Big Players Research Articles

Turning H₂ into a liquid fuel

Hydrogen is one of the fuels of the future. Hydrogen-powered fuel-cell vehicles emit no carbon dioxide, only a thin trail of water. Unlike electric cars, they can be refueled in minutes. And while H 2 is created mostly from methane today, proponents see a future when green hydrogen is generated cheaply by water electrolysis that uses energy from the wind and the sun. But hydrogen is also an extremely light molecule that must be compressed for shipping and storage. The infrastructure to get it into fuel-cell vehicles or power plants exists in just a few places. Umicore and Anglo American, two big players in precious metals, have formed an R&D venture to advance a novel solution to the compression problem: the liquid organic hydrogen carrier, or LOHC. The idea behind the LOHC is to chemically bind hydrogen to a stable liquid carrier. This bound hydrogen can be loaded into a

The FutureS of healthcare

This editorial for the special issue of FutureS is not intended to provide a comprehensive, analytical overview of the future of health care; rather, it collects the perspectives on which scholars have focused most. There is a danger that what we report will quickly become obsolete for numerous reasons; think of the speed of current technological progress or the fact that the Covid-19 pandemic could further stress health care systems around the world. However, we would like to outline some of the current topics explored in the literature and focus on the scenarios envisioned by practitioners. We write this piece being interested in the innovative impulses of all the actors belonging to the "renewed" health care ecosystem, aware of the fact that there are significant differences between the countries of the North and South of the world and, consequently, between their health care systems. What we can say with certainty is that the healthcare and life sciences are the protagonists of an unparalleled revolution. The aging population and changing needs, the increasingly common occurrence of chronic disorders, and digitization are some of the challenges facing the sector. The technological change of the fourth industrial revolution is disruptive and changes the logic of the market, not only that of healthcare but also that of adjacent markets. Because of the intensity with which insiders have to face these new trends, the topic has been the focus of interest of scholars and practitioners in recent years. The big players in consulting, as well as the scholars, have deepened the issues of healthcare of the future, focusing on what will be the major challenges in 10 years and imagining potential scenarios that will reconfigure the way health care is delivered and used.In the next 10 years, there will be profound demographic changes and the healthcare system will necessarily have to reconfigure the supply of the necessary services and the methods of delivery (KPMG, 2018). Due to the aging of the population, there has already been a dramatic increase in chronic and degenerative diseases requiring complex treatment in recent years.In addition, the Covid-19 pandemic that has been sweeping the world since 2019 has strained global health systems, revealed already existing weaknesses, even in the most advanced countries, and is representing an important moment of reflection for all policymakers. The whole world is questioning what will need to be done to foster greater effectiveness of national systems as well as better capacity to cope with shocks of such magnitude.In this document we explore what practitioners and scholars consider the main future challenges and the major changes that need to be made in the healthcare sector in order to embrace a new paradigm of care, based on the centrality of the patient, on prevention and not on cure, on technologies at the side of humans.

Worst-case Bounds on Power vs. Proportion in Weighted Voting Games with an Application to False-name Manipulation

Weighted voting games apply to a wide variety of multi-agent settings. They enable the formalization of power indices which quantify the coalitional power of players. We take a novel approach to the study of the power of big vs. small players in these games. We model small (big) players as having single (multiple) votes. The aggregate relative power of big players is measured w.r.t. their votes proportion. For this ratio, we show small constant worst-case bounds for the Shapley-Shubik and the Deegan-Packel indices. In sharp contrast, this ratio is unbounded for the Banzhaf index. As an application, we define a false-name strategic normal form game where each big player may split its votes between false identities, and study its various properties. Together, our results provide foundations for the implications of players’ size, modeled as their ability to split, on their relative power.

