Master Concept Research Articles

How should we think about globalization in a post-globalization era?

This article critically examines the challenges to the globalization paradigm observed throughout the world in the twenty-first century. While empirical evidence suggests that the policy-oriented globalization project of the 1990s has been superseded by different tendencies and policies, social-scientific scholarship in areas other than economics has not engaged with the notion of ‘post-globalization’. The principal reason appears to be the employment of different conceptual lenses, whereby globalization appears as a long-term process largely unaffected by short-term shifts. The article interrogates the conceptual terrain of globalization scholarship, arguing that several important developments require the adjustment of theoretical lenses and a greater flexibility in the use of globalization as a master concept. In order to perform such a task, the article outlines a series of ideas that could facilitate the development of a perspective capable of addressing the question of how we should think about globalization in a post-globalization era.

Becoming topological of heavy metal: Notes from India

The article argues for doing away with master concepts such as ‘subculture’ and similar ancillary concepts and instead argues for the open-ended pursuit of the social. Instead of deploying a priori spatiotemporal concepts such as ‘subculture’, ‘scene’ or ‘tribe’ it argues that a more fruitful approach would be to interrogate the work that these concepts do. It is important to grasp how and if these concepts close down or open up the field. The article argues that these concepts are necessarily topological and scalar, i.e. they are concerned with fixing musical collectivities in space–time. Through two ethnographic vignettes from India – of metal gigs in Kolkata and Bengaluru set a decade apart – the article argues for a minor and open-ended approach to heavy metal. Against the master concepts, the article argues for a seepage of minor aesthetics into our theorizations which can challenge the totalizing impulse of theory. An open-ended pursuit of heavy metal allows comprehension of a range of human and non-human processes in the social which otherwise risk being obfuscated by a narrow concern of chasing a master concept. In the concluding section, the article ends with a brief methodological note on the black metal/punk/grindcore act from India, Heathen Beast and the difficulty of situating them through conventional concepts.

Forced Orthodontic Extrusion to Restore the Unrestorable: A Proof of Concept.

The purpose of this clinical study was to assess the feasibility of forced orthodontic extrusion with the Tissue Master Concept to retain subgingivally fractured teeth as abutments for which extraction and replacement would be equal treatment opportunities. Participants were recruited from a group of consecutive patients in need of prosthodontic rehabilitation. In total, 36 deeply destroyed teeth in 31 patients underwent forced orthodontic extrusion with forces exceeding 50 g to reestablish biologic width and ensure a 2-mm dentin-ferrule design prior to single-crown restoration. The primary endpoint was the success of the extrusion in terms of the ability to restore the respective abutment tooth. Information about overall treatment time, frequency, and reasons for failure were collected. Four patients dropped out of the treatment. For the remaining 27 participants, data were fully collected. The amount of extrusion ranged between 2 and 6 mm (3.5 ± 0.9 mm), and the mean duration until retention was 20 ± 12 days. On average, patients returned three (± 3) times for control visits after extrusion. Adhesive failure (n = 6) and orthodontic relapse (n = 2) were the most frequent complication types. Forced orthodontic extrusion may be a useful tool to restore teeth evaluated as nonrestorable.

Tooth preservation of deeply destroyed teeth by forced orthodontic extrusion: A case series.

Maintaining and restoring teeth exhibiting subgingival or even subcrestal defect extensions represent a common problem in daily practice. Such teeth are often deemed "unrestorable" due to a significant hard tissue loss and defect locations violating the biologic width. In order to achieve a sufficient 2-mm-ferrule design and reestablish the biologic width, both surgical crown lengthening and orthodontic extrusion have been suggested. However, surgical crown lengthening has a negative effect on the attachment level of adjacent teeth as well as esthetic disadvantages particularly in the esthetic zone. Therefore, orthodontic extrusion might be considered as a valid therapeutic alternative since gingival architecture is maintained. While most orthodontic appliances are too complex for daily application, forced orthodontic extrusion by means of the Tissue Master Concept might be a cost- and time-effective approach due to advances in adhesive and computer-assisted dentistry. This clinical case series illustrates the methodology of the rather straightforward Tissue Master Concept in specific clinical situations that may occur in clinical routine.

