Open Access

This paper provides a critical reading of Janek Wasserman’s The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas. Wasserman depicts the evolution of the Austrian School from the 1860s until today, a particularly illuminating narrative for the readers of this journal. The breadth of portrayed economists, their cultural embeddedness in Austrian and US contexts, and the complexity of configurations across the school’s generations create a rich and readable story. The last third of the book suffers from allegations about the ideological agenda and institutional power of the Austrian economists which sometimes lack sufficient substantiation. The paper indicates how both in their theorizing and in their political activities, the Austrian economists can be seen as reformers instead of revolutionaries, and as constitutionalists instead of anti-democrats. Despite these disagreements, Wasserman’s portrayals evoke largely fair and challenging impulses both to scholars working in the Austrian research program and to those interested in the Austrian School’s long history, regardless of one’s ideological positions.

Based on a real-world application in the semiconductor industry, this article models and discusses a hybrid flow shop problem with time dependencies and priority constraints. The analyzed problem considers a production where a large number of heterogeneous jobs are processed by a number of machines. The route that each job has to follow depends upon its type, and, in addition, some machines require that a number of jobs are combined in batches before starting their processing. The hybrid flow model is also subject to a global priority rule and a “same setup” rule. The primary goal of this study was to find a solution set (permutation of jobs) that minimizes the production makespan. While simulation models are frequently employed to model these time-dependent flow shop systems, an optimization component is needed in order to generate high-quality solution sets. In this study, a novel algorithm is proposed to deal with the complexity of the underlying system. Our algorithm combines biased-randomization techniques with a discrete-event heuristic, which allows us to model dependencies caused by batching and different paths of jobs efficiently in a near-natural way. As shown in a series of numerical experiments, the proposed simulation-optimization algorithm can find solutions that significantly outperform those provided by employing state-of-the-art simulation software.

Sometimes cranioplasty is necessary to reconstruct skull bone defects after a neurosurgical operation. If an autologous bone is unavailable, alloplastic materials are used. The standard technical approach for the fabrication of cranial implants is based on 3D imaging by computed tomography using the defect and the contralateral site. A new approach uses 3D surface scans, which accurately replicate the curvature of the removed bone flap. For this purpose, the removed bone flap is scanned intraoperatively and digitized accordingly. When using a design procedure developed for this purpose creating a patient-specific implant for each bone flap shape in short time is possible. The designed skull implants have complex free-form surfaces analogous to the curvature of the skull, which is why additive manufacturing is the ideal manufacturing technology here. In this study, we will describe the intraoperative procedure for the acquisition of scanned data and its further processing up to the creation of the implant.

This paper presents numerical analysis of the discrete fundamental solution of the discrete Laplace operator on a rectangular lattice. Additionally, to provide estimates in interior and exterior domains, two different regularisations of the discrete fundamental solution are considered. Estimates for the absolute difference and lp‐estimates are constructed for both regularisations. Thus, this work extends the classical results in the discrete potential theory to the case of a rectangular lattice and serves as a basis for future convergence analysis of the method of discrete potentials on rectangular lattices.