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The purpose of this paper is to describe the student learning outcomes (SLOs) for a sustainability major, evaluate faculty incorporation of the SLOs into the courses in the sustainability major curriculum and measure student performance on the SLOs from entry into the major to the senior capstone course.

Through an iterative approach with a faculty advisory committee, SLOs were developed for the sustainability major. Curriculum mapping followed by evaluation of course syllabi were used to determine the extent to which each course addressed the SLOs. Student performance on most SLOs was measured through student assessment in an introductory and capstone course to evaluate the change in performance over time.

The core courses of the sustainability major were more likely to address the SLOs of the major than that of the elective courses. Where measured, student performance on the SLOs increased from the introductory course to the capstone course. Sustainability majors participated in an average of almost ten experiential learning opportunities focused on sustainability.

This research provides a longitudinal assessment of student learning in an undergraduate sustainability major. Because undergraduate sustainability degrees are generally new, this research can serve as a base upon which to continue to improve sustainability curriculum design.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the quality of banking services provided in support of small- and medium-sized enterprises' (SMEs) internationalization from the customers' perspective.

Customer satisfaction of 50 Italian SMEs with the banking services provided for international activities has been evaluated by adopting the Kano model's continuous and discrete analyses.

Results show which banking services provided for business internationalization are necessary to satisfy customers' expectations, which services customers like having and dislike not having and which services are unexpected by customers creating a high increase in satisfaction when provided.

This work shows the value of the Kano model in evaluating the non-linear relationship between customer satisfaction and quality of banking services for the international activities of companies. The main limitation of this work is the limited geographical context of the investigation.

This research suggests banks to transform their role in the relationship with SMEs from mere financiers to active partners committed to their growth abroad by offering a wide range of services not just financial, but also counselling and care professional, thus achieving mutual benefits.

Previous works on banking services and business internationalization are focussed on the transaction costs, information asymmetries and the impact of online banking. This work advances available knowledge by analysing the customer's point of view, evaluating the satisfaction of SMEs which, although more dependent on banks for their expansion abroad than large listed companies, are mostly ignored by literature.

Inductances of complex coils, in the presence of linear materials only, can be computed by discretizing coils into simpler elements, whose magnetic behavior is analytically expressible, and suitably combining elementary contributions. Reliable results require high numbers of elements. In such cases, advantages can be taken from Graphic Processor Unit (GPU) capabilities of dealing efficiently with high numbers of repeated simple computational tasks. The purpose of this paper is to set up a fast and prompt numerical procedure to cope with the above described task.

The coils are first decomposed into current segments, taking into account accuracy, relative position and shape of coils to determine the number of segments. An analytical formula is then used to compute elementary contributions using GPUs to speed up the process, and finally superposition is used to recover the result.

The main advantages of the proposed approach are first demonstrated using simple examples, with analytical solutions, to validate the method accuracy and promptness, then more complex cases are taken to demonstrate its generality.

The method is intrinsically limited by the linearity assumption, excluding the presence of magnetic materials. The adopted formulas require in addition that coils must lie in free space.

The proposed method can help in the design of complex coils or coils systems, where the performance depends on total magnetic energy or magnetic forces among coils.

The paper presents an original implementation in GPU-based computational environment of a procedure to compute inductances, based on the superposition of a high number of current segments. The procedure includes an original method to self-adaptively define number and position of current segments used in the coils discretization.

This paper aims to provide a broad overview of the corpus of studies on digital finance in relation to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and startups.

Bibliometric analysis was used, allowing to investigate the relevant literature (735 articles). In accordance with best practices, relevant articles were identified on the topic following the PRISMA 2020 framework that ensures reproducible and rigorous results. The search then proceeds with performance analysis, identifying key trends at the intersection of research fields, including distribution of articles by year, citations by year, most cited contributions and most cited and prolific authors. This is followed by analyses of co-citation, co-authorship and co-occurrence with a detailed description of the thematic clusters identified.