Leveraging the 4th Industrial Revolution Technology for Sustainable Development of the Northern Sea Route (NSR)—The Case Study of Autonomous Vessel

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) technology has been applied to various industrial areas not only to improve economic efficiency but also to obtain environmental and safety benefits. We paid attention to the unresolved issues of Arctic development to establish a balance between economic feasibility and social values and suggest the 4IR technologies as the solution for this. The master concept of application of the 4IR technology to NSR sailing is presented. Further, we conducted a case study for autonomous vessels. A cost breakdown structure model is specified to compare the total costs of traditional and autonomous vessels. Then, we conducted scenario analysis to investigate the economic and social effects of autonomous vessels by season and route. The results show that autonomous vessels have economic benefits compared to the traditional vessel even in the winter season, and if we realize autonomous vessels in the NSR, there are more cost saving effects than in the Suez Canal Route (SCR) in any season. As for the environmental benefits, autonomous vessels have lower gas emissions and reduced water disposal compared to the traditional vessel. Further, autonomous vessels could be a solution to provide a better crew working environment by minimizing the number of people on board. The contribution of this research is that, first, we utilize real fuel oil consumption measurement data to estimate the voyage expenses, and, second, this is a novel attempt of applying the 4IR technology as a solution for the Arctic development issue. In this respect, this research is expected to serve as a cornerstone for future research, and it will help to establish Arctic development strategies in Arctic or non-Arctic countries.

Nihilopolitics as Meta-biopolitics? On Arthur Bradley's Unbearable Life: A Genealogy of Political Erasure

ABSTRACT This article begins by introducing Bradley's master concept of unbearable life and its underpinning structure and logic of nihilopolitics through the ancient Roman figure of damnatio memoriae. It then gives an overview of how both unbearable life and nihilopolitics are reflected in and supported by Bradley's close readings of different political theological figures, stretching from Foucault (the unbearable), passing through Augustine (Cacus), Shakespeare (Macbeth), Robespierre (the already dead), Hobbes (the religious martyr) and Schmitt (the katechon), to Benjamin (the undead and the past to come). The article concludes by briefly outlining a possible dialogue between Bradley's master concepts of unbearable life and nihilopolitics and the psychoanalytic concepts of the superego and the death drive.

Genus Unbelief, Species Atheism: The Case for and Against Unbelief as a Master Concept for Non-Religion

Recent initiatives by Stein, Flynn, Conrad, and others have promoted ‘unbelief’ as a replacement, an ‘umbrella term,’ for concepts like atheism, secularism, and irreligion. In this essay I show that unbelief as it is currently construed cannot serve this function: it is simultaneously too broad (embracing not only irreligion but heterodox religious belief) and too narrow (focusing on religious belief to the exclusion of other types of belief), and it commits a taxonomic error of equating unbelief with categories above and below its level. However, I also argue that, once reformed and disciplined, unbelief is a valuable and essential tool, and I provide some resources and models for a future Unbelief Studies in the Credition Research Project and the literature on agnotology, as well as ethnographical material questioning the cross-cultural applicability of belief and unbelief. Finally, I charge Unbelief Studies with the mission not only to analyze belief but to criticize and ultimately banish it as a bad mental and linguistic habit that perpetuates mistakes and leaves individuals vulnerable to further faults while eroding social trust and facticity itself.

Southern Literature, Cold War Culture, and the Making of Modern America by Jordan J. Dominy