Berlin Congress 1878 Through the Eyes of Phanariot Alexander Karateodori Pashi

The article contributes to the historical literature on the Berlin Congress; it shows the events of the summer of 1878 through the eyes of the diplomats of the defeated Otto man Empire. The primary source for the article is the “Rapport” by the head of the Turkish delegation to the Сongress, Alexander Karathéodori Pasha (1833–1906), a Phanariote with Greek and Bulgarian roots, the son of the personal physician of Sultan Mahmud II and the first Ottoman lawyer. He graduated from the Sorbonne law faculty with a doctorate in law. Until recently, Turkish historians wrote about him more as a diplomat. However, in recent years, they started to pay attention to his extraordinary fate, the history of his family, in which there were many famous Phanariots. “Rapport” only in recent years began to attract the at tention of historians. The history of its creation is still unclear. It contains fascinating details of the relationship between representatives of a collective Europe at that time, the nature of their interests, and factors that outlined the fate of the Balkan region for decades to come. The report was written by Ottoman dignitaries when the Balkans finally became a “border area.” Its author noticed how the “big players” ’s geopolitical contradictions pushed the local people’s historical evolution along the “path” of future cataclysms. Alexander Karathéodori Pasha conveys, through seemingly minor details, the discord between the representatives of the “collective West” “and their desire to stop the attempts of the Ottoman Empire to follow the European paradigm of development. Against the background of the events in Berlin, Karathéodori eased the participants’ desires to start the quickest part of the “Ottoman inheritance” and drew attention to the beginning process of restructuring of international relations. He viewed the Berlin Congress analytically and realized its long-term implications.

Zarządzanie migracją w Stanach Zjednoczonych i w Unii Europejskiej – utrzymanie bezpieczeństwa

The article reflexes the nexus between security and migration management. Immigration is often seen as threat to national security but in case of refugees they are the victims of the instability and lack of protection of their human rights. The article aims to analyse how the human security concept is discussed in EU policies and how it has been implemented to tackle the migration crisis. The approach of the USA to migration and security will be used for the comparative analysis. The article discusses the historical and legal developments of migration management and the effects and problematics in the open world. Since the EU and the USA are the world big players, they should stay the leaders in promoting human rights and security. The way to do it is to introduce homogeneous policies in terms of migration management.

The Power of Reputation: A Case Study on Artistic Directors of Austria's Music Festivals

Abstract Reputation represents the standing of a person or organisation in the public field and illustrates/marks their contribution towards the implementation of collectively shared values and goals. From a business point of view, reputation belongs to the intangible assets of a company and is therefore part of the goodwill. Especially, the leader of an organisation—particularly in a cultural enterprise—shapes the external public image of the organisation, studies the impact of the image on the public consciousness by assessing public opinion about the organisation's achievements and consequently also gauges the economic and/or artistic success of the organisation. Based on the statements of experts about music festivals of high culture in Austria alongside the big players such as Salzburg or Bregenz Festival, the aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between reputation of artistic directors (ADs) and the performance of cultural enterprises. It will also be demonstrated how the reputation of these individuals has an impact on tourism, hospitality and trade in the vicinity of cultural enterprises.

Paying with your personal data: the insensitivity of private information provision to asymmetric benefits

Internet services are often free of charge but ask for customers’ personal data in exchange for usage. We experimentally study whether the provision of information-based public goods is susceptible to restraint when contributions not only make contributors better off but also enable a non-contributing “big player” to acquire substantial profits. We show that the presence of the big player crowds out the willingness to provide neutral tokens, but no such effect is observed for the provision of private information. Hence, collecting anonymized personal data instead of monetary fees can be more profitable to service providers and create greater benefits for customers.

Mining Twitter Data for Business Intelligence Using Naive Bayes Algorithm for Sentiment Analysis

Today social media has grown to be a big player in the way businesses and organizations operate, especially with the coronavirus pandemic increasing the online footprint of organizations. The use of data from social media to drive business intelligence is now of growing interest to both researchers and business owners. Business owners can now utilize platforms like Twitter to learn about their target audience and improve their business processes to meet their growing needs. Twitter makes it easy to see what is going or about to go viral and vital details like why it is going viral and the players behind it. This research aims to help business owners’ especially small and medium enterprises and start-ups gain a competitive advantage in their industry by using the crowd wisdom opportunity via social media. The proposed system is based on Twitter and crawls the platform for relevant data, including; locations, trends, and important actors (influencers) within a specified field; the system cleans the data and presents the information in an actionable format. Python was used for Twitter data mining, and sentiment analysis of the tweets was done using Naive Bayes classifiers.

