Open Access Books

Decoupling of business models and ecosystems is the disconnection of certain characteristic activities originally planned and completed in coincidence. It could bring in an immense adverse shock in the functioning of established business models and ecosystems possibly bringing them to resilience. Core causes for decoupling and resilience of business models and ecosystems are jolts, known as global crisis, universal pandemics, etc. The undesirable outcomes of critical events can reveal unique circumstances for business model and ecosystem resilience. Business model and ecosystem resilience represents a mandatory prerequisite for firms challenging their functioning and even very existence. Research has been conducted thus far, nevertheless this theme requires significantly more consideration. The key objective of this book is to bring further insights in the field delivering a thorough examination of the ways in which business models and ecosystems can develop resilience under extraordinary conditions. In the book, the resilience of business models and ecosystems is analysed aiming to investigate further the specifics of the relevant processes securing resilience and its outcomes. The resilience of business models and ecosystems is scrutinised as a credible way for enhancing the predispositions of firm’s survivability.

Forced Mobility of EU Citizens is a critical evaluation from an empirical perspective of existing practices of the use of transnational criminal justice instruments within the European Union. Such instruments include the European Arrest Warrant (EAW), prisoner transfer procedures and criminal law-related deportations. The voices and experiences of people transferred across internal borders of the European Union are brought to the fore in this book. Another area explored is the scope and value of EU citizenship rights in light of cooperation not just between judicial authorities of EU Member States, but criminal justice systems in general, including penitentiary institutions. The novelty of the book lays not only in the fact that it brings to the fore a topic that so far has been under-researched, but it also brings together academics and studies from different parts of Europe – from the west (i.e. the expelling countries) and the east (the receiving countries, with a special focus on two of the jurisdictions most affected by these processes – Poland and Romania). It therefore exposes processes that have so far been hidden, shows the links between sending and receiving countries, and elaborates on the harms caused by those instruments and the very idea of ‘justice’ behind them. This book also introduces a new element to deportation studies as it links to them the institution of the European Arrest Warrant and EU law transfers targeting prisoners and sentenced individuals. With a combination of legal, criminological, and sociological perspectives, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students with an interest in EU law, criminal law, transnational criminal justice, migration/immigration, and citizenship. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license and funded by Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Law Studies.

The purpose of this book is to offer innovative applications of the distillation process. The book is divided in two main sections, one containing chapters that deal with process design and calculations, and the other, chapters that discuss distillation applications. Moreover, the chapters involve wide applications as in fruit spirits production, in organic liquid compounds produced by oil and fats cracking, energy evaluation in distillation processes, and applicability of solar membrane distillation. I believe that this book will provide new ideas and possibilities of the development of innovative research lines for the readers.

Guidelines for legal representatives of children in civil matters Editors: Ann Skelton and Carina du Toit 2016 ISBN: 978-1-920538-49-1 Pages: 28 Print version: Available Electronic version: Free PDF available

Saint Jérôme souffre parfois du voisinage trop éclatant de son illustre contemporain Augustin. Qu’il s’essaie dans le genre historique avec la Chronique et aussitôt s’élève le choeur des voix qui lui préfèrent l’ampleur et la portée théologique de la Cité de Dieu ! Mais une telle comparaison, qui ne tient compte ni des enjeux ni du contexte spécifiques de chaque œuvre, est forcément réductrice et conduit inévitablement à des classements arbitraires et spécieux. L’œuvre historique d’Augustin, ...

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On the occasion of the two-hundred-year anniversary of the founding of the university, the Gottsched couple traveled to Königsberg. Their journey is reflected in the letters from 1744 and 1745 along with the events of the Second Silesian War. Gottsched reports on the reception of his collection of dramatic texts Schaubüne, answers queries from academics seeking positions and acts as an intermediary between authors and publishers.

The 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD) is the first human rights treaty to explicitly acknowledge the right to education for persons with disabilities. In order to realize this right, the convention’s Article 24 mandates state parties to ensure inclusive education systems that overcome outright exclusion as well as segregation in special education settings. Despite this major global policy change to tackle the discriminations persons with disabilities face in education, this has yet to take effect in most school systems worldwide. Focusing on the factors undermining the realization of disability rights in education, Julia Biermann probes current meanings of inclusive education in two contrasting yet equally challenged state parties to the UN CRPD: Nigeria, whose school system overtly excludes disabled children, and Germany, where this group primarily learns in special schools. In both countries, policy actors aim to realize the right to inclusive education by segregating students with disabilities into special education settings. In Nigeria, this demand arises from the glaring lack of such a system. In Germany, conversely, from its extraordinary long-term institutionalization. This act of diverting from the principles embodied in Article 24 is based on the steadfast and shared belief that school systems, which place students into special education, have an innate advantage in realizing the right to education for persons with disabilities. Accordingly, inclusion emerges to be an evolutionary and linear process of educational expansion that depends on institutionalized special education, not a right of persons with disabilities to be realized in local schools on an equal basis with others. This book proposes a refined human rights model of disability in education that shifts the analytical focus toward the global politics of formal mass schooling as a space where discrimination is sustained.

