Towards A Commercial Future

'Toward a Better Future' provides a comprehensive analysis of education development in Singapore since 1965, giving particular attention to the strategic management that has enabled Singapore to transform its education and training system from one similar to that of many Sub-Saharan African countries four decades ago into one of the world's best-performing systems. It is one of a pair of concurrently-published books presenting materials originally developed for a 2006 study tour to Singapore and Vietnam for senior education officials from Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Lesotho, Madagascar, and Mozambique. The second book, 'An African Exploration of the East Asian Education Experience', presents five country studies, as well as regional, comparative analyses highlighting insights gained during the study tour and putting them in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa. Together, the two books aim to foster knowledge exchange between Sub-Saharan African and East Asian countries on good practices in the design and implementation of education policies and programs. By facilitating the cross-country fertilization of ideas between two regions with relatively limited contact in the past, these books fi ll a clear gap in the current literature on development practice in education.

Modern agriculture needs to review and broaden its practices and business models, by integrating opportunities coming from different adjacent sectors and value chains, including the bio-based industry, in a fully circular economy strategy. Searching for new tools and technologies to increase crop productivity under optimal and sub-optimal conditions and to improve resources use efficiency is crucial to ensure food security while preserving soil quality, microbial biodiversity, and providing business opportunities for farmers. Biostimulants based on microorganisms or organic substances obtained from renewable materials represent a sustainable, efficient technology or complement to synthetic counterparts, to improve nutrient use efficiency and secure crop yield stability. Under the new European Union Regulation 2019/1009, plant biostimulants were defined based on four agricultural functional claims as follows: Plant biostimulants are products that stimulate plant nutrition processes independently of the product's nutrient content with the sole aim of improving one or more of the following characteristics of the plant and/or the plant rhizosphere: 1) nutrient use efficiency, 2) tolerance resistance to (a)biotic stress, 3) quality characteristics or 4) availability of confined nutrients in the soil or rhizosphere’. Many diverse natural substances and chemical derivatives of natural or synthetic compounds, as well as beneficial microorganisms, are cataloged as plant biostimulants including i) humic substances, ii) plant or animal-based protein hydrolysates, iii) macro and micro-algal extracts, iv) silicon, v) arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) and vi) plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) belonging to the Azotobacter, Azospirillum and Rhizobium genera.

"This book evaluated the incorporation of technology into educational processes reviewing topics from primary and secondary school to higher education, from Second Life to wiki technology, from physical education to cultural learning"--Provided by publisher.

This book reviews the forces driving economic and social change in today's world. It asesses the likelihood of a long boom materialising in the first decades of the 21st century and explores the strategic policies essential for making it happen.