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3D Printing technologies are becoming pervasive and used both in industry and in informal contexts like domestic self-production and craftsmanship 2.0. A large part of the current studies concerning 3D Printing aims at increasing the performance of processes, materials and devices; however, only few studies approach sustainable issues (i.e. printable eco-materials, distributed networks, etc.). 3D Printing instead could play a crucial role in the transition processes toward the so-called Sustainable Society, if linked with current Design for Sustainability approaches. The paper analyses current literature regarding 3D Printing and Design for Sustainability in order to identify new open research topics and re-think their impact and design roles for future sustainable applications. Specifically, the paper produces evidences linking 3D Printing technologies and Sustainability from the design point of view; it outlines a number of promising open cross-sectorial research topics that aims to anticipate the impacts and the evolution of future Sustainable 3D Printing technologies and new generation of democratic products and services for All.

Herein, we present stable and reproducible arc plasma generation from a TiB2 cathode. The process development contains three complimentary features: Use of a Mo cylinder around the TiB2 cathode improves arc ignition and stabilizes the process by keeping the arc spot at the cathode surface. The evolution of the cathode surface during erosion and the process stability is further improved by addition of 1wt% carbon in the cathode, with no resulting change in plasma characteristics (ion energy, ion charge states, macroparticles). Finally, an increased plasma density through use of a separate anode provides the last key point, which together with the other two contributes to highly controlled plasma generation from TiB2 using DC vacuum arc, and complete utilization of the cathode material. The combined results provide a novel and efficient route for synthesis of metal borides. (C) 2019 Author(s). ; Funding Agencies|Knut and Alice Wallenberg (KAW) Foundation [KAW 2015.0043]; Swedish Government Strategic Research Area in Materials Science on Functional Materials at Linkoping University (Faculty Grant SFO-Mat-LiU) [2009 00971]

The reviewed book describes the transformation of industrial capitalism into digital, facilitated by big data and developed IT. The author argues that the global market economic situation is what leads to transformation. The book gives us an idea on platform evolution, starting with analyzing the reasons for them emerging, continuing on to the typologies of modern platforms while highlighting their economic strengths and weaknesses, until finally predicting future wars between economic platforms, certain manifestations are already apparent in our time, according to the author. This work might be of use to those who want to know about the typology of various electronic-information platforms established based on their respective means for generating profit. The author defines labor market changes conditioned by an increase in unemployment and life expectancy, during a time when people are working closely with IT infrastructure, based on the example of the USA and other countries dealing with a similar social-economic situation.

The analysis focuses on the influence of illegal economies on local order and questions the conventional rationale of instability and violence through illegal activities. In an in depth-case study the analysis provides evidence that illicit economies can contribute to the development of local order rather than destroying it. The VRAEM is the current epicenter of drug production in Peru and therefore a well-fitting case for the analysis. The paper builds on qualitative data from participant observation, interviews and theory-based questionnaires collected in 2016 and 2017. The paper focuses on current center for drug production and on the social consequences, deepens our understanding of the influence of illegal economies on the local order. Understanding this influence is essential for designing policies for and understanding dynamics of state intervention. The drug economy played a significant role in the evolution of local order particularly in the areas of economy, security and rule. Even if this order does not resemble a normative state order, it is in itself stable and legitimate.

Budapest metropolitan area is the major logistic hub of Hungary, as major TENT-T corridors cross the city. Growth potential is high, and railway infrastructure, brownfields and new hubs of logistics are key areas of development; still none of these sectors are at their full potential. The case study introduces the historical background and evolution of logistics and the rail network, and national objectives aiming to improve efficiency in infrastructure to foster sustainability and competitiveness. The focus areas are rail freight, offshore trade, service export, intermodal terminals, air cargo terminals, suburban passenger services and investments aiming to increase the usage of railway in freight and passenger transport. The study highlights how the region is seeking its competitive edge, and how progress is hindered by the lack of railway capacities or a lack of integrated urban planning. The urban rail concept and large brownfield sites along the lines may create opportunities for exploitation, but a lack of synergies impedes strategic development for now.

