Stabilizing Reforms As a Factor for the Development of the Republic of Indonesia

As a member of the G20, the Republic of Indonesia has huge economic power. It occupies the first place in the Southeast Asia region and the fifth place in the world in terms of economic growth rate, which reached 10.5% in 2019. From this point of view, Indonesia is an industrial country enjoying steady economic growth. Under the leadership of President Joko Widodo, the Indonesian government has implemented a number of economic reforms, the most important of which is the establishment of 19 programmes as priorities for the development agenda, which includes human resources development, building infrastructure, including new capital, increasing interconnectedness via the Maritime Highway Programme, village development, and enabling ending and sector improvement taxes through the tax amnesty programme. Despite some decline due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the performance of the Indonesian economy was better in 2020 than that of some other countries in the ASEAN region, and member countries of the G20 experienced a deeper contraction. In that period, Indonesia’s economy achieved a growth rate of 2.07%, and the World Bank boosted Indonesia’s rating within the upper middle-income countries for its success in achieving an overall increase in national income per capita from $3,840 to $4,050.

Social Mobility in Developing Countries

Limited attention has been paid to how well social mobility measures developed and used to study industrial countries perform in analysis of low-income settings. Following brief, selective reviews of the axiomatic, econometric and other relevant literature, three mobility concepts illustrate how properties that appear innocuous in industrial country analysis become problematic when downward mobility includes descents into destitution. For origin-independence measures—the most widely used in research on developing countries so far—axiomatic propriety and cognizance of co-residency-induced and other estimation bias are not enough. Adopting a variant of the ‘perverse fluidity’ concept from sociology to define the estimate bias attributable to intergenerational descents into poverty, we use experiments and data from India to find perverse fluidity biases in intergenerational mobility estimates of up to 50 per cent. Seemingly ‘good’ mobility news may thus be ‘bad’ with intergroup, regional and international mobility comparisons more precarious than acknowledged so far.

Community of Common Future in Cyberspace

This chapter begins with an account of the current state of China’s digitization and cybersecurity. Benefitting from the rapid development of information and communication technology (ICT), China achieved a rapid evolution from a semi-industrial country to a digitized nation. Besides these immense advantages, ICT has acted as a powerful catalyst, bringing huge benefits to every aspect of Chinese society. Yet cyberspace has also created a new dimension of insecurity and disarray due to the increasing dependence on a brand-new interconnected ecosystem. The chapter then examines the meaning of, and the necessity for, a ‘community of common destiny’ in cyberspace, before continuing to illuminate what China can do at the domestic and international levels to pursue this aim. It also analyses the implications of China’s approach for the stability and security of international cyberspace.

Mass Incarceration Retards Racial Integration

President Nixon replaced President Johnson’s War on Poverty with his War on Drugs in 1971. This new drug war was expanded by President Reagan and others to create mass incarceration. The United States currently has a higher percentage of its citizens incarcerated than any other industrial country. Although Blacks are only 13 percent of the population, they are 40 percent of the incarcerated. The literatures on the causes and effects of mass incarceration are largely distinct, and I combine them to show the effects of mass incarceration on racial integration. Racial prejudice produced mass incarceration, and mass incarceration now retards racial integration.

Experimental studies of burning plant pellets in a domestic boiler

In recent years, biofuels have increasingly been used as fuel in Ukraine. Ukraine is an agro-industrial country with great potential for the production and use of pellets of plant origin. Our country ranks 6th in the world for the production of such biofuels as pellets, but most of them (about 85 %) are exported abroad. This is due to the low demand for pellets in the domestic market. Cereal straw can be used in municipal energy. The amount of straw left after harvest is sufficient for its use as fuel. This biofuel in its composition and calorific value is close to such traditional fuels as wood and peat. Also, raw materials for bio-pellets can be sunflower husks and energy crops. The main objectives of this work are experimental studies of the combustion of different types of agropellets. An experimental installation of a solid fuel boiler with a pellet burner was developed and implemented at the Institute of Engineering Thermophysics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine to study the peculiarities of pellet combustion. With the help of the developed measurement system based on a comb with thermocouples, which is located above the torch in the boiler, the temperature regime in the boiler volume was studied and the peculiarities of the pellet burning process in the burner were determined. As a result of the work, experimental studies of the peculiarities of burning pellets of agricultural origin, namely straw (barley, wheat) and pellets from corn cobs were carried out. On the basis of the constructed graphic dependences the characteristic features of temperature modes of work of a household copper at burning of agropellets were defined. The use of the results is possible in the communal and industrial heat energy, social and budgetary sphere and individual household sector.