Corona und die gefesselte Globalisierung

ZusammenfassungDer Begriff der Globalisierung meint keine aktuelle Periode der Weltgeschichte, sondern einen Prozess, der wellenförmig verläuft und von tiefen Einbrüchen unterbrochen wird. Die Aufschwungphasen sind durch ein exponentielles Wachstum gekennzeichnet, bis Kipppunkte erreicht werden. Parallel dazu verläuft ein Prozess der Fragmentierung, der einzelne Länder, Großregionen oder Teile einer Gesellschaft betrifft, weil es immer Gewinner und Verlierer der Globalisierung gibt. Anhand historischer Beispiele werden beide Prozesse im Weltmaßstab skizziert. Sie sind nicht die bloße Folge des technischen Wandels bei Transport und Kommunikation, sondern bedürfen der flankierenden Institutionen aus Internationalen Öffentlichen Gütern wie Sicherheit, Stabilität und Konnektivität. Bereit gestellt werden sie von großen Mächten, weil nur diese über die Ressourcen verfügen und vor dem Freiwilligendilemma stehen. Ferner bedarf es einer großen Erzählung der Globalisierung, die konkurrierende Lehrmeinungen marginalisiert. Globalisierung gerät in die Krise, wenn die treibenden Transaktionen Kipppunkte erreichen oder die großen Mächte sich im Niedergang befinden und nicht mehr bereit bzw. in der Lage sind, für die Internationalen Öffentlichen Güter aufzukommen. Dann beginnt der globalisierungskritische Diskurs, der hegemonial wird, wenn immer neue Krisen den Globalisierungsdiskurs delegitimieren. Konsequenz ist die Spaltung der Gesellschaft in Kosmopoliten und Populisten. Derzeit stehen die wichtigsten Akteure vor dem hegemonialen Dilemma (USA) bzw. dem Freerider-Dilemma (China) und reagieren neoisolationistisch. Damit stehen die Internationalen Öffentlichen Güter zur Disposition, die Globalisierung gerät in die Krise. Die Corona-Pandemie hat diese Entwicklung katalysiert.

The Relation Between Trading Volume Concentration and Stock Returns

The Taiwan Stock Exchange discloses data on daily trading volume across brokerage firms for each listed stock. Market practitioners suggest that the concentration of trading volume contains information on the trading behaviors of big players. We use the Gini Coefficient to measure the degree of concentration, upon which a trading strategy is proposed. We conduct an event study to examine whether such a strategy will yield abnormal returns. Our sample contains 375 listed companies with events identified during the sample period from February 2020 to August 2020. The empirical results show that the trading signal based on the Gini coefficient is informative and that most of the average abnormal returns after the event date are significantly positive with the cumulative average abnormal returns increasing almost monotonically up to the end day of the event window. Consistent with prior studies in which different measures of concentration are utilized, our findings provide additional evidence that the Gini Coefficient could help investors to develop profitable stock selection and market timing strategies.

Collaboration in the IETF

RFC 9000, published in May 2021, marks an important milestone for the Internet's standardization body, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF): finally, the specification of the QUIC protocol is available. QUIC is the result of a five-year effort - and it is also the second of two major protocols (the first being SPDY, which later became HTTP/2) that Google LLC first deployed, and then brought to the IETF for standardization. This begs the question: when big players follow such a "shoot first, discuss later" approach, is IETF collaboration still "real", or is the IETF now being (mis-)used to approve protocols for standardization when they are already practically established, without really actively involving anyone but the main proponents?

The Importance of Circular Economy (CE) and its Effect on the Plastic Packaging Supply Market

There is an increasing pressure from the public, governments and the industry itself to move towards to a more sustainable world. In 2015 the European Commission launched its action plan for the circular economy (CE), followed by several further legislation and regulation worldwide, sustainability commitments of FMCG and manufacturing companies, retailers, and foundations. The transition from current linear economy to circular economy requires new actions and policies, and impose extra challenges on all participants on the market. Sustainability, especially in relation with plastics, needs to be examined in its entirety. Beyond legislation, this study is investigating how the big players on the market have been influenced by CE, which sustainable goals they target to reach and by when, and whether these targets are aligned with CE. The study also analyses strategy approach and the effect on the organisations’ sourcing activities.

