enactment of new rules (ex ante innovation). Following a new regulatory proposal, this innovation only remains active through current debates. While American corporate law has put forward new hybrid corporate structures adhering to an expanded form of corporate law, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada has only launched, in 2013, a consultation bid. Recently, British Columbia is the only province that has adopted a hybrid corporate law structure: the Community Contribution Company. On the other hand, several audacious jurisprudential stances demonstrate that ex post innovation has progressed significantly more rapidly (ex post “d’intendance” and autonomous ex post). Canadian corporate law innovates by implementing goals which are attributed to conventional businesses, thereby enabling them to implement activities of a social nature and to question the dogma of shareholder value. As illustrated by the dichotomy between human rights and the financial interest of corporations, however, Canadian corporate law also innovates in the legal responsibility area in which large corporations are set up.

During the Industrial Revolution, the structure and methods of Western legal systems facilitated commercial expansion and technological innovation. But as the Information Age gradually re-shapes pre-conditions for successful innovation, legal systems generally—and contracting in particular—may be obstructing rather than enabling continuing growth. To re-align commercial and technical needs with legal methods, traditional legal systems must themselves innovate. This Chapter highlights three perspectives for imagining legal innovation: first, alternative structures for contracting, like relational/collaborative and outcome/performance-based contracts; second, information design tools like simplification and visualization, and computer coding tools; and finally, systemic measures designed to resolve the kinds of problems that have increasingly challenged traditional legal methods. Throughout, the Chapter adopts the attitudes and methods of Proactive/Preventive Law to untangle the difficult relationship between law and innovation: stronger innovation requires the law to offer diverse methods, flexibly applied, to meet varied contextual needs; and yet any new legal reform must be efficient and feasible as well as effective and just.

The expression “legal innovation” has emerged recently to qualify certain legal work or certain technologies used in relation to law or legal is-sues. Why now as Law is a living material continuously evolving and as Lawyers have constantly created legal rules, solutions and tools? Are we facing a linguistic denial that needs to be overcome to help Lawyers to be actors of the current legal revolution? Indeed, Lawyers must do their job more quickly and in a more effective manner but in a more complex context: internationalization, globalization, digitalization, etc. The solution for Lawyers is to conceive and develop new systems, processes and tools to perform some of their tasks. How can Lawyers innovate? How can legal teams be organized and motivated to innovate and industrialize some of their production? What are the mechanisms to be followed? What are the accelerants and obstacles to legal innovation? A new legal innovation methodology is proposed to conduct research and development programs from the designer to the consumer, associated to a new tool the LTRL (Legal Technology Readiness Level) as a help to have a strategic view of the program steps.

The Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is the part of the analytical multi-criteria decision-making technique. The main idea of this technique, the preferred alternative is the one with the most close to the positive ideal solution and the further to the negative ideal solution. The positive ideal solution is formed as a combination of the best points of each criterion. The negative ideal solution is a combination of the worst points of each criterion. This technique is only can be applied for the numerical dataset where the importance weights of the criterion known or defined based on the experts opinion numerically. And the ranking results can be obtained corresponding the importance weights of the defined criteria. In this study the detailed information about this technique will be presented.

The ‘‘ELimination Et Choix Traduisant la REalité’’ ELECTRE strategy bring together a subject of decision assistance strategies whose particularity is the partial collection based on the development of relations of comparisons of the exhibitions of each pair of arrangements. It is an outranking strategy dependent on concordance examination. Its significant preferred position is that it is considered vulnerable. One weakness that the procedure also the results could be difficult with clarifying. In other words, it is based on pairwise predominance comparisons between choice focuses for each criterion. ELECTRE has been utilized in different fields such as: financial matters, environment, water management, and transportation problem. In this study, the detailed information of the ELECTRE technique will be presented.

Various methods for flexible pavement design were developed over the years ranging from empirical, mechanistic and the recently the mechanistic-empirical method. In this paper seven different pavement design methods were studied and each of the methods was used to determine the thickness of a flexible pavement. Fuzzy PROMETHEE decision technique was used to identify the most suitable method for designing the pavement. The criteria employed in the selection of the best method for the pavement design includes pavement thickness obtained from the design result, environmental consideration and pavement performance in the design procedure, recommended design life, minimum strength requirement for subbase and base material. Road Note 29 (RN29) was found to be the most preferred method with HD26/01 been the second. HD26/01 will be recommended for design of new road, since research proved total failure of the road pavements designed with RN29 after 20 years.

