ARTISAN MOBILITY IN PREINDUSTRIAL EUROPE AND MOBILITY WITHIN THE EUROPEAN HIGHER EDUCATION AREA

This research work performs a comparative study between the artisan mobility in the preindustrial Europe and the mobility within the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), emphasizing key aspects of the EHEA associated with mobility such as employability, technological transfer, social cohesion and receptiveness to new ideas. It can be concluded that, indeed, artisan mobility in preindustrial Europe was as a precedent for mobility within the EHEA, in the context of engineering education, from the detailed study of (a) movements of skilled artisan institutionally organized by states and political authorities, (b) tramping system, whose institutional backbone shows a clear parallelism with the organizational framework that supports the mobility within the EHEA, and that also contributed to overcome problems of information asymmetry in the labour market between local employers and itinerant workers, and consequently to solve problems of journeyman unemployment, (c) journeyman mobility as a teaching program integrated into the craft guild framework, which could restrain the information asymmetry in the commodity market by giving traceability and additional validation to the artisan instruction, and (d) minority migrations, which acted as a spur for the mobility within the EHEA because they allowed Europe to be aware of the importance of tolerance and receptiveness to new ideas. Keywords: Technology transfer; Employability; Labour mobility; EHEA; Preindustrial Europe

Towards an Ontology-Driven Information System for Archaeological Pottery Studies: The Greyware Experience

The archaeological analysis of medieval and modern pottery has benefited from the consolidation of archaeometry in the domain of Medieval Archaeology in the past few decades. As part of an ongoing research project devoted to the characterization of pottery production, distribution processes and technological transfer, we deal with a considerable amount of data that are very diverse in origin and nature and must be exploited within an integrated information system in order to provide information for historical knowledge. The Greyware system has been designed to fulfil this goal and provides the main categories for pottery analysis within a shareable and reusable scenario. Its development and application prove that a little semantics goes a long way and that the creation of domain ontologies for archaeological research is an iterative process under development, as long as several projects sharing data, resources and time can develop a collaborative framework to maximize the assets of individual expertise and collaborative work. In this paper, we discuss the requirements of the system, the challenge of developing strategies for normalized data management and their potential for exploiting historical vestiges from an integrated perspective.

Combining relative chronology and AMS 14C dating to contextualize ‘megasites’, serial migrations and diachronic expressions of material culture in the Western Tripolye culture, Ukraine

Scholarship regarding the Eneolithic Cucuteni-Tripolye cultural complex of Romania, Moldova and Ukraine has recently focused on ‘megasites’ of the Western Tripolye culture (WTC) in Central Ukraine. However, in order to properly contextualize such unusual phenomena, we must explore the broader typo-chronology of the WTC, which is suggestive of a high degree of mobility and technological transfer between regions. We report 28 new AMS 14C dates from sites representing diagnostic types and propose a high-resolution chronological sequence for the WTC’s development. Our results support the relative chronology and offer an opportunity to propose a new chronological synthesis for the WTC.

From Glass to Glaze in al-Andalus: Local Invention and Technological Transfer

It has long been assumed that lead glazing technology preceded glassmaking in the Western world and that the technological transfer was from glazes to glass. Here, we present new evidence for the reverse, the indigenous innovation of glassmaking and its transfer to glazes in early Islamic al-Andalus (Spain). Compositional analyses show that Islamic lead glazes from Córdoba are intimately related to a distinct type of high-lead glass, suggesting a connection between the two technologies. The archaeological remains from a pottery workshop indicate that the glazing process initially involved the production of a lead glass and is not linked to earlier Roman or other contemporary glazing technologies. The data also demonstrate that the potters not only used the same materials and techniques but borrowed stylistic and decorative models from glassmaking.

Future Match Making: When Pediatric Oncology Meets Organoid Technology

Unlike adult cancers that frequently result from the accumulation in time of mutational “hits” often linked to lifestyle, childhood cancers are emerging as diseases of dysregulated development through massive epigenetic alterations. The ability to reconstruct these differences in cancer models is therefore crucial for better understanding the uniqueness of pediatric cancer biology. Cancer organoids (i.e., tumoroids) represent a promising approach for creating patient-derived in vitro cancer models that closely recapitulate the overall pathophysiological features of natural tumorigenesis, including intra-tumoral heterogeneity and plasticity. Though largely applied to adult cancers, this technology is scarcely used for childhood cancers, with a notable delay in technological transfer. However, tumoroids could provide an unprecedented tool to unravel the biology of pediatric cancers and improve their therapeutic management. We herein present the current state-of-the-art of a long awaited and much needed matchmaking.