Reviewed by: Southern Literature, Cold War Culture, and the Making of Modern America by Jordan J. Dominy Greg Barnhisel Jordan J. Dominy. Southern Literature, Cold War Culture, and the Making of Modern America. UP of Mississippi, 2021. ix + 159 pp. In William Faulkner’s 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom!, Shreve McCannon implores his Harvard roommate, Quentin Compson, to tell him about the South: “What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.” Even a Canadian like Shreve knows that to his Mississippian friend, the South, not the US, was his country of birth. The South was briefly an independent nation just three decades before Quentin’s birth. But it retained, refined, and intensified its separateness in the decades after the Confederacy fell and Reconstruction was sabotaged. Separateness, in fact, became the South’s identity: it saw itself as a captive region, a rump nation, within a larger and not particularly benevolent state. Thus, it seems improbable that Southernness could become a central component of a larger, amalgamated American identity, especially when crafting and selling that identity was a primary concern of American intellectuals and policymakers as the US became, in the years after the war, the world’s primary power and a synecdoche for the Free World. But, as Jordan J. Dominy argues in Southern Literature, Cold War Culture, and the Making of America, that’s exactly what happened. Like so much else, this universalizing of Southernness was largely Faulkner’s doing. Although this book spans the earliest years of the Cold War to the present day (what Dominy might call the Duck Dynasty stage of Western civilization), Faulkner looms over the project, as he did over American literature of the time. Area studies, a foundation-funded academic endeavor that began in the 1930s, became an urgent priority after World War II, when the US had to train leaders and technocrats to lead a loose global empire. Southern studies soon joined Asian Studies, Latin American Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and, of course, American Studies in scholarly journals and graduate catalogs. And “the figure of Faulkner” (38), Dominy asserts, “is what makes possible the area studies paradigm of southern studies.” When asked, Faulkner was pleased to represent the benign face of America and volunteered to go on numerous cultural-diplomatic trips for the State Department, often reciting his 1951 Nobel speech to foreign audiences. And he was an adamant and vocal anti-Communist. The problem was that he was just so . . . Southern. The Soviet Union, [End Page 789] as well as leftists in the West, made sure to remind everyone about Southern segregation and racial terrorism whenever American diplomats started raising their voices about freedom and equal opportunity. Excusing or even defending Southern resistance to desegregation, Faulkner often did his own cause little help. So how to square this circle? Dominy shows that the US consistently relied on two strategies: stressing the primacy of the individual and aestheticizing. Faulkner’s works were explained, by the Southern-rooted Kenyon Review and others, as formalist tours de force, not as depictions of a South whose culture was poisoned by white supremacy. These New Critical readings “contain[ed] unsavory national political problems by making them into an object of formalistic literary study” (45). And when a work just could not be entirely aestheticized (as with Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust), questions of race became issues of individual morality, or the human heart in conflict with itself, as Faulkner himself put it in the Nobel address. So, in Intruder in the Dust, Dominy explains, Gavin Stevens’s commentary “obscures and depoliticizes the problem [of an attempted lynching] by emphasizing individual moral responsibility and duty to country” (41-42). Dominy argues that the idea of the vital center that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. influentially developed in his 1949 book of the same name became the master concept of this strategy. Centrist politics, individual responsibility, and a commitment to narrowly defined civil liberties were its cornerstones and allowed critics and prize committees to read deeply political works such as All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison as dramas...

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC ASPECTS OF RECOGNITION AND VALIDATION OF NON-FORMAL ADULT LEARNING SYSTEM IN GREECE

Non-formal and informal aspects of education are nowadays related to the concepts of recurrent and lifelong learning, as literature significantly supports the importance of education, learning and training that takes place outside typical educational institutions. As lifelong learning is the master concept that could shape educational systems and economies, non-formal education includes any organized educational activity outside the established formal systems that serves identifiable learning objectives, while informal education refers to the lifelong process where every individual acquires knowledge, attributes, skills, values and behaviors from daily life’s experience. Furthermore, as there is currently a strong trend worldwide, to include similar practices in internal policy strategies, new alternative terms arise such as community learning, community education, etc. together with many pilot initiatives. During the recent years, such initiatives have already taken place in many countries, proving that similar actions could greatly contribute to individuals’ knowledge and skills enhancement as well as help in mitigating social inequalities, tackle unemployment, achieve a better match between jobs and skills, and thus improve employment through economic development by supporting human capital productivity. Due to the promising advantages of the organized establishment of non-formal and informal education, the present paper focuses on a thorough analysis of the aforementioned concepts and describes the initiative of a relevant research in Greece, conducted by the authors. The research consists of two parts, one that includes a reliable and representable sample of educational organizations (bodies), examining the current ways used to support and certify certain fields of informal education, noting the typical ways currently used to recognize non-formal and informal learning as well as an additional sample of individuals (beneficiaries) that are interested in further support, validation and certification of non-formal education and informal acquired learning. The results are expected to contribute to the process of highlighting information on the intensity of the demand for recognition of prior knowledge through mediation certification procedures by adult education organizations, as well as to the submission of proposals for the operation of the relevant national mechanisms under development in Greece, according to the European Directive 2012.