Application of the knowledge derived from the scientific discipline, ecology and the relevant ecological principles, hypothesis, theories, and methods relating to this subject, is not only to address the intricate relationships among different structural components of mother earth with all its ecosystems but also to scrutinize the cause and effect of human-mediated ecological threats to environment and finally to develop solutions to all those environmental perturbations.Achieving this target is thought to be possible only by adhering to the basic ecological thoughts and principles on a harmonized interaction between people and nature by making a balance in between resource harvesting and also sustainability of the ecosystem. Several research studies have unearthed pertinent information of the human actions on the environment and biological responses, to chalk out systematic and strategic eco-management strategies for eco-remediation followed by ecorestoration of eco-degraded environmental sectors and also to attach importance on decision-making processes that regulate human activities.Awareness, especially towards riverine ecology and ecological perturbations, have been developed and proper actions are being taken where habitats are becoming fragmented, ecologically altered, eco-degraded, and reduced worldwide, at steady rates and scales. The diversity and populations of biotic components within this landscape of this world have been declining in numbers and becoming genetically eroded.The consequences of such biological impoverishment to the mankind through biodiversity loss, reducing and even disrupting of ecological services and the subsequent decaying and disruption of the ecosystem functioning have drawn more attentions to the environmental practitioners, planners, and managers, different stakeholders of the society who advocated more on to the protection of the ecosystem and conservation of biodiversity in tune with the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity Conservation during 2011–2020.Integration of several interdisciplinary research outcomes for undertaking systemic and strategic conservation planning and efforts still requires additional thoughts to make the venture more effective in the present era. Sustainable eco-management of the resilient ecosystems is in need of maintaining the balance in the eco-dynamics of the ecosystems over time adhering more on to the operating principles of the ecology in order to meet the expectation of the human society in achieving ecologically healthy environment.In such context, this chapter has been written to acquaint the readers on basics of subject ecology and their applicability towards eco-management of river’s ecosystem at global, national, and regional scales.

Water, a chemical compound, exists in nature in three physical states: liquid, gas, and solids, and all these forms are useful to human beings. Water has become a widespread life-sustaining substance, comprising 50–90% of living materials and covering nearly three-fourths of the Earth’s surface. All living organisms are composed mainly of water, the prime medium of life on earth and those of rivers are partly or wholly immersed in water. Life evolved in water, with water, and with the physical and chemical characters of natural water, and this balance is necessary. The global distribution of water is irregular. Some regions have plenty and others have shortages. The availability of liquid water depends on a reserve of inland waters, characterized by waters in lakes, rivers, reservoirs, wetlands, and groundwater. Water like other substances, expands when frozen, and help ice to float on the surfaces of the freshwater bodies. Cohesion of internal molecular constituents gives rise to another physical property of water, surface tension, which allows water organisms to traverse on the surface of the water. Water being the most essential and integral part of the lives and livelihoods of human beings for food, health, energy, and environment needs proper management in order to achieve sustainable eco-development. The water being a renewable natural resource will never “run out” the availability and variability of water impose the greatest impact on all-round development of a nation. Almost all rivers from a large country like India along with several other regions of the world have been identified as water-stressed rivers because of cumulative impacts of water abstractions, and environmental perturbations out of deforestation, global climatic changes, etc. Although life originated in water, it is really challenging for the aquatic organisms to adjust and survive in the ever-changing aquatic realm which appears to be not only unstable but hostile too as this aquatic environment is governed by unfamiliar rules of cold, wave-swept seacoasts, torrential mountain streams, and rivers, also by the very turbulent waters at the confluence of rivers with the sea. The living organisms of aquatic environments and their bioecological activities are very dependent on the prevailing ecological factors, both living and nonliving in the temporal and spatial scales. The unique physical and chemical characteristics of water and their interaction define the different aquatic environments and constrain the evolution of organisms that inhabit them.In view of the above, this chapter mostly highlights different properties of water which have made water as the most unique chemical entity of the world. Besides, the mutual interactions among varied properties of water with the physical processes of river ecosystem and vice versa have been taken care of. In view of the problems of nonavailability of water, comments have been put forward to point out basic guidelines for water management.