Understanding the Relationship between Electric Power Consumption, Technological Transfer, Financial development and Environmental Quality.

This research paper attempts to investigate both the long-run and causality relationship among electric power consumption (EPC), technological transfer, financial development (FD), and environmental quality for the Saudi Arabia (KSA) economy from 1980 to 2019. In doing so, we propose a carbon emission function tested by incorporating multi-steps techniques such as autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) has been exploited to determine the existence of cointegration or no; while vector error correction model (VECM) has been applied to decide the direction of causality. In this paper we have proposed two proxies of technological transfer, namely imported technology (MT) and Technical cooperation grants (TCG). The results indicate the existence of cointegration between the concerned series. Besides, the existence of a feed-back effect among variables (except TCG) in the long-run. However, in the short run feed-back effect exists among EPC and EnvQ; MT and EnvQ; EPC and MT. Thus, the paper provides original visions for policy makers to encourage the technological transfer by financing and supporting the electric energy sector which constitutes the main locomotive to improve the environment quality for the KSA.JEL classification : C32, C52, O11, Q43

Contemporary Industrial Policy: Technological Transfer

The role of the modernization process of a contemporary industrial enterprise and the mechanisms for ensuring technological transfer are considered. The features of the functioning of the enterprise as a system-forming socio-economic element that sets the technological level of the national economy are discussed. The increasing importance of the community team as a generator of new needs and a conductor of an innovative product in real production is considered. The analysis of the influence of various factors on the innovative activity of industrial enterprises of St. Petersburg is presented, and the mechanisms of innovative activation are proposed.

INTERNATIONAL TRADE, GLOBALIZATION AND NIGERIAN ECONOMY

Protagonists of free trade such as the World Bank and IMF are loud in proclaiming the virtues of international trade and globalization. They are quick to point out that granting free rein to these concepts would not only lead to optimal resource allocation but also engender growth in global economy. This paper sought to probe the veracity of these claims in the context of a developing economy like Nigeria. The paper first clears up conceptual issues involved and later cast the operations of these phenomena within the Nigerian economic setting. It was found that whereas industrial countries, in joint operation with their multinational corporations, may have benefited immensely from the opportunities created by international trade and globalization, developing countries, characterized by weak technological base and unfavourable macro-economic factors, have hitherto benefitted minimally, but her losses far outweigh her gains such that she could rightly be characterized as a net loser in the competition. It therefore argues that countries like Nigeria should protect their domestic markets from the negative impact of foreign trade and globalization. It however recommends that Nigeria should adopt a selective technological transfer that fits into her domestic need for economic diversification via private sector-led initiatives.

Finale

The Nine failed to establish an industrial free-trade area with Spain and thus to gain access to the Spanish market, the largest west European industrial market outside their direct influence. The decision of the Council of Ministers of the European Communities, in October 1975, to suspend FTA negotiations with Spain, without denouncing the 1970 Agreement, meant the ultimate success of the Spanish government’s politico-economic strategy, the last episode of the European rescue of the Franco regime. The EC Council decision might have been inevitable in terms of public opinion and democratic morality, but it meant to permit Madrid to retain full control over the country’s import policy while fully exploiting the export prospects offered by the 1970 Agreement. In the end, the decision was detrimental for the overall interests of all the parties involved, whether the Spanish population or Western Europe. The final section of this book invites economic historians to estimate the costs of the Spanish EEC policy concerning the inefficient allocation of resources, weak technological transfer, lesser accompanying investment, and limitations to total-factor-productivity increases. Political historians, in turn, should explore what specific interests explain, in each case, why, if official Spanish trade practices in export promotion and import restriction gave the Six every incentive to denounce the 1970 Agreement, apart from obvious political reasons, they did not do so. Finally, scholars dealing with Spanish EEC-membership negotiations should determine the extent at which the Community experience over the 1970 Agreement explains Community attitudes towards some Spanish demands after 1979.