CƏNUBİ QAFQAZ: DÖVLƏTLƏR ARASINDA YENİ MÜBARİZƏ MEYDANI

The article analyzes the security problems in the South Caucasus and examines the interests of international actors in the region. The article provides detailed analyse of possible impacts of the world states to potitical issues in the South Caucasus region. Paper underscores the geopolitical symbol of South Caucasus as clashing and conflicting centre of the interests of the big players. Throughout history Caucasus was a playground for many regional and global actors with enduring interests. Each actor tries to capitalize on the geostrategic benefits of the region. Though the South Caucasus occupies a small area on the world map, the scale of the interest in the region is much bigger than its geographical size. Key words: security, South Caucasus, geostrategy, states, political interests, policy

FDI in China and global production networks: Assessing the role of and impact on big world players

How can countries successfully engage in global production networks? We provide a Computable General Equilibrium analysis of the impact of FDI on global production networks in Textiles, Chemicals, Electronics and Machinery, dividing the world economy in six regions (China, East Asia, Japan, EU28, the U.S. and the group of Emerging and Developing Economies). Interestingly for the policy maker, although the four sectors have contrasting production technologies, their Chinese exports and imports still follow a similar trend: East Asia and Japan are Chinese main intermediate suppliers while the US, Europe and the Emerging and Developing Economies play more the role of final markets. FDI inflows have benefitted China and we quantify by how much they have raised Chinese wages, GDP, national income and export competitiveness. By contrast, being an intermediate supplier or playing mostly the role of big final market in the network is not enough to succeed in your integration with China. The extent of the (positive or negative) effects is very much related to whether the structure of production (i.e., sectors’ weight in GDP) of the different economies is similar to (and therefore more easily crowded out by) Chinese booming sectors.

Remaking higher education for the post‐COVID‐19 era: Critical reflections on marketization, internationalization and graduate employment

This Special Issue was conceived and developed following a series of international conferences held in Asia, with a particular focus on critically reflecting upon higher education development in the region from broader social and political economy perspectives. Some of the papers in this Special Issue were selected from presentations in the East Asia Social Policy (EASP) Research Network Conference successfully held in Taiwan in 2018, while others were chosen from international events held at Lingnan University in Hong Kong presenting critical reviews and reflections on internationalization, marketization and graduate employment of higher education in Asia. This introductory article puts the discussions of the selected papers in this issue in context, with critical reflections on the key issues being examined in these papers. The Special Issue is published when the world is still confronting the unprecedented global health crisis resulted from the outbreak of the COVID‐19 pandemic. This article discusses the higher education development trends in Asia through the massification, diversification and internationalisation processes in transforming the higher education system and examines how these development trends are affected by the COVID‐19 crisis.

Google Trend Analysis and Paradigm Shift of Online Education Platforms during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Objective: The largest pandemic in history, the COVID-19 pandemic, has been declared a doomsday globally. The second wave spreading worldwide has devastating consequences in every sector of life. Several measures to contain and curb its infection have forged significant challenges for the education community. With an estimated 1.6 billion learners, the closure of schools and other educational institutions has impacted more than 90% of students worldwide from the elementary to tertiary level. Methods: In a view to studying impacts on student’s fraternity, this article aims at addressing alternative ways of educating—more specifically, online education—through the analysis of Google trends for the past year. The study analyzed the platforms of online teaching and learning systems that have been enabling remote learning, thereby limiting the impact on the education system. Thorough text analysis is performed on an existing dataset from Kaggle to retrieve insight on the clustering of words that are more often looked at during this pandemic to find the general patterns of their occurrence. Findings: The results show that the coronavirus patients are the most trending patterns in word search clustering, with the education system being at the control and preventive measures to bring equilibrium in the system of education. There has been significant growth in online platforms in the last year. Existing assets of educational establishments have effectively converted conventional education into new-age online education with the help of virtual classes and other key online tools in this continually fluctuating scholastic setting. The effective usage of teaching tools such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, and WebEx are the most used online platforms for the conduction of classes, and whiteboard software tools and learning apps such as Vedantu, Udemy, Byju’s, and Whitehat Junior have been big market players in the education system over the pandemic year, especially in India. Conclusions: The article helps to draw a holistic approach of ongoing online teaching-learning methods during the lockdown and also highlights changes that took place in the conventional education system amid the COVID pandemic to overcome the persisting disruption in academic activities and to ensure correct perception towards the online procedure as a normal course of action in the new educational system. To fill in the void of classroom learning and to minimize the virus spread over the last year, digital learning in various schools and colleges has been emphasized, leading to a significant increase in the usage of whiteboard software platforms.