In order to address the water–sediment interactions in the fluvial system, different subjects have emerged as hydrogeology, hydrology, eco-hydrology, etc., during the different phases of last century mostly utilizing the knowledge of earth science supplemented by mathematical ones. However, focus on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research and application has been in practice to address multidimensional problems pertaining to the ecology/geomorphology/hydrogeology of any fluvial landscape, especially rivers and streams during the last couple of decades which has brought so-called distant subjects closer to one another. Conceptualizing the functioning of a river or a stream has been attempted in different angles and perspectives by an engineer, or a geomorphologist or an ecologist giving due emphasis on their own fields of expertise.Although the definitions of ecology and hydrology sound very similar, they differ on both conceptual and application perspectives as the subject ecology deals with the interrelationships among organisms in respect of their environments while the hydrology refers to the study of the interactions of several structural components of water environment emphasizing more on the hydrological cycle. In general, ecology represents a more descriptive and experimental science whereas hydrology is more predictive and analytical. Hydrogeology is also an interdisciplinary approach for studying the documentation of water resources, pollution studies, and environmental management. In view of ever-increasing demand of integrated river basin management, combining of hydrogeology with the issues such as river basin and watershed management, climate change, water-soil interactions, etc., has been increased which are now being addressed adhering to the scientific principles pertaining to hydrogeology giving more emphasis on the importance of sources, volume, mode of recharging, and protection of groundwater as a finite and vulnerable resource.Considering the ecological goods and services rendered by the rivers, environmental researchers and planners are very much concerned in generating baseline information in the fields of the geohydrology and fluid mechanics through holistic ecomanagement of rivers. Besides, the impacts of water and its water balance pathways, water conservation and pollution abatement have become parts and parcels in today’s life of human beings in terms of ecology and economy. For this reason, environmental hydrologists or hydrogeologists should be familiar with the science of hydrology which can be defined as the ecological study of the water and associated components and processes. Three districts of South West Bengal, India, viz., Midnapore (West), Bankura, and Purulia, topographically possess the high lands of lateritic uplands (100–300 m) and hillocks (300–500 m) which occupy a large portion of geomorphic surfaces of these districts. The land resources of these areas are activated by riverine networks comprising of five major rivers, viz., Subarnarekha, Kansai, Shilabati Dwarakeswar, and Rupnarayan, and also some tributaries like Kaleghai, and many minor streams like Dulung, Kumari, Parang, etc. In this drought-prone part of India, most of the rainwaters (>1500 mm) are discharged into the Hooghly estuary and the Bay of Bengal through the riverine runoff, and very little amount of surface water is recharged into groundwater storage.Different forms of wetlands in the river valley and also artificial tanks accommodate a considerable portion of surface water only during the monsoon season of four (4) months of a year (June, July, August, and September) because of higher porosity and permeability of soil. This has necessitated the subsurface water to flow along the river valleys and thereby ensure groundwater storage to support the available water resources for different land-use practices in the region. Biodiversity of this area has an intimate relationship with water budgeting because denuded forest reserves have been a source of soil erosion, coupled with sedimentation and turbidity causing loss of aquatic biodiversity. Instead, erstwhile a forest cover accelerates the vertical seepage instead of horizontal one, thereby leading to groundwater recharging.Moreover, continuation of drought and declining of annual rainfall over the years, especially in view of the global warming, have resulted in decrease of subsurface water flows that supported traditional land-use practices along the riverine tracts. This chapter deals with the pros and cons of sustainable water budgeting in such tropical environmental setups integrating meteorology, geomorphology, resource availability (living/nonliving), land-use patterns, and people’s dependence on the existing ecological goods and services and hypotheses of the consequences on implementation of recommendations based on ground truth verification survey.Relationship between surface, subsurface, and groundwater flows has been highlighted taking into consideration the coefficient of permeability, porosity, grain size distribution, water storage coefficient, and recharge dynamics based on extensive drilling operations in the selected zones on riverbed and analysis of satellite imageries. Artificial recharging of the groundwater as well as the surface water storage through check dams and excavation of tanks; construction of horizontal wells and surface dykes, rainwater harvesting; the microcatchment-wise water assessment; and introduction of dry crop practices in place of traditional wet crops are being recommended based on the baseline information