Since the fall of the USSR, the development of the integration process has become a foreign policy priority of the former Soviet territory. However, Moscow has failed to achieve this goal: no established structure could lead to significant integration. This research provides a historical review of the Eurasian economic integration. Employing an analysis of the international agreements and treaties that were behind the activities of the Eurasian integration unions, we reveal the specific features of economic integration communities' evolution in the post-Soviet territory within the period from the Soviet Union collapse to the present date and assess their true fails and gains. The findings reveal that the Eurasian integration appears to have evolved mostly "on paper" in the form of various documents but has had no practical implementation. Its development was characterized by permanent cycles, which member countries attempted to overcome, establishing new integration entities. However, their interest gradually faded, making EAEU feel like the last attempt to implement a Eurasian integration processes.

This article introduces the Rising Powers Diplomatic Network (RPDN) dataset, which monitors the distribution of the diplomatic apparatus of emerging powers across the globe. RPDN's release version contains data on two countries, Brazil and Turkey, covering mainly the 1995-2015 timespan, thus providing a comprehensive portrait of the evolution of their diplomatic capacity and patterns of interstate interactions. Specifically, RPDN contains information on two items: presidential diplomacy (i.e.: number of official visits) and diplomatic presence (number and size of diplomatic representations abroad). Data for Turkey also list visits by the prime minister in addition to the president's. Data for Brazil also report: size of staff at each diplomatic post, post ranking/grade and number of military attachés abroad. The article concludes demonstrating RPDN's applicability, by addressing a central question in the regional powers literature: do regional powers emphasize their regions in their diplomacy in comparison to other destinations? It is expected that this dataset makes a contribution to quantitative research on rising powers and their diplomacy.

There is a rapid evolution of care delivery taking place across the globe in response to an explosion of novel health technologies. Growing in parallel to this expansion is the anticipation of mHealth technologies to drive patient-centered care into the future. Despite this hope, continuing reports of health inequities and lived experiences of substandard care fill national, state, and community health reports. The impact of these inequities is particularly pernicious on Black men and their long-term health status. As decades of robust evidence substantiates needed interventions, current progress is not seeing expected gains. In this commentary, we argue that at the heart of these inequities are issues of access, health literacy, institutional racism, and growing social distance between clinicians and Black men. To address these inequities, we suggest that digital interventions, designed to support decision-making, information exchange, and shared accountability have the best hope to overcome current inequities by promoting authentic relationships that ultimately drive better communication between Black men and their clinicians.

This study addresses citizen implication in societal issues, and analysis it at the crossroads of online and offline spaces. It draws on previous literature to advance a research model which differentiates between online and offline forms of civic engagement, and tests their relationships with people's attitudes and behaviors. Results show that both attitudes and behaviors are influenced by offline and online engagement, pointing out the driving role of the online side in forming civic attitudes, and the powerful direct effect exerted by the offline side on civic behavior. The research findings explain attitudinal and behavioral outcomes of online and offline civic engagement. Indicating that people become more involved in civic issues due to the digital evolution, the study extends prior literature and proposes an inclusive framework for understanding online and offline civic engagement, from a theoretical, instrumental, and empirical point of view. Additionally, the paper offers an up-dated scale for measuring the online civic engagement, by adding a 6th item (crowdfunding) into existent scale.

We focus on a number of idiosyncrasies of cultural and creative entrepreneurs (CCEs) to study CCEs' capacity of resilience under times of downturn (economic, financial and debt crisis). We analyse CC firms' demography (born and dead), trends and performance and the association between subsidies received and firm survival. We look at mostly micro firms in a country where CCEs are particularly challenged from the financial perspective, namely Portugal. We exploit the unique availability of accounting micro data at private firm level in a time span of 8 years (2004-2011), which allows to include the effects of the latest financial crisis, and to understand the evolution of the economic success criterion. The obtained results about the impact of subsidies on survival are interesting in both CCEs and policy perspectives, suggesting a positive impact of subsidies in periods of downturn, and negative impact of subsidies in periods of growth of the economy. Further, CC firms revealed to be more dynamic than other firms in other sectors.

