A Hybrid Model for Green Supplier Selection and Order Allocation: DEMATEL, ANP, and Multi-criteria Goal Programming Approach

Increased competition in the industrial world forces companies to increase their competitiveness through Green Supply Chain Management (GSCM). The key to the success of GSCM is the selection of suppliers and the allocation of the proper order by taking into account environmental aspects. This decision involves several criteria and must also pay attention to the relationship between criteria. This study proposes a hybrid procedure to solve Green Supplier Selection and Order Allocation (GSSOA). The integration of Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL), Analytic Network Process (ANP), and Multi-Criteria Goal Programming (MCGP) are proposed to solve this problem. The DEMATEL is used to calculate the relationship between criteria. Furthermore, the ANP is proposed to determine the weight of the criteria and supplier ranking. Finally, the MCGP method is offered for allocating orders based on priority suppliers. A case study on the food industry in Malang, Indonesia, was conducted to apply this procedure. The results showed that the low defects rate criterion is the most important compared to other criteria. The best supplier was successfully selected, and the order allocation was completed. Order allocation priority is to suppliers D, C, A, and B. This study also presents a sensitivity analysis for order allocation.

Class 1 Heating Cycles: A New Class of Thermodynamic Cycles

Thermodynamic cycles are not only the core concepts of thermal science, but also key approaches to energy conversion and utilization. So far, power cycles and refrigeration cycles have been the only two general classes of thermodynamic cycles. While diverse types of systems have been developed to perform thermodynamic cycles, no new general classes of thermodynamic cycles have been proposed. Based on the basic principles of thermodynamics, here we propose and analyze a new general class of thermodynamic cycles named class 1 heating cycles (HC-1s). Two basic forms of HC-1s are obtained by connecting six essential thermodynamic processes in the proper order and forming a thermodynamic cycle. HC-1s present the simplest and most general approach to utilizing the temperature difference between a high-temperature heat source and a medium-temperature heat sink to achieve efficient medium-temperature heating and/or low-temperature cooling. HC-1s fill the gaps that have existed since the origin of thermal science, and they will play significant roles in energy conservation and emission reduction.

Causality of Internal and External Linkages of Enterprises' Low-Carbon Strategy From a Configuration Perspective

This study aims to identify the motivations behind the low-carbon strategy of companies. For this purpose, a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis is conducted to explore the linkage effects of internal and external factors such as business environment, industry environment and individual heterogeneity on the company's low-carbon strategy based on a multi-dimensional theoretical perspective. It is found that the low-carbon strategy of companies in a low, medium, and high-level business environment follow the order of " survival maintenance ", "firm foothold", "bigger and stronger", "adapt to the trend", and "value innovation". Further analysis shows that the proper order of the three types of indicators from high to low is: industry environment, individual heterogeneity, and business environment. “The industry is under pressure and has enough power” is a key reason for low-carbon strategies; the competition intensity within the industry is an important external incentive for low-carbon strategy; CEO power is an important internal driving force for low-carbon strategy. This paper shows that a high-level business environment can help to improve managers’ forward-looking decision-making and help companies escape the inherent thinking of the “red sea competition”.

Blood Culture Contamination in a Community Hospital- less than 2% is achievable

Introduction/Objective Blood cultures are commonly obtained to evaluate the presence of bacteria or fungal infection in a patient’s bloodstream. The presence of living microorganisms circulating in the bloodstream is of substantial prognostic and diagnostic importance. A positive blood culture indicates a reason for the patient’s illness and provides the etiological agent for antimicrobial therapy. Collection of blood culture is an exact process that requires time, the proper order of draw, and following of correct protocol. The busy Emergency department that requires multiple demands for nurse’s time, turnover of staff, rushing from one task to another can result in the improper collection and false-positive blood cultures. The national benchmark is set at 3% by the American Society of Clinical Microbiology (ASM) and The Clinical and Laboratory Standard Institute (CLSI). False-positive blood culture results in increased length of stay and unnecessary antimicrobial therapy, resulting in an increased cost burden to the hospital of about $5000 per patient. Methods/Case Report At our 150-bed community hospital, 26 beds Emergency Department, we have come a long way in reduction of our blood culture contamination rates from upwards of 4% to less than 2%, far lower than the national benchmark. Results (if a Case Study enter NA) NA Conclusion There are multiple devices available from various manufacturers claiming to reduce blood culture contamination. These devices do reduce blood culture (BC) contamination but at an added cost of the device. The rate of BC can be reduced and less than 3% is achievable by materials available in the laboratory. We have achieved this by providing training to every new staff by demonstration and direct observation, providing everything required for collection in a kit, using proper technique, the inclusion of diversion method that involves the aseptic collection of a clear tube before collecting blood cultures, and following up monthly on any false positive blood cultures.

Leibniz on the Idea and the Concept of the Self

Leibniz positions himself between Malebranche’s pessimism and Descartes’s optimism concerning our capacity of self-knowledge. In this position, he finds himself confronted with forces that pull in opposite directions. The tension between Leibniz’s optimistic and pessimistic claims about our capacity of self-knowledge can be resolved by distinguishing two distinct kinds of reflection: inner sentiment and metaphysical reflection. While the former is confused and merely allows one to recognize one’s own existence and the occurrence of one’s thoughts, it nevertheless provides the necessary starting point of metaphysical reflections on one’s self in the course of which metaphysical ideas are awakened. If carried out with attention and in proper order, metaphysical reflections lead to the recognition of metaphysical truths about the makeup of one’s own self.