Rivers and streams representing interfaces between varied forms of aquatic habitats and terrestrial landscape are being recognized as lifeline and inculcated to the core of human life. These lotic water bodies carry and transport all kind of materials of earth from land to sea via a network of aquatic systems (wetlands, flood plains, estuaries, etc.) maintaining interlinkages among different components (soil, water, air, and biodiversity) of the environment. A comprehensive knowledge on the physiography, bio-geo-chemistry, and hydrology of riverine networks along with their associated streams, rivulets, floodplains, and wetlands in order to understand the roles of rivers as formidable driver in global biogeochemistry has become a prerequisite to identify and utilize the services of rivers in respect of freshwater supply, biodiversity development, and control of flood and erosion load.The term physiographyRiversphysiography of rivers encompasses the origin, types, extent of regional and local distribution, climatic conditions, and relevant nomenclatures such as streams, riffles, pools, springs, and falls of rivers in an area. This chapter discusses on the characteristics and classification of freshwater rivers (permanent or intermittent), stream orders, basins, catchment, and watersheds, highlighting their relationships among the large and small rivers in the changing agroclimatic conditionsRiversagroclimatic conditions.Moreover, a holistic ecological assessmentRiversholistic ecological assessment of rivers along with the streams cannot be completed unless the interactions with adjoining ecosystems and landscapes such as forests, wetlands, agriculture fields, and rural /semi-urban /urban settings are taken into consideration. Besides, several terminologiesRiversterminologies having some overlapping components are in the use to depict particular geomorphologic setups of riverine system. Explanation and justification of those terminologies have been taken care of. Different stream orders which focus on automated information of such orderings in riverine eco-region with regard to their flow patterns, erosion, and depositional characters have been highlighted.This chapter also has stressed upon the inclusion of several theories, hypothesis, models, and scientific explanation put forward by different researchers on rivers, its ecology, functional roles, etc. Case studies pertaining to the physiography and interrelationshipsRiversinterrelationships among different structural components of the two major riverine systems of South West Bengal, viz., Subarnarekha and Kansai, are presented so that a holistic assessment of the potential, prospect and problems of these rivers and river basins could be made. A brief but some salient points pertaining to the Indian rivers giving due emphasis on the mighty river, the Ganges, have also been included.

Many small-scale industries are producing various components by sand casting method. The rejection rate of these components is reasonably high which can reduce by proper failure analysis. The current work involved detailed investigation on rejections, and its causes of ductile and grey cast iron components such as harvest cup, chain link, and non-return valve in an industry. Initially, the major defects which cause the significant rejection of the products are identified by visual inspection. First analyses were carried out to understand the causes for the defects by permeability test, moisture determination test, grain fineness test, swelling index of bentonite test, green compression strength test, loss of ignition test, mould hardness test and refractoriness test for sand and mould; secondly, chemical composition was analysed before and after inoculation addition by spectroscopy test. It helps to identify if the carbon equivalent falls in the required range or not. Thirdly, microstructure of the material was studied before and after etching by employing optical microscopy test and phase analysis by XRD. In addition, the mechanical properties of the cast materials were studied using UTM and fractography study with the help of SEM. Based on the consideration of test results, procedures adapted in the casting process and environment condition, suitable corrective actions are recommended to reduce the rejection rate of the components.

This paper reports an attempt made to investigate the effect of fins with and without perforation on the convection coefficient (h) for cooling purpose. Experiments were conducted considering two specimens with six fins, one with solid fins and the other with perforations (of 8 and 10 mm diameters) on fins. The convection coefficient in terms of Nusselt number and Rayleigh number was also studied and compared with available literature work. It was found that experiments with perforated fins increased the convection coefficient up to 36%.

