Natural resources and the extractive industries play a central role in the economy of developing countries and the lives of nearly half of the world’s population. The increasing demand for oil, gas, and mineral resources has led some countries to prioritize the extractive industries; yet, there is growing empirical evidence that in some cases governments have neglected other sectors of the economy, making them highly dependent and vulnerable to volatile commodity prices. Latin American countries face the challenge of changing their model of primary-export specialization and move away from their dependence on natural resource-intensive exports in order to avoid being vulnerable to commodity cycles. In this context, given the limited literature available on measuring the dependence on the extraction of oil, gas and minerals of the Ecuadorian economy, the objective of this article is to twofold. First, to provide a snapshot of the historical and current situation of Ecuador’s natural resource dependence. Second, to estimate the Extractives Dependence Index (EDI) scores for Ecuador for the years 2003 to 2017. The EDI is a generally accepted method for measuring a country’s aggregate dependence on natural and mineral resources. Based on the EDI scores obtained, we analyze the variation of this indicator and investigate the effect of extractives dependence on the Ecuadorian economy. Results show that despite the government’s significant efforts to diversify Ecuador’s economy, the country has a persistent dependence on the extractive sector.

Generation of coal-based electricity is always associated with the origination of large amount of combustion waste. The presented article is a review concerning the possibilities of innovative directions of management for one of the by-products of coal combustion: fly ash. The storage of these waste products is associated with their negative impact on the environment. This is why research has been undertaken worldwide on the implementation of the concept of a circular economy. This article includes the examination of basic physical, chemical, and mineralogical properties of the most valuable components of fly ash (microspheres, magnetic fraction, and glass). It contains the examination of methods of separating these components and indicates the prospective directions of their use, e.g. as light fillers for polymers, sorbents, catalysts, composite materials, light ceramics, lightweight concretes, thermal insulation materials, biomaterials, raw material for the synthesis of zeolites or geopolymers. The paper also presents the components of fly ash, which can be treated as an alternative source of valuable elements, including critical elements. Moreover, it points to the necessity of capturing flammable substances from combustion by-products in order to obtain raw material characterised by a high degree of purity. It has been demonstrated that this way of ash management can lead to high recycling rates and bring valuable materials back to the economy. Such actions fit perfectly into global efforts for sustainable development and the circular economy.

The Energy Law of April 10, 1997 initiated changes in the energy market in Poland. Actions taken on the basis of this law were aimed at the modernization and development of the power sector. Organizational and legal changes causing the development of distributed generation, thus increasing the level of market competition have been introduced. The care for high quality of customer service, including the protection of vulnerable customers, environmental protection, growing share of renewable energy and emission reduction requirements have become a reality. It seems, therefore, that it is necessary for the Polish energy sector to undergo permanent modernization, to develop the production and industrial infrastructure and to develop modern conventional technologies by way of implementing innovations in the field of energy companies. The author of the paper argues that it is indispensable to make a broadly understood transfer of knowledge and technology to the energy sector on the basis of a knowledge-based economy. This also applies to energy clusters, which currently constitute a platform for cooperation: entrepreneurs, scientific-research units, and public authorities. The functioning of these entities is an important catalyst for the transfer of knowledge and technologies. Their regional nature boosts competitiveness of the involved enterprises, and is a natural way of transferring knowledge to the energy market.

Many tourist cities face the problems regarding the social impact of short-term tourist rental. The rapid development of the tourism economy in recent years, combined with the development of digital technologies and the emergence of peer-to-peer digital platforms, has brought both positive and negative effects of the transformations. The problem is difficult and complex because the attitudes of local stakeholders vary. While residents look only through the phenomenon of gentrification and quality of life, entrepreneurs see in the short-term lease unconditional economic benefits. Cities, protecting the public interest, try to eliminate the adverse effects of tourist short-term rental in various ways. The article presents the attitudes of three groups of stakeholders in Cracow towards the phenomenon of short-term rental, namely residents, hoteliers and restaurateurs.

In this paper, 3 typical organic fluids were selected as working fluids for a sample slag washing water binary power plants. In this system, the working fluids obtain the thermal energy from slag washing water sources. Thus, it plays a significant role on the cycle performance to select the suitable working fluid. Energy and exergy efficiencies of 3 typical organic fluids were calculated. Dry type fluids (i.e., R227ea) showed higher energy and exergy efficiencies. Conversely, wet fluids (i.e., R143a and R290) indicated lower energy and exergy efficiencies, respectively.

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The work presented in the paper concerns a very important problem of searching for string alignments. The authors show that the problem of a genome pattern alignment could be interpreted and defined as a measuring task, where the distance between two (or more) patterns is investigated. The problem originates from modern computation biology. Hardware-based implementations have been driving out software solutions in the field recently. The complex programmable devices have become very commonly applied. The paper introduces a new, optimized approach based on the Smith-Waterman dynamic programming algorithm. The original algorithm is modified in order to simplify data-path processing and take advantage of the properties offered by FPGA devices. The results obtained with the proposed methodology allow to reduce the size of the functional block and radically speed up the processing time. This approach is very competitive compared with other related works.