Identity: The demand for dignity and the politics of resentment

Identity is an urgent and necessary book―a sharp warning that unless we forge a universal understanding of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict. In 2014, Francis Fukuyama wrote that American institutions were in decay, as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatened to destabilize the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to “the people,” who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole.Demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today. The universal recognition on which liberal democracy is based has been increasingly challenged by narrower forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, which have resulted in anti-immigrant populism, the upsurge of politicized Islam, the fractious “identity liberalism” of college campuses, and the emergence of white nationalism. Populist nationalism, said to be rooted in economic motivation, actually springs from the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means. The demand for identity cannot be transcended; we must begin to shape identity in a way that supports rather than undermines democracy.

GLOBALISATION AT THE CROSSROADS? THE REVIVAL OF NATIONALISM AND IDENTITY POLITICS

This article is a revised and expanded version of the author’s keynote address for the inaugural International Conference on Politics and International Studies (ICPIS) 2018, held in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia. The title reflects the official theme of the said scholarly congregation, which deliberates on the contested notions of globalisation and the phenomenon’s related outcomes, including its much touted hegemonic, universal liberal qualities, which have elicited a backlash that has seen the revival of nationalism and identity politics during the last few decades. That globalisation has arrived at a crossroads and the thought of what might lie ahead is what this paper seeks to ponder, through the prism and critique of both recent as well as older works by the likes of Francis Fukuyama, Charles Taylor, Wang Gungwu and Samuel P. Huntington. More specifically, it critically explores the evolution and progress of globalisation from both historical and international relations (IR) perspectives, explicating watershed eras in the long cycle of modern international history that had as much facilitated as hindered the realisation of a universal liberal consensus, or liberal triumph. Although concluding that globalisation has been stopped in its tracks, the article nevertheless, expresses concerns regarding the limitations of Western-oriented IR as a discipline in comprehensively grasping the complexities of post-globalisation dynamics shaped by cultural-ideational specificities, not to mention, the fallacy of overemphasising on “identity politics” as a “master concept” in explaining all that is happening in contemporary world politics. Instead, it contends on the need to review existing analytical frameworks, while exploring new “logics” in the quest to construct new paradigms to help make sense of a post-globalisation, post-liberal, probably post-Western era.

Globalization and the rise of integrated world society: deterritorialization, structural power, and the endogenization of international society

AbstractThere is a widespread feeling that globalization represents a major system change that has or should have brought world society to the forefront of international relations theory. Nonetheless, world society remains an amorphous and undertheorized concept, and its potential role in shaping the structure of the international society of states has scarcely been raised. We build on Buzan's (2018, 2) master concept of ‘integrated’ world society (‘a label to describe the merger of world and interstate society’) to locate the integration of world society in the globalization of social networks. Following the advice of Buzan (2001) and Williams (2014), we use conceptual frameworks from international political economy to systematically explore the structure of integrated world society along six dimensions derived from Mann (1986) and Strange (1988): military/security, political, economic/production, credit, knowledge, and ideological. Our empirical survey suggests that, on each of these dimensions, power has centralized as it has globalized, generating steep global hierarchies in world society that are similar to those that characterize national societies. The centrality of the United States in the networks of world society makes it in effect the ‘central state’ of a new kind of international society that is endogenized within integrated world society.

Are Concept Maps a Valid Measurement Tool for Conceptual Learning? A Cross-case Study

The approaches of “problem-based learning” and “writing to learn” are known for facilitating the apprehension of concepts and better retaining of knowledge. In educational research, concept maps are sometimes used to assess the learners’ level of knowledge. In this paper, the main aim is to investigate the validity of concept maps as an instrument for the assessment of learning. Therefore, six students were observed for more than a year and their learning process was documented in various ways. The concept maps were used in the form of a pre-post-test, and the different students’ results were compared in a cross-case analysis using a master concept map. The results presented in this study indicate that the validity of concept maps compared to interviews and reports are questionable. It is possible to measure some parts of the learning process with concept maps, but conceptual learning seems to be hidden from the instrument. Therefore, concept maps might not be the most useful tool to measure conceptual change.

