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The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

The general attitude of the ancient theatre conservation strategies and policies is still concerned primarily with their architectural physical appearance without considering their authentic scientific acoustical qualities. The paper attempts to illustrate and discuss how to enhance their acoustic heritage to arouse the audience's interest and needs. Thus, supporting their reconstruction based on recent acoustical research and community needs-related concerns and opportunities for ancient theatre's modern use.

It is based on reviewing the main issues related to reconstruction in the international charters and conventions and how to infuse ancient theatres with their full role. It discusses the dilemma and debates regarding the theatre stage wall, colonnade (portico) restoration and anastylosis. Is it sufficient enough to recover the theatre sound volume? Or to rethink for full physical reconstructions of these missing related acoustical theatre architectural elements to their original level and layout as in ancient times in parallel to their virtual reconstruction?

The cultural significance of the authentic theatre's acoustical qualities needs to reform the conservation strategies and policies for a more flexible and resilient approach. It should be postulated, re-examined and advocated parallel to their 3D virtual reconstruction in the related international charters and conventions.

The paper's implications are not immediate; it is far-reaching. It suggests the importance of acoustics in analysing historic theatre performance venues and reforming conservation strategies and approaches. This issue is especially critical for architects, conservators, the heritage community and the public audience.

Recommendations are made for potential bold reconstruction actions that may be taken to achieve further sustainability, comfort, and permeability in modern theatre-use performances. Their physical reconstruction for improving the performance of contemporary theatre use regarding retaining the acoustic cultural significance should be more flexible and resilient in the charters.

This paper considers the exhibition: UnDoing. This research-through-curation project examined interactions within existing spaces and situations. This established links between the selected exhibits, the gallery, the city and with the continuum of the previous exhibition.

Carefully selected architects, designers and artists were invited to contribute—those who pursued a contextual approach; whose practice explored the way buildings, places and artefacts are reused, reinterpreted and remembered.

Through the act of curation, this research uncovered a series of different approaches to constructed sites and existing buildings, from layered juxtaposition, the refusal to undo, to interventions of new elements within architectural works.

Curation offered the opportunity to consider works of architecture and of art through the same lens, for direct comparisons to be made and the influence of one upon the other to be comprehended.

The examination processes the architect employs is similar to that of the artist; the development of an understanding of place, and from this synthesis, creative interpretation. However, despite the similarities in the starting position, the elucidation developed by the artist can be vastly different to that of the architect.

The juxtaposition and new classifications created by the exhibition encouraged visitors to look at art, architecture and the city in a different way; to grasp the direct link between the different subjects; and the possibilities created.

The two driving factors for UnDoing were places of previous occupation and the city of Manchester. The qualities of surrounding constructed environment combined were combined with attitudes towards existing structures and places.

To explore how the blockchain affects the pricing and financing decisions in a low-carbon platform supply chain.

Considering the dual roles of the e-commerce platform as a seller and an initiator, a typical game-theoretical method is applied to analyze the behavior of supply chain decision-makers and the impact of key variables on equilibriums.

When loan interest rates are symmetric, whether blockchain is used or not, the e-commerce platform financing mode will always produce higher wholesale price and unit carbon emission reduction, while the retail price is the opposite. Higher unit additional income brought by the blockchain can bring higher economic and environmental performances, and the e-commerce platform financing mode is superior to bank financing mode. The application of blockchain may cause the manufacturer to change his/her financing choice. For bank financing, with the increase of loan interest rates, the advantages brought by blockchain will gradually disappear, but this situation will not occur under e-commerce platform financing.

Blockchain is known for its information transparency properties and its ability to enhance user trust. However, the impacts of applying blockchain in a low-carbon platform supply chain with different financing options are not clear. The authors examine the manufacturer's strategic choices for platform financing and bank financing, whether to adopt blockchain, and the impact of these decisions on carbon emissions reduction, consumer surplus and social welfare. The research conclusion can provide reference for the operation and financing decisions of platform supply chain under the carbon reduction target in the digital economy era.

Single-shot multi-category clothing recognition and retrieval play a crucial role in online searching and offline settlement scenarios. Existing clothing recognition methods based on RGBD clothing images often suffer from high-dimensional feature representations, leading to compromised performance and efficiency.

To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel method called Manifold Embedded Discriminative Feature Selection (MEDFS) to select global and local features, thereby reducing the dimensionality of the feature representation and improving performance. Specifically, by combining three global features and three local features, a low-dimensional embedding is constructed to capture the correlations between features and categories. The MEDFS method designs an optimization framework utilizing manifold mapping and sparse regularization to achieve feature selection. The optimization objective is solved using an alternating iterative strategy, ensuring convergence.

Empirical studies conducted on a publicly available RGBD clothing image dataset demonstrate that the proposed MEDFS method achieves highly competitive clothing classification performance while maintaining efficiency in clothing recognition and retrieval.

This paper introduces a novel approach for multi-category clothing recognition and retrieval, incorporating the selection of global and local features. The proposed method holds potential for practical applications in real-world clothing scenarios.