This book explores the evolution of male writers marked by peculiar traits of childlike immaturity. The 'Boy-Man' emerged from the nexus of Rousseau's counter-Enlightenment cultural primitivism, Sensibility's 'Man of Feeling', the Chattertonian poet maudit, and the Romantic idealisation of childhood. The Romantic era saw the proliferation of boy-men, who congregated around such metropolitan institutions as The London Magazine. These included John Keats, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, Hartley Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey and Thomas Hood. In the period of the French Revolution, terms of childishness were used against such writers as Wordsworth, Keats, Hunt and Lamb as a tool of political satire. Yet boy-men writers conversely used their amphibian child-adult literary personae to critique the masculinist ideologies of their era. However, the growing cultural and political conservatism of the nineteenth century, and the emergence of a canon of serious literature, inculcated the relegation of the boy-men from the republic of letters

Der Inhalt und die Rechtsnatur des europäischen Missbrauchsverbots gehören zu den relevantesten Problemen des Unionsrechts. Wie ein europäisches Missbrauchsverbot zu fassen ist, gilt daher auch als Schlüsselfrage für die Schaffung einer einheitlichen europäischen Steuerrechtsordnung. Die besondere Brisanz der Thematik zeigt sich in der im Rahmen der BEPS-Diskussion erfolgten Normierung von Art. 6 der Anti-Tax-Avoidance-Directive. Die vorliegende Abhandlung untersucht die historische Entwicklung des europäischen Missbrauchsverbots, nimmt eine rechtsmethodische Inhaltsbestimmung vor und legt dar, dass es sich bei der Richtlinienbestimmung um die unionsweite Normierung des Missbrauchsverbots für das Unternehmenssteuerrecht handelt. Dabei werden steuerrechtsdogmatische Fragen dieses europäischen Rechtsgrundsatzes, wie insbesondere die Auswirkungen auf grenzüberschreitende Transaktionen und welche Rolle dabei subjektive Kriterien spielen, in die Betrachtung einbezogen. / »The European Principle of Prohibition of Abuse of Law as the Guardian of Tax Law« -- This study examines the historical evolution of the European concept of prohibition of abuse of law. It seeks to determine the conditions of the concept in in tax law and submits that Art. 6 of the Anti-Tax-Avoidance-Directive legislates the already established general principle of prohibition of abuse of law for the European corporate tax system. It further evaluates the tax implications of this concept for cross-border transactions and the importance of subjective criteria for determining abuse.

AbstractThis research examines the impact of increasing the stringency of renewable portfolio standards (RPS) on the consumption of energy produced from renewable sources. Putting prior findings in the context of policy learning, first we focus on technological innovation, factor endowments, and economic energy dependence of American states to track how RPS have proliferated and strengthened. Next, we look at the net effect of this RPS evolution on state fossil fuel energy divestment. To evaluate the interplay between: a) the political desire to lower fossil fuel use, b) technological feasibility to do so, and c) the economic trade‐offs and risks, we focus on the industrial sector dependence on energy security and affordability. Our results indicate that energy security is a priority and even in light of increasing RPS stringency, states with relatively weak but mandatory RPS are leaders in aggregate renewable energy consumption. This fact is due to favoring biofuel and hydro generation rather than solar and wind because of lower deployment costs.

E-government evolution has been described as a government's internal process of digital development, which eventually transforms its ability to respond to the public. As time goes by and these promised benefits have yet to fully materialize, civic technology—online tools that aim to achieve improved online interaction between governments and the public—is sometimes placed in the gap. This study provides findings from 38 interviews across five US municipal civic technology implementations, answering the question of whether US cities which have adopted civic technology tools enjoy improved two-way interactions between governments and the public, and also whether an "interaction-first" approach to government digitization appears to spur additional e-government development. By selecting five very different tool implementations, the research design employs Mill's Method of Difference to isolate commonalities springing simply from a municipality's implementation of a civic technology tool. Interviews reveal a range of common effects beyond the simple improvement of the service-delivery experience.

The purpose of the article is to assess Poland's position on the international tourist market taking a comparative approach, in the light of the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Index (TTCI) developed by the World Economic Forum (WEF), and also critical analysis of the TTCI methodology used in the years 2009–2016. The countries (Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) indicated by the Polish Tourism Organization as the most important competitors were selected for the comparative analysis of Poland's position on the tourist market. The research proved that in the analyzed period the position of Polish tourism against the background of competitors is growing as a result of the significant improvement of the Travel & Tourism regulatory framework and infrastructure. The WEF methodology is not yet perfect due to the selection and number of respondents, whereas the modification of competition factors, consistent with the evolution of theoretical concepts and also keeping up with the progress in business practice, deserves a positive assessment.