Sustainable Corporate Governance: The Impact Factors for Top Consulting Engineering Companies in Taiwan

The objective of this research was to explore the impact factors of sustainable corporate governance for top consulting engineering companies in Taiwan, to facilitate managers in meeting stakeholders’ needs and adapting to the challenges of the global markets. Nine hypotheses derived from a literature review were proposed and used to develop a survey. Based on the concept of structural equation modeling (SEM) and these hypotheses, a questionnaire containing six aspects and comprising 46 stems was developed using the Likert 5-scale format. The survey took around four months to administer with 324 effective returns, with only five hypotheses confirmed. This was followed by factor analysis to determine the weight sequence for the 28 impact factors and four aspects. The contributions of the findings are as follows: (1) the weighted factors provide practitioners with guidelines for the proper order for the implementation of measures to improve corporate governance, and (2) they answer questions about the degree of influence and the relationship among all aspects and factors for sustainable corporate governance.

Speakers formulating their talk as interruptive

© 2017 Elsevier B.V. Interruption has predominantly been conceptualised as a violation of normative turn-taking practices and speakership rights. The present study further develops a broader perspective by showing that speakers can orient to matters of sequential organisation, other than turn-taking, when they claim their own talk is interruptive. Drawing from a larger collection of 72 cases where explicit claims to interruption were made, this paper uses conversation analysis to examine a subset of 20 instances where speakers specifically described what they were doing was interruption. Our target phenomenon was expressions such as “I want to interrupt” and “apologise for interrupting”. Speakers can prospectively mark some upcoming talk as interruptive and they can also retrospectively cast what they have just said as an interruption. Either way, the observably relevant disruption was not to turn-taking but to other sequences of action, namely the proper order of activities, the organisation of topics and adjacency pairs. Furthermore, by focusing on cases from institutional settings we propose that by explicitly claiming one's own talk as interruptive participants make relevant membership categories and their associated deontic responsibilities for the progression of activities within institutional settings.

Speakers formulating their talk as interruptive

© 2017 Elsevier B.V. Interruption has predominantly been conceptualised as a violation of normative turn-taking practices and speakership rights. The present study further develops a broader perspective by showing that speakers can orient to matters of sequential organisation, other than turn-taking, when they claim their own talk is interruptive. Drawing from a larger collection of 72 cases where explicit claims to interruption were made, this paper uses conversation analysis to examine a subset of 20 instances where speakers specifically described what they were doing was interruption. Our target phenomenon was expressions such as “I want to interrupt” and “apologise for interrupting”. Speakers can prospectively mark some upcoming talk as interruptive and they can also retrospectively cast what they have just said as an interruption. Either way, the observably relevant disruption was not to turn-taking but to other sequences of action, namely the proper order of activities, the organisation of topics and adjacency pairs. Furthermore, by focusing on cases from institutional settings we propose that by explicitly claiming one's own talk as interruptive participants make relevant membership categories and their associated deontic responsibilities for the progression of activities within institutional settings.

The gender-binary cycle: the perpetual relations between a biological-essentialist view of gender, gender ideology, and gender-labelling and sorting

Gender inequality is one of the most pressing issues of our time. A core factor that feeds gender inequality is people's gender ideology—a set of beliefs about the proper order of society in terms of the roles women and men should fill. We argue that gender ideology is shaped, in large parts, by the way people make sense of gender differences. Specifically, people often think of gender differences as expressions of a predetermined biology, and of men and women as different ‘kinds’. We describe work suggesting that thinking of gender differences in this biological-essentialist way perpetuates a non-egalitarian gender ideology. We then review research that refutes the hypothesis that men and women are different ‘kinds’ in terms of brain function, hormone levels and personality characteristics. Next, we describe how the organization of the environment in a gender-binary manner, together with cognitive processes of categorization drive a biological-essentialist view of gender differences. We then describe the self-perpetuating relations, which we term the gender-binary cycle , between a biological-essentialist view of gender differences, a non-egalitarian gender ideology and a binary organization of the environment along gender lines. Finally, we consider means of intervention at different points in this cycle. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms’.

Improvement of cognitive ability of English language learners through writing skills.

This paper explores the interrelation between the cognitive linguistic skills that are necessary for children to write on both words and texts. Three types of cognitive-linguistic abilities, which were considered to be more specifically interested in the text writing research, were transcriptional skills, ideation and syntax. The first two emerged out of a simplistic writing view (Berninger, 2010) while the predicted value of syntactic skills was based on an "extended triangle model" (Bishop & Snowling, 2011). The transcription skills in the present research have been operationalized to generate strokes in line with the proper order of stroke. With respect to the ideation, we tested the capacity of children to create orally sentences on such subjects and the requirements for grading are close to the criteria of text composition. Although good handwriting enhances student reading, improves skills, the process of abandoning handwriting has already started in a number of countries. This study paper reveals that handwriting is not only meant for primary school students, but also in high school education with regard to some important studies.