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A critical overview of food supply chain risk management
No full textDue to the increasing occurrence of disruptive events caused by both human and also natural disasters, supply chain risk management has become an emerging research field in recent years, aiming to protect supply chains from various disruptions and deliver sustainable and long-term benefits to stakeholders across the value chain. Implementing optimum designed risk-oriented supply chain management can provide a privileged position for various businesses to extend their global reach. In addition, using a proactive supply chain risk management system, enterprises can predict their potential risk factors in their supply chains, and achieve the best early warning time, which leads to higher firms’ performance. However, relatively little is known about sustainable risks in food supply chains. In order to manage the ever-growing challenges of food supply chains effectively, a deeper insight regarding the complex food systems is required. Supply chain risk management embraces broad strategies to address, identify, evaluate, monitor, and control unpredictable risks or events with direct and indirect effect, mostly negative, on food supply chain processes. To fill this gap, in this paper we have critically discussed the related supply chain risk management literature. Finally, we propose a number of significant directions for future research
The Civic Discourse: Representing Immigrants in the Italian Far Right
No full textThe Italian far right has been gaining increasing electoral support and has been associated
with xenophobic discourse casting the immigrant as the Other opposed to the Italian
Self. Xenophobia, however, is deeply imbricated with civic discourse, which is deployed
by Italian far right parties in order to appear more credible and legitimate in the political
arena. Through the Critical Discourse Analysis of original interviews with Italian far right
representatives and intellectuals carried out between 2016 and 2018 and of Italian far right
manifestos from the 1990s to 2013, this chapter unveils the imbrication of xenophobic and
civic tones inherent to the discursive construction of the immigrant, who is problematized,
differentiated, criminalized and inferiorized
Hypergraph reconstruction from network data
Get PDFNetworks can describe the structure of a wide variety of complex systems by specifying which pairs of entities in the system are connected. While such pairwise representations are flexible, they are not necessarily appropriate when the fundamental interactions involve more than two entities at the same time. Pairwise representations nonetheless remain ubiquitous, because higher-order interactions are often not recorded explicitly in network data. Here, we introduce a Bayesian approach to reconstruct latent higher-order interactions from ordinary pairwise network data. Our method is based on the principle of parsimony and only includes higher-order structures when there is sufficient statistical evidence for them. We demonstrate its applicability to a wide range of datasets, both synthetic and empirical
Linear and nonlinear quantitative EEG analysis during neutral hypnosis following an opened/closed eye paradigm
Get PDFHypnotic susceptibility is a major factor influencing the study of the neural correlates of hypnosis using EEG. In this context, while its effects on the response to hypnotic suggestions are undisputed, less attention has been paid to “neutral hypnosis” (i.e., the hypnotic condition in absence of suggestions). Furthermore, although an influence of opened and closed eye condition onto hypnotizability has been reported, a systematic investigation is still missing. Here, we analyzed EEG signals from 34 healthy subjects with low (LS), medium (MS), and (HS) hypnotic susceptibility using power spectral measures (i.e., TPSD, PSD) and Lempel-Ziv-Complexity (i.e., LZC, fLZC). Indeed, LZC was found to be more suitable than other complexity measures for EEG analysis, while it has been never used in the study of hypnosis. Accordingly, for each measure, we investigated within-group differences between rest and neutral hypnosis, and between opened-eye/closed-eye conditions under both rest and neutral hypnosis. Then, we evaluated between-group differences for each experimental condition. We observed that, while power estimates did not reveal notable differences between groups, LZC and fLZC were able to distinguish between HS, MS, and LS. In particular, we found a left frontal difference between HS and LS during closed-eye rest. Moreover, we observed a symmetric pattern distinguishing HS and LS during closed-eye hypnosis. Our results suggest that LZC is better capable of discriminating subjects with different hypnotic susceptibility, as compared to standard power analysis
Route optimization using forecasting, wheelchair modelling and path planning
Get PDFIn routing systems, the capability to generate reliable safe routes depends on the integration of a path optimization algorithm with dynamics and models. In this work, a system based on a novel route optimization algorithm is considered. The sensitivity of the lowest energy solutions is analyzed considering different simplified wheelchair models. The aim is to implement a system for routing wheelchairs around obstacles so that more people can safely drive powered wheelchairs. Powered wheelchairs can positively impact participation, activity, wellbeing, pain and self-esteem. Systems described here can allowing more autonomous or collaborative driving, and enhance mobility of disabled individuals finding it difficult to use standard powered wheelchairs. The work included a small qualitative exploratory study that exposed three topics: (a) “situations that might benefit from path planning and obstacle avoidance; (b) “optimism concerning the use of technological systems on powered wheelchairs”; (c) “characteristics of disabled users that could benefit from using a powered wheelchair”. Findings indicated that the systems presented in this paper could help to overcome some of the difficulties in using powered wheelchairs
Identification of Critical Business Processes: A Proposed Novel Approach
No full textCritical Business Processes (CBPs) are processes that are crucial to the financial stability and operations of an organisation. This paper focuses on surveying the literature, while presenting a critical synthesis of the findings of previous studies on CBPs. The paper seeks to extensively and critically review the current literature to understand state-of-the-art methods and key research gap for CBP identification. While this paper targets the process of identifying the gap in literature, it helps in finding out what is needed for mitigating it, motivating the future researches in this area, and pushing the boundary between human and machine interaction in key strategic decisions for organisations along with security implications
