A review of the past 40 years reveals that economic policymaking has been profoundly influenced by two major phenomena. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Keynesian "revolution" made its debut on the stage of economic policy and determined the actions of policymakers in the Western world. The last two decades of the past millennium intum were influenced by the phenomenon of privatization. While the …
The metaphor of dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants expresses the meaning of discovering truth by building on previous discoveries. Although it is originally attributed to Bernard of Chartres in the twelfth century, Isaac Newton popularized the concept in 1676. The concept is as relevant for us today as it was for Newton in the seventeenth century. Since the early 1980s, pioneering…
This book has been written in order to contribute to the debate about best practice in construction procurement. At the outset it should be made plain that the authors do not subscribe to the view that there is any such thing as best practice. The main argument in this book is that there can never be a best practice, only better practice, in construction procurement. The reason for arrivi…
Sales of organic products are steadily increasing, and so is organic production in low and middle income countries. For good reason: for farmers it is an opportunity to improve their livelihoods and at the same time manage their land in a more sustainable way. It enables them to access promising local and international markets and to gain a better income. There are many successful examples of …
The International Marketing Council of South Africa (IMC) was brought into being in August 2000 upon the realization that it was absolutely imperative to create a positive and compelling brand image for South Africa. At the time, there was a gap between the perception of the country and the reality of the country in the global marketplace. To exacerbate matters, there were many messages en…
The demand for food and agricultural products is changing in unprecedented ways. Increases in per capita incomes, higher urbanization and the growing numbers of women in the workforce engender greater demand for high-value commodities, processed products and ready-prepared foods. A clear trend exists towards diets that include more animal products such as fish, meat and dairy products, whi…
The international business literature has already acknowledged a number of positive outcomes for companies actively engaged in strategic alliances, such as higher return on equity, better return on investment, and higher success rates, compared with integration through mergers and acquisitions, or companies in the Fortune 500 list that avoid building inter-corporate relationships (Booz-Alle…
Competitive marketing strategies are strongest either when they position a firm's strengths against competitors' weaknesses or choose positions that pose no threat to competitors. As such, they require that the strategist be as knowledgeable about competitors' strengths and weaknesses as about customers' needs or the firm's own capabilities. This chapter is designed to assist the strategist …
The Asian Banker is the region’s most authoritative provider of strategic business intelligence to the financial services community. The Singapore-based company has offices in Singapore, Malaysia, Beijing, Manila and Dubai. It has a business model that revolves around three core business lines: publications, research services and forums.
Mechanical design is a complex process, requiring many skills. Extensive relation- ships need to be subdivided into a series of simple tasks. The complexity of the process requires a sequence in which ideas are introduced and iterated. We first address the nature of design in general, and then mechanical engineering design in particular. Design is an iterative process with many interactive ph…
This book aims to highlight the gendered nature of housing processes and systems in an international context. The intention is to explore the dynamics of contemporary economic and social change and consider the implications for the relationship between women and the housing system in developed and emerging societies in Europe, the USA and East Asia. Whilst there has been a growing interest in c…
The mission of the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) is to educate responsible leaders versed in ‘China Depth, Global Breadth’. The CEIBS Euro-China Centre for Leadership and Responsibility (ECCLAR) supports that mission by creating and disseminating knowledge on the practice and development of wise and responsible leadership especially in the corporate context. This coll…
The theory of univariate splines began its rapid development in the early sixties, resulting in several thousand research papers and a number of books. This development was largely over by 1980, and the bulk of what is known today was treated in the classic monographs of deBoor [Boo78] and Schu- maker [Sch81]. Univariate splines have become an essential tool in a wide variety of application are…
Risk assessment and management are core issues in social work across a range of settings and contexts. Responding to the risks posed by others, reducing risks to vulnerable persons and managing risks to themselves are all in a day’s work for busy practitioners. Managers and practitioners are routinely confronted with risk decisions, and such decisions are often central to the allocation of re…
For quite a long time, computer security was a rather narrow field of study that was populated mainly by theoretical computer scientists, electrical engineers, and applied mathematicians. With the proliferation of open sys- tems in general, and the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) in particular, this situation has changed fundamentally. Today, computer and network practitioners are equally…
Welcome to PhoneGap social app development. Social networking has changed the way we share information in our world. Where it used to be an e-mail to a friend (or even a letter!), now it's a tweet or a Facebook post, often for the world to see. What's even more amazing is how relatively young the various social networks are and how quickly they have changed the way we communicate and consume in…
Zabbix was born as a distributed network monitoring tool with a central web interface where you can manage almost everything. Nowadays, with Zabbix 2.4, the number of possible architectures has been reduced to a single server setup and a Zabbix-proxies distributed setup.