Fused filament fabrication, well known as fused deposition modeling (FDM), is a rapid prototyping method that employs thermoplastic filaments in a semi-molten state. These filaments are pushed out from the nozzle’s orifice for fabricating the required components. Henceforth, it is essential to comprehend the governing factors that influence the quality of FDM products. In this context, the FDM process parameters have been tuned, and an attempt is made to analyze the enhancement in dimensional accuracy of components made by the fused filament fabrication technique. Raster angle, orientation, layer thickness, and the number of contours are considered as process variables. The components are made up of ABSM30 (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene), and their dimensional accuracy has been impacted by aforesaid variables and interactions between them. Response surface methodology (RSM) is employed in consideration of enhancing the dimensional accuracy. The results reveal that the aforesaid variables and interaction between them govern the dimensions of the build parts in a diverse direction. This dimensional inaccuracy is caused because of the shrinkage of semi-molten thermoplastic, which leaves the nozzle. Here, the dimensional inaccuracy has been analyzed in terms of volumetric deviation.

Roti is an irreplaceable component of the Indian menu. But the process of roti making is quite tiresome and time consuming. Whether it is a family gathering like weddings or hostel mess, often a problem arises regarding demand and supply of freshly baked roti. There are machines available in the market which can make this task easy for us, but they have certain shortcomings such as expensiveness, lack of quality, lack of taste, extreme low or extreme high rate of production of roti and imbalance between these factors. The main aim was to design and fabricate an efficient, compact, and user-friendly automatic roti machine to serve the needs of people. Also for not alternating the traditional taste, we used LPG flame burners to cook it. This paper describes the design and fabrication of the machine. Each of its modified components is explained and supported by a mathematical calculation and the reason behind its selection/designing. The stress analysis and other technical aspects are also taken into consideration. The cost of the whole project was under Rs. 50,000 and is capable of producing 480 rotis/h. It requires electricity to preheat the dough using G coil. Majority of parts are made up of mild steel and cast iron. Cam follower mechanism is used to flatten the dough balls followed by conveyor mechanism for baking. Whole machine is powered by 1.5 Hp motor attached to 80:1 gearbox.

In this work, the estimation of heat flux for one-dimensional transient heat conduction problem has been done with the help of the search-based conjugate gradient method with an adjoint problem. The finite volume approach is applied to discretize the differential equations which are solved by using developed in-house MATLAB code. The novelty of this paper is justified as the required temperature data to solve the CGM algorithm are obtained by using real-time experimentation instead of performing the numerical simulation. The RMS error of the estimation of heat flow is obtained from that we can conclude that the accuracy is increased by using multiple sensors. The value of estimated heat flux is affected by the measurement errors which is inherently present in the measurement data.

Aerospace and automobiles provide a great potential to the development of metal additive manufacturing. Most of these techniques are fusion based and face the drawback of solidification issues and are not applicable for every alloy. Friction stir additive manufacturing (FSAM) is a family of novel techniques that utilizes friction stir welding principle for layer-by-layer additive manufacturing of materials. This technology is revered to be a breakthrough in the field of metal additive manufacturing (MAM) due to the advantages of solid-state welding which are intrinsic to these processes. The paper highlights the recent developments in the much uncharted field of friction stir additive manufacturing, introduces the major technologies of the FSAM and underscores the advantages of FSAM over its fusion-based counterparts. The paper also throws a light on the outlook and the potential of FSAM technologies in the domain of industrial manufacturing. The paper sums up by presenting some of the noteworthy research works done in this field.

The present study compares the weld performance of the two variants of activated tungsten inert gas welding (A-TIG) process known as, Flux Bonded TIG (FB-TIG) process and Flux Zone TIG (FZ-TIG) process on modified 9Cr–1Mo (P91) Steel. Bead-on-plate welding samples were prepared using TiO2 flux with FB-TIG and TiO2 and ZnO flux combination was used in FZ-TIG process. For systematic comparison, bead-on-plate welding samples were also prepared for A-TIG and conventional, i.e. Normal TIG (N-TIG) process with the same set of process parameters. Metallurgical characterization of all the bead-on-plate weld samples was conducted using optical microscopy, and comparison of weld dimensions was made amongst all the weld samples, prepared understudy. Experimental results showed that the FZ-TIG variant had offered the highest depth of penetration (Dp) and least bead width (Bw) and highest depth-to-width (Dw) ratio, compared to the rest of the variants, which is desirable.