Crucial differences between present service sector structures of Russia and Poland: changes and contribution to the economy

During the period of planned economies in Russia and Poland, services were underestimated as a sector of economic activity. To some degree, this continues to be the case. In spite of the existence of market economies in Central and Eastern Europe for more than 25 years, Russia and Poland should be categorized differently in terms of economic and social development. Based on D. Bell’s and his followers’ (M. Castells, A. Toffler, J. Rifkin, P. Drucker) theory of post-industrial society and post-industrial economy, Poland can be classified as a post-industrial country, while Russia is still an industrial country in many aspects. This point of view is based on global statistics and cross-country comparisons. The following statistical data has been used as a source for this research: share of services in GDP by country, contribution (value added) of seven main types of services to the respective GDP of Russia, Poland and other selected countries, value added and governmental expenditures per capita of primary services in aforementioned economies. The main differences between the Russian and Polish service sectors are indicated. The cases of Russia and Poland are presented here to highlight the key common features of Central and Eastern European countries’ tertiary sectors.

Characterization of Rome’s rainwater in the early of 2018 aiming to find correlations between chemical-physical parameters and sources of pollution: a statistical study

Analysis of rainwater in historical cities plays a key role to save ancient monuments from atmospheric agents. In this study we sampled the Rome’s rainwater from February to July of 2018 and we analysed them to determine their chemical and physical parameters: pH, redox potential, conductivity, temperature, and the concentration of the main inorganic ions (Na+, K+, Ca++, Mg++, F−, Cl−, NO3−, SO4−−). The volume of the daily fallen rainwater, the speed and direction of the wind in the sampling site were also collected. In order to find a correlation between all the above data we used the Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Results evidenced that there aren’t authentic “acid rains” as the minimum pH value that we found is 5.2. In some cases high concentrations of nitrates and sulphates were found with maximum values of 12.4 ppm and 18.7 ppm respectively. We also found no correlation between the rainwater’s composition and the seasonal period; on the contrary, the speed and direction of the wind, especially when coming from the sea or industrial country near Rome, play a noticeable role on the rainwater composition.

Prospective aspects in the oncological treatment of prostate cancer

Prostate cancer (PC) is the second most common malignancy worldwide; the incidence is growing in every industrial country. Depending on the stage, surgical therapy, radiotherapy, and hormonal therapy are the potential therapeutic options. The elevation of radiation dose significantly improves biochemical control and disease-free survival independently of the type of radiotherapy (RT). The short-term and long-term side-effects of therapy are very important as PC patients usually have long survival. Although RT is getting more targeted, tolerance of normal tissues limits dose escalation and increases acute and chronic gastrointestinal (GI) and urogenital (UG) morbidity, exacerbating the pre-existing urological, sexual, and psychological problems. Symptoms depend on the degree and extent of the tissue damage and have a significant adverse effect on the patient’s quality of life (QOL). In clinical practice, toxicity can be reduced by the use of modern radiotherapy techniques by decreasing the safety margins (e.g. intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT), image-guided radiotherapy (IGRT)), by advantageous patient positioning and with almost constant fullness of the rectum and the urinary bladder. During radiotherapy the supine position is the most frequently used laying method. Patients can be treated also in a prone position (with the use of belly board - BB). The use of BB is associated with lower dose burden of intestines in several clinical trials of pelvic cancers formerly in the 3DCRT and nowadays in the IMRT-IGRT era. Despite advances in loco-regional medical treatment, advanced or metastatic PC is still very serious problem. Systematic treatment of metastatic prostate cancer can be divided into hormone-sensitive (HS) and castration-resistant (CR) pathophysiological phases. For metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer (mHSPC) until recently, androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) alone by surgical or medical castration was the standard-of-care. Although the histological classification of PC is well-known, the different molecular subtypes and variants may respond differently to certain therapies. In recent years, many retrospective studies have focused on identifying potential predictive factors for optimizing treatment decisions.

5. An industrial country, 1880–1910

“An industrial country, 1880–1910” looks at America’s first captains of industry: Rockefeller, at one time the world’s richest man, who made his fortune in oil; Scotland-born Carnegie, who pioneered new processes in steel; and Duke, Kellogg, and Heinz, who packaged and marketed agricultural products in the form of cigarettes, cereal, and soup. Journalists colloquially known as muckrakers began to criticize the dominance of big business. Companies who monopolized or divided markets were punished for violating antitrust laws. This did not stamp out corruption, but was a meaningful development in business–government relations. In the 1910s, companies began to think increasingly about public relations, using public relations to tell their corporate stories.

Vampires of the Late 1950s and Early 1960s

Concerned with the political and socio-economic implications of Italian vampire cinema, the chapter identifies Italian vampires with enemies within (a specific group of people in the nation-state’s social body) and enemies without (scheming foreigners). The chapter focuses on the vampire movies made in the 1959-1965 period, which coincided with the 1958-1963 economic miracle that turned vastly backward, prevalently agricultural Italy into a modern, industrial country. Taking horror parody Tempi duri per i vampiri / Uncle Was a Vampire (Stefano Vanzina as Steno, 1959) as its main case study, the chapter describes a parable of class struggle pointing to the need of renegotiating ancestral class identities in order to survive the dramatic socio-economic changes brought about by the economic miracle. At the same time, a careful analysis of horror-tinged adventures reveals them to be a re-enactment of the Nazi occupation of Italy in the last years of World War Two and, possibly, an allusion to the neofascist resurgence of the early 1960s.