Seamless roaming and guaranteed communication using a synchronized single-hop multi-gateway 802.15.4e TSCH network

Industrial wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) are being used to improve the efficiency, productivity and safety of industrial processes. One open standard that is commonly used in such cases is IEEE 802.15.4e. Its Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) mode employs a time synchronized based medium access control (MAC) scheme together with channel hopping to alleviate the impact of channel fading and interference. Until now, most of the industrial WSANs have been designed to only support static nodes and are not able to deal with mobility. In this paper, we show how a single-hop, multi-gateway IEEE 802.15.4e TSCH network architecture can tackle the mobility problem. We introduce the Virtual Grand Master (VGM) concept that moves the synchronization point from separated Backbone Border Routers (BBRs) towards the backbone network. With time synchronization of all BBRs, mobile nodes can roam from one BBR to another without time desynchronization. In addition to time synchronization, we introduce a mechanism to synchronize the schedules between BBRs to support fast handover of mobile nodes. We show that with the proposed network architecture handovers happen instantly without any packet losses, while the handover time can be up to tens of seconds without any time synchronization between BBRs. The solution is evaluated in a testbed setting as well as in a real industrial environment.

Introduction: Of Biodeconstruction (Part II)

Introduction: Of Biodeconstruction (Part II) Erin Obodiac (bio) Of Biodeconstruction (Part II) ventures through the door left open by the emergent questions, hesitations, and provocations about deconstruction, the philosophy of life, and the life sciences advanced in Of Biodeconstruction (Part I). Although Jacques Derrida’s writings on autoimmunity, pharmakon, life-death, the question of the animal, Geschlecht, cloning, living-on, the genetic program, and epigenesis suggest an engagement—from the earliest publications to the last seminars—with biology, the life sciences, and the philosophy of life, it remains a question whether or not deconstruction is already “biodeconstruction.” Yet neither a critique of the biological sciences—contemporary or arcane—nor, alternately, a conclusion concerning the historical limits of deconstruction in our postgenomic era is primarily what is at stake. Rather than taking aim at a target from the outside or foreclosing on the future, the critical force of deconstructive readings and writings tends toward implosion and preemption. And yet: a step of retreat (the pas, the “not” of the step) perhaps hinders differential materiality’s foray into biological thought. Catherine Malabou, the honored respondent for the Of Biodeconstruction double issue, interrogates this hindrance in her many books—especially Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality and Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction—and further develops for the present Postmodern Culture issue a critical clarification of what she sees as a Derridean blind spot. In Of Biodeconstruction (Part I), the essays by Vitale, Obodiac, and Senatore, for the most part, hold fast to Derrida’s critique of self-consciousness as living presence—phenomenology’s cornerstone—and the premise that différance and the trace not only organize and constitute all life, from the amoeba to the human being, but also subtend the animate and the inanimate: counter to a logocentric conception of the genetic code, the genome as a mode of arche-writing, a texture of differential traces, allows for an openness to the outside that might be compatible with contemporary findings in epigenetics, systems theory, and research into the plasticity of the genome. In addition, the conversation by Kirby, Schrader, and Timár, which headed up Part I, demonstrates that new materialist feminism, feminist science studies, and the analysis of the political economy of nature-culture find in biodeconstruction a critical ally. If Part I situates biodeconstruction within the current critical context and the Derridean groundwork, Part II presents focused readings of Jacques Derrida’s concept of autoimmunity; Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the living being; Jane Bennett’s new materialist and Irwin Schrödinger’s genetic determinist conceptions of life; and Jorge Luis Borges’s bio-onto-theologic story “La escritura del dios.” Framed against the backdrop of Roberto Esposito’s thesis that biopolitics mediates biology and politics by way of the immunity paradigm, the first essay, Elina Staikou’s “Autoimmunity in Extremis: The Task of Biodeconstruction,” explores the radical dimensions of Derrida’s concept of autoimmunity. Arguing that autoimmunity has made its appearance in Derrida’s work under various names—pharmakon, death-drive, the nuclear hypothesis—Staikou suggests that autoimmunity is a central principle for biodeconstruction, one that attends to both the nihilism and the affirmation that characterize life processes such as those played out in endosymbiosysis and apoptosis. In “Biodeconstructing Merleau-Ponty,” Raoul Frauenfelder turns to the seminars on biology and philosophy Maurice Merleau-Ponty gave in the 1950s at the Collège de France. Frauenfelder identifies the development of the preformationism/epigenesis dialectic as a constitutive stumbling block for Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh of the world”—the master concept of his oeuvre—suggesting that this dialectic flattens out the radically differential nature of life-death: biodeconstruction puts into question the teleological closure reasserted by the phenomenological reading of the living being. Jonathan Basile’s essay, “How the Other Half-Lives: Life as Identity and Difference in Bennett and Schrödinger,” takes up the work of Jane Bennett, Erwin Schrödinger, Immanuel Kant, and Bernard Stiegler to demonstrate how biodeconstruction differs from new materialist, genetic determinist, and anthropocentric conceptions of life. Binaries such as animate/inanimate, vitalism/mechanism, self/other, human/animal, and especially the binary identity/difference fail to account for the living being’s...