Hastelloy – C series weld overlay is an area of great significance in the present chemical processing industries, pressure vessel, and heat exchanger industries. Hastelloy – C series of alloys has been one of the least studied and understood classes of materials. The purpose of this studied is to understand and compare the performance of Hastelloy – C series nickel–chromium–molybdenum alloys with the view of metallurgical, mechanical, and physical properties, corrosion resistance, and weld overlay aspects. Characteristics of various nickel and nickel-based alloys with a focus on the Hastelloy – C series have been presented through a comparison of physical and mechanical properties, applications, and corrosion behavior in different atmospheres. A comprehensive review has been done to study the effect of alloying element addition on phase stability, the formation of topological-closed-packed phase (TCP), transformation sequence of Hastelloy C-4, C-276, and C-22. The importance of dilution for weld overlay, selection of welding process, selection of filler wire, recommended joint geometry, and weld sequencing for Hastelloy – C series weld overlay has been discussed in detail. This review will help to understand the effect of high Mo with Fe and W on the formation of TCP phases, the corrosion behavior of C-2000 in an oxidizing and reducing atmosphere, and the role of dilution in weld overlay from conventional and advanced conventional welding process point of view.

In the present work, the effect of trauma impacts on the cranium and the influence of cranial brain fluid on the walls of the cranial vault are analyzed. Using experimental methods (photoelasticity and image correlation), as well as numerical methods with ANSYS Mechanical APDL®, the results were studied in order to know the mechanical behavior in the surface of the cranial vault in which the cranial plates for replacement or reconstructive surgery for injuries by trauma (third degree) are required. Also, it would be considered as an economic and capable option for prosthesis which only considers titanium and stainless steel as material for the replacement.

The EU–India relationship is a playground for policy analysts—numerous policy recommendations are addressed to both India and the EU. Policy analysis influences the European and Indian political practitioners and also the public with their constructions of possible future relations. Because the scientists’ impact carries such weight, it is necessary to engage with the fundamental research principles that underlie the production of policy analysis. The assumption of this contribution is that an examination of supposedly abstract theoretical debates using the disciplines of International Relations (IR) and policy research helps to critically reflect on the role of policy analysts. On the basis of the critical hints identified in the theoretical discussions, a possible way forward will be proposed to advance research on the relationship between the two largest democracies in the world. By adapting the so-called Global IR paradigm, a practical proposal will be developed to put the scientific cooperation of the EU–India relations in general and the cooperation in policy-oriented research in particular on a broader basis: The idea of parapublic underpinnings (Krotz 2007) can help to substantially improve relations between India and the EU to establish the basis for research on an equal footing.

The European Union (EU) and India are global powers in search of a strategy. The EU is a realist strategic actor, which emphasises economic and political power. It is also a normative power predicated on democracy, the rule of law and human rights. The EU Global Strategy (2016) is an extension of those norms and policies, but also emphasises the internal resilience of extra-European states in international relations and principled pragmatism in EU foreign and security policy. In effect, the EU Global Strategy is a relaunch of EU Foreign Policy. This contribution seeks to focus on what this tells us about the changing nature of the EU-India Strategic Partnership from an EU/European perspective and to what extent the EU Global Strategy can reinvigorate EU-Indian cooperation.

India-EU climate diplomacy has transitioned from being guided by ideational differences to pragmatic and result-oriented goals. The initial differences deepened in the run-up to the 2009 Copenhagen Summit, where India’s position as an ‘emerging economy’ led the EU to call for a new regime that would make countries such as India also adopt greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets. India, even while upholding the principles of equity and climate justice, decided to compromise on its traditionally held positions to become a part of the solution, which was most evident in the signing of the 2015 Paris Agreement. In the meantime, bilateral relations between India and the EU, particularly from certain member countries, strengthened in the climate change arena, as reflected in their strategic partnership. In this context, this chapter attempts to outline the drivers of and shifts in India-EU climate diplomacy using the conceptual framework of ‘climate diplomacy’ and ‘realist constructivism’ approach, with an eye on both ideational and material factors. It stimulates an ‘applied’ discussion on climate issues that could best contextualise India’s climate diplomacy towards the EU, with a focus on the 2009–2015 period and the future of the post-2020 international climate regime.