Amid the gloom, indeed the despair, that prevailed among auto industry spokesmen during early 1981, the University of Michigan held the first U.S.-Japan Auto Conference. With all the uncertainty that accompanies a march into new territory, the conference very much resembled a call to arms as industry, union, and government officials sought to comprehend and respond to the Japanese challenge. In the subsequent two conferences in 1982 and 1983, the concerned parties displayed an impressive willingness to roll up their sleeves and get on with creating the conditions for a renewal of the industry. Yet success seemed to elude their efforts, and frustrations mounted as the national recession lengthened and deepened. It was not until the March 1984 conference that definite change in tone became apparent. By this time, it was clear that the industry was beginning to reap the fruits of its efforts. As Paul McCracken notes in his remarks, the market for new cars was manifesting its traditional high-geared response to improved business conditions, and the voluntary trade restraints were contributing to the ability of the industry to take advantage of this renewed prosperity. In addition, those who know the industry well knew that the major improvements in quality and productivity had been made, and many of the changes responsible for these improvements seem unlikely to be reversed. All this was much on the minds of speakers and participants during the March conference. The various speakers presented an image of people who thought that they were pretty much on the way toward addressing successfully their internal problems of productivity, quality, and marketing. All that remained was to dispose of the external factors that prevented the, from competing on that well-known if elusive "level playing field." [ix]

This eBook is a collection of articles from a Frontiers Research Topic. Frontiers Research Topics are very popular trademarks of the Frontiers Journals Series: they are collections of at least ten articles, all centered on a particular subject. With their unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical advances in a hot research area! Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial Office: frontiersin.org/about/contact

Aminata Camara, Maya K., Lafia T., Oxana Chi and Layla Zami are middle-class, highly educated women in Germany and come from families of mixed African European heritages. This ethnographic study traces the coming of age as person of African descent in Germany born in the 1980s with a focus on the city of Frankfurt. Silvia Wojczewski follows the paths of five women and shows how the practice of travelling is used as a way to connect to transnational families and to an Afrodiasporic heritage. Zooming in on five lives, she reveals the ways in which class, diaspora and kinship relations influence how the women understand themselves and their position in the world.

Allegory is about seeing a double meaning in a work of art. In this particular text, literal and hidden meaning has a long history of both practical use in creating utterances and creating theories of pictorial communication. In the Old Polish era, the most representative examples of allegorical reading of myths are Andrzej Zbylitowski’s Renaissance translation of the story of Acteon from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Walerian Otwinowski’ commentary in his translation of this work, which he intended to be used by students. Therefore, in the explanations placed on the margins of the translated text, he extracted the myth’s moral, theological, and philosophical truths. He also made an allegory of a Christianization of “pagan” beliefs, treating them as stories about false gods, under which the authors passed on knowledge about the Christian God, probably under his inspiration, because they did not know the Bible.

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Biotechnology is the scientific field of studying and applying the most efficient methods and techniques to get useful end-products for the human society by using viable micro-organisms, cells, and tissues of plants or animals, or even certain functional components of their organisms, that are grown in fully controlled conditions to maximize their specific metabolism inside fully automatic bioreactors. It is very important to make the specific difference between biotechnology as a distinct science of getting valuable products from molecules, cells or tissues of viable organisms, and any other applications of bioprocesses that are based on using the whole living plants or animals in different fields of human activities such as bioremediation, environmental protection, organic agriculture, or industrial exploitation of natural resources. The volume Advances in Applied Biotechnology is a scientific book containing recent advances of selected research works that are ongoing in certain biotechnological applications. Fourteen chapters divided in four sections related to the newest biotechnological achievements in environmental protection, medicine and health care, biopharmaceutical producing, molecular genetics, and tissue engineering are presented.

Across the Muslim world today, if anything is selfevident across the Muslim world today it is that the Ummah is badly in need of reform. On this point it can be stated with confidence that Muslims are agreed. Poverty and injustice characterize the face of Muslim lands from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Pollution and corruption are the order of the day in the societies where the gulf between them and the developed countries of the world has never been wider. Politics in the Muslim world are all too often the politics of deprivation, and culture the culture of despair. “Crisis in the Muslim Mind" examines the intellectual and historical roots of the malaise that has encompassed the Ummah and threatens to efface its identity. First published in Arabic in 1991, this important work (in an abridged English translation) is designed to familiarize educated and concerned Muslims with the nature of the crisis confronting them, and to suggest the steps necessary to overcome it.