Leveraging 3D geometric knowledge in the product lifecycle based on industrial standards

AbstractWith their practical introduction by the 1970s, virtual product data have emerged to a primary technical source of intelligence in manufacturing. Modern organization have since then deployed and continuously improved strategies, methods and tools to feed the individual needs of their business domains, multidisciplinary teams, and supply chain, mastering the growing complexity of virtual product development. As far as product data are concerned, data exchange, 3D visualization, and communication are crucial processes for reusing manufacturing intelligence across lifecycle stages. Research and industry have developed several CAD interoperability, and visualization formats to uphold these product development strategies. Most of them, however, have not yet provided sufficient integration capabilities required for current digital transformation needs, mainly due to their lack of versatility in the multi-domains of the product lifecycle and primary focus on individual product descriptions.This paper analyses the methods and tools used in virtual product development to leverage 3D CAD data in the entire life cycle based on industrial standards. It presents a set of versatile concepts for mastering exchange, aware and unaware visualization and collaboration from single technical packages fit purposely for various domains and disciplines. It introduces a 3D master document utilizing PDF techniques, which fulfills requirements for electronic discovery and enables multi-domain collaboration and long-term data retention for the digital enterprise.Highlights With their practical introduction by the 1970s, virtual product data have emerged to a primary technical source of intelligence in manufacturing. Modern organization have since then deployed and continuously improved strategies, methods and tools to feed the individual needs of their business domains, multidisciplinary teams, and supply chain, mastering the growing complexity of virtual product development. As far as product data are concerned, data exchange, 3D visualization, and communication are crucial processes for reusing manufacturing intelligence across lifecycle stages. Research and industry have developed several CAD interoperability, and visualization formats to uphold these product development strategies. Most of them, however, have not yet provided sufficient integration capabilities required for current digital transformation needs, mainly due to their lack of versatility in the multi-domains of the product lifecycle and primary focus on individual product descriptions. This paper analyses the methods and tools used in virtual product development to leverage 3D CAD data in the entire life cycle. It presents a set of versatile concepts for mastering exchange, aware and unaware visualization and collaboration from single technical packages fit purposely for various domains and disciplines. It introduces a 3D master document utilizing PDF techniques, which fulfills requirements for electronic discovery and enables multi-domain collaboration and long-term data retention for the digital enterprise. 3D interoperability makes an important contribution to engineering collaboration. Several formats made to that end successively deal with challenges of their time. Some of these such as STEP are highly verbose formats, which gradually encapsulate all information necessary to define a product, its manufacture, and lifecycle support. Others are focusing best on lightweight visualization use cases and endure better with increasing size and complexity of data. Traditional formats like STEP and JT, though, are not capable of supporting the publishing activity in even broader fashion. New tendencies therefore are aiming at strengthening these individual formats through combination with complementary standards or by using document-based approaches. Unlike STEP or JT, 3D PDF can serve multiple purposes and leverages 3D data downstream throughout the product lifecycle to create, distribute and manage ubiquitous, highly consumable, role-specific rich renditions. Based on its container structure, 3D PDF is a fundamentally different approach from traditional experience established in product development – it is an exceptionally proficient contextual aggregation of multi-domain and multi-disciplinary product data. The manufacturing community should embrace it as an addition and great improvement to current engineering collaboration standards. All engineering components required for its descriptions are meanwhile published international standards. The productive use of 3D PDF for sure requires a change in the current mode of operation, be it simply because the traditional CAD model promptly demands new technical descriptions. More perspectives, which have not been primary focus of this approach need to be addressed in order to implement the 3D digital master concept of this paper in the industry. For the complete process to work properly, the actual workflows of today's business organizations must succeed a readiness check involving enhanced technical documentation capabilities of the authoring (CAx) applications based on 3D, PLM, and manufacturing workflows as well as new ways for engineering data communication with supply chain partners in the digital enterprise.

