Development and validation of a lean supply chain management measurement instrument

It is widely argued that to be competitive, a company not only needs to focus on internal aspects but on the entire supply chain. Lean supply chain management has become a means of enhancing competitiveness by improving efficiency and increasing flexibility at all stages of the supply chain. This research develops and validates a lean supply chain management measurement instrument. A two-phase approach is used for scale development and refinement. In the first phase, a literature review is conducted to identify definitions of lean supply chain management and agile supply chain management and their corresponding measurement items. In the second phase, the lean supply chain management measurement instrument is validated using survey data based on scales developed in the first phase by 59 scholars with experience in lean management and/or supply chain management. The results provide a structured and comprehensive measure of lean supply chain management indicating that there are two differentiated dimensions in the measurement instrument: one related to the operational aspects of lean supply chain strategy implementation and the second related to lean supply chain planning.     

Species composition