Rising Pediatric Morbidity and Mortality in the Developing World.

Pediatric morbidity and mortality are on the rise in certain regions of the world specifically the low-income countries where no goals are being met in this regard. In comparison to the developed countries, the rate of decline in morbidity and mortality is dawdling. Disease trends show that there is a resurgence of diseases that are already major contributors to this healthcare crisis (big players like pneumonia, malaria, and meningitis), whereas no significant decrease is being noted in the others. Seasonal and cyclical trends along with other factors such as antibiotic resistance and deficient vaccination coverage in the low socioeconomic class (due to decreased availability or lack of awareness) can be counted as major precipitating factors and policies should be aimed towards rectification.

GoBhaarati- contributing to the “Journey of Healthy Living”

Learning outcomes The learning outcomes of this paper is as follows: to showcase how a futuristic mission and planned branding initiatives can help start-up social enterprise to create a successful brand; to explain how a comprehensive understanding of the target group and innovative products/services and channel strategies help GoBhaarati position itself as an upcoming not for profit social enterprise; to argue how proper brand mission and branding can help even a small startup to create a brand identity in a fiercely competitive fragmented market dominated by big players; the constraints GoBhaarati faced in constituting and aligning distribution channel. These impulsions can have legal, environmental and or managerial foundations. Case overview/synopsis GoBhaarati Agro Industries and Private Limited (GoBhaarati) operated as a nonprofit social enterprise in the Health and Wellness Industry, providing natural indigenous traditional Indian products such as millets, honey, turmeric, jaggery, rock salt and serving millet-based snacks to consumers. At the epicenter of Gobhaarati's branding strategy was its health and wellness positioning. The company's mission was to increase the positive perception of millets and to convince consumers that there was intrinsic value in a product's origin and production processes. Iriventi aimed to achieve a turnover of at least ten crores by 2025, but the company's sales and financial resources were limited. With this clouding in mind, Iriventi could not decide whether to let GoBhaarati stay niche in business or to expand it organically. Complexity academic level Graduate and executive management education students can use the case. The case may also be used to focus on entrepreneurship and distribution management for start-up social enterprises. Supplementary materials Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Subject code CSS 8: Marketing.

A Study in Anxiety of the Dark

A Study in Anxiety of the Dark

The Impact of Globalization on European Airline Market

Airline industry is very important for modern society as the biggest player in the globalization process by connecting regions, promoting global trade and tourism, facilitating economic and social development. However, here is a lack of research on relationship between globalization and airline industry in Europe. It remains unclear how to measure the impact of globalization on performance of airline companies and industry. The article aims at investigation of the impact of globalization on operational and financial performance of European airlines before pandemics.The authors applied a nonexperimental quantitative research design to analyze the relationship between independent globalization variables (level of globalization in Europe, globalization opportunity, globalization threat) and dependent airlines’ operational and financial performance indicators. Research is done using secondary data from annual reports of 19 European airlines members of European Common Aviation Area (ECAA). The panel data analysis was applied for 2007–2017 with multiple regression analysis using STATA. The results show that globalization exerts a significant positive effect on operational performance. On financial performance only revenue per passenger kilometers is positively influenced by globalization. Globalization affects low-cost airlines and full-service airlines performance differently.