Model study and 3-D numerical analysis of vertical micropile subjected to oblique pullout loads

Details of three-dimensional numerical study on 20 mm gravity grouted and centrally reinforced vertical micropile of 600 mm length in uniform sand bed subjected to pull-out loads of inclinations 0°, 5°, 10°, 15°, 20°, 30°, 45°, 60°, 75° and 90° carried out through ABAQUS are presented in this paper. The results of the model study carried out by the same authors on the same micropile subjected to pull-out loads at the same inclinations were used to calibrate the numerical model as well as to compare the analysis results. Axial and lateral load results of the model study were used to calibrate the numerical model. The calibrated numerical model was used to understand the behaviour of micropile at various inclinations of pull-out load. The results of experimental and numerical studies were compared. A reasonably good agreement was found between the two studies. To simulate the behaviour of soil i.e. sand, Mohr–Coloumb constitutive law was used while linear elastic model was used for modelling of reinforcement bar. Linear elasto-plastic constitutive model was used to define the stress–strain behaviour of grout. Interactions between the grout and sand as well as grout and reinforcement bar were modelled using surface-to-surface contact elements approach based on slave–master concept. The results are shown in terms of load-displacement curves. To gain further insight about the behaviour of micropile, horizontal displacement, bending moment and net lateral soil pressure profiles along the length of micropile were also plotted for different inclinations of pull-out load from the numerical study results.

Green growth: ideology, political economy and the alternatives

The discourse of “green growth” has recently gained ground in environmental governance deliberations and policy proposals. It is presented as a fresh and innovative agenda centered on the deployment of engineering sophistication, managerial acumen, and market mechanisms to redress the environmental and social derelictions of the existing development model. But the green growth project is deeply inadequate, whether assessed against criteria of social justice or the achievement of sustainable economic life upon a materially finite planet. This volume outlines three main lines of critique. First, it traces the development of the green growth discourse qua ideology. It asks: what explains modern society’s investment in it, why has it emerged as a master concept in the contemporary conjuncture, and what social forces does it serve? Second, it unpicks and explains the contradictions within a series of prominent green growth projects. Finally, it weighs up the merits and demerits of alternative strategies and policies, asking the vital question: “If not green growth, then what?”

On Strategy, Grand and Mundane

Is “grand strategy” a useful concept? What is it, and how is it different from “strategy”? Some definitions of grand strategy—as an all-encompassing idea for coordinating the resources of an entire nation to achieve its ultimate goals—are unachievable, overly focused on strategy as a master concept, could unintentionally militarize domestic policy, and blur the lines between strategy and policy. The concept is salvageable. Grand strategy is best thought of as both the intellectual framework or master concept that ties together whole-of-government (but not whole-of-nation) planning, and the long-term pattern of behavior that reveals states’ behaviors and priorities in action.

Autonomy and Happiness in Rousseau's Justification of the State

AbstractRecent interpretations of Rousseau suggest that autonomy is the master concept by which to understand his justification of the state. The Rousseauian state is legitimate insofar as it enables individuals to obey only their own wills and thus to be free. Autonomy-based interpretations cannot adequately account for Rousseau's remarks on the role of the state in securing a collective form of happiness through political community. These interpretations incorrectly construe collective happiness as pertaining only to how civic-minded citizens might be psychologically motivated to obey the state's dictates, rather than to what makes the state legitimate. By contrast, I offer a new interpretation according to which the Rousseauian state is justified because it enables a mutually constitutive relationship between the autonomy of individuals and the happiness that stems from participation in political community.