The changing global order, marked by the rise of populist and inward-looking governments, economic and social instability and unrest around the world, has necessitated enhanced cooperation between states in the strengthening of their democratic frameworks. The European Union (EU) and India, with their strong emphasis on democratic values, have worked together to reduce poverty, prevent disasters, expand trade and enhance security worldwide. Aspiring to play a more significant global role, they have worked closely to promote joint research in health, agriculture, energy and many other fields of mutual interest. The relationship between the EU and India has evolved in recent years from that of donor and recipient to a partnership with opportunities for mutual benefit. The EU’s interest in enhancing the strategic partnership with India has been reinforced through its international cooperation within the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda context. Both sides have agreed to move forward with joint initiatives, especially in the areas of sustainable development, connectivity, resilient infrastructure in third countries and triangular cooperation in Africa. However, there is a dearth of literature which theoretically and empirically examines either the EU’s or India’s approach to development cooperation. Most of the studies are factual and typically ignore the guiding principles of development cooperation, a field which has considerable potential for boosting the strategic partnership and providing fertile ground for an enhanced and innovative institutional framework for cooperation between India and the EU. This chapter primarily aims at identifying various convergences and divergences between the strategies and the guiding principles of development cooperation in the two largest democracies of the world.

In a changing world order, the role of strategic partnerships in international relations takes on an increased significance. Several actors, including the EU and India, use strategic partnerships as a way for managing bilateral relations. For the EU, partnership strategies are internally negotiated and reflect shared strategic visions and policy preferences among the member states and institutions. However, so far very little attention has been paid in the literature on EU strategy-making to the role, function, and impact of partnership strategies. In particular, the question of what characteristics make a strategy a tool for increased engagement between strategic partners has to date been neglected. Based on unique interviews with experts about the EU’s Strategy on India (EUIS), this paper suggests that when underpinning the relations to a likeminded partner, a strategy can be a core element for engagement if it manifests both cohesion with the EU’s wider understanding of its global role and convergence with the partner’s preferences. We contend that the added value to the partnership of formulating strategy is the increased levels of predictability of strategic action and we call for further studies of the EU’s partnership strategies in light of changing conditions for agency in world affairs.

In applications related to the physics of boiling, one has to know the dependence of the bubble growth rate at a heated surface on the thermophysical properties of a liquid and vapor, capillary, viscous, and inertial forces, as well as on the kinetic molecular laws operating at an interface

Gas bubbles rising in a liquid at rest under the gravity force may have various forms: sphere, oblate spheroid, and spherical cap. Depending on the form of the bubble, its trajectory can be either rectilinear, zigzag, or spiral.

Cooling of a hot surface by dropwise jets is widely useful in various engineering problems: power systems, metallurgy, cryogenic systems, space, and fire-fighting engineering. Progress in this field is retarded by the lack of full comprehension of the entire realm of phenomena occurring for an incident flow of fluid jet to a surface. The principal question governing the entire process of jet cooling pertains to the study of the coupling of dynamic and thermal drops with the surface. The problem of coupling drops with a hard hot surface has a long history. In 1966, a fragment of a treatise by Leidenfrost (a German physician and theologist) of 1756 was published (Leidenfrost JG, De Aquae Communis Nonnullis Qualitatibus Tractatus. Duisburg, 1756) [1]. This insightful manuscript appeared before the energy conservation law was discovered and before the real nature of heat was unveiled, in particular, the concept “heat of evaporation” was not formulated. The principal result, which made Leidenfrost’s name immortal, was his discovery of a new physical fact: at a certain temperature, a metal surface ceases to be wettable by water (and other liquids).

The derivation of the generalized Rayleigh equation that describes the dynamics of a spherical gas bubble in a tube filled with an ideal liquid is given.