Performance analysis shows that scholarly output covers a 12-year period, starting in 2011, and demonstrates a growing interest in this topic. Co-occurrence analysis reveals a significant intellectual structure which allows numerous knowledge gaps to emerge, and these offer new opportunities to be addressed in future research.

This study uniquely focuses on the evolution of the research domain related to digital finance associated with SMEs and startups. It provides implications for practitioners and avenues that researchers can develop in the future to produce impactful studies.

During the 2020 election cycle, 2,276 super PACs spent over $2.1 billion in federal elections. This chapter argues that changes made to the US campaign finance system brought about by the Citizens United v. FEC (2010) and SpeechNow.org v. FEC (2010) cases have destabilized the American political system by fueling tensions between right-wing and left-wing populist factions and by contributing to congressional corruption. By moving away from the political corruption standard and toward the free speech standard in Citizens United, polarizing wealthy mega-donors and dark money sources have come to play a dominant role in congressional elections. These cases also helped to contribute to a two-tiered campaign finance regulatory structure that distinguishes between campaign contributions given directly to federal candidates and political money contributed to super PACs to support or oppose federal candidates. In the 2020 congressional elections, PACs and super PACS outspent both major party candidates combined in 35 House and Senate races. Super PACs are serving as “shadow parties” by targeting competitive races for the purpose of swaying partisan control of Congress. This study also shows that an exceedingly high percentage of super PAC money is spent on negative advertising that further divides rather than unifies the nation. This chapter also highlights the corrupting influence of congressional leadership PACs and examines how super PACs have enabled foreign and dark money sources to illegally influence congressional campaigns.

Faced with fierce competition, increasingly more organizations seek to audit demand in the marketplace. The same can be said for insurers. Empirical findings show that insurers are widely disliked by customers, and insurance agents talked to clients on average once every eight years. We found that approximately 44 per cent of the population does not own any form of insurance, for example life insurance and personal accidents insurance. What are the underlying reasons why the majority of people do not insure themselves against hazards? There is a need for insurers to undertake a demand audit in order to understand what the policyholder wants and needs. Information from customers plays a major role in the auditing process. Our audit checklist includes: demographic characteristics of policyholders and non‐policyholders; reasons for being insured and not insured; and critical purchasing factors. The demand audit that we surveyed will help the insurance industry design a good strategy to meet the demands of the market.

This paper aims to show on a widely used benchmark problem that chaotic sequences can improve the search ability of evolution strategies (ES).

The Lozi map is used to generate new individuals in the framework of ES algorithms. A quasi‐Newton (QN) method is also used within the iterative loop to improve the solution's quality locally.

It is shown that the combined use of chaotic sequences and QN methods can provide high‐quality solutions with small standard deviation on the selected benchmark problem.

Although the benchmark is considered to be representative of typical electromagnetic problems, different test cases may give less satisfactory results.

The proposed approach appears to be an efficient general purpose optimizer for electromagnetic design problems.

This paper introduces the use of chaotic sequences in the area of electromagnetic design optimization.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the ongoing debate regarding the relationship between relational capital (RC) and firm performance, by investigating the moderation effect of firm size and its key role in defining conditions for competitive advantage.

The paper uses the interpretative lens of the resource dependence theory, and refreshes consolidated studies rooted in RC. It identifies a set of variables to measure the influence of RC on firm performance, including the cost of goods sold, interest expenses and earnings per share. Content analysis was used to capture specific features of corporate disclosure tools using 51 items pertinent to RC. The authors used a specific disclosure index drawing on data collected from 73 listed firms in France, Germany, Italy and the UK. Data covering the period from 2011 to 2013 were analyzed using six regression models.

Firm size has a moderating effect on the relationship between RC and some variables linked to firm performance.

The study combines an internal and external perspective to investigate the interplay between firms and market environments, and therefore, enriches the ongoing debate concerning the relationship between RC and firm performance. It outlines possible ways through which RC can become an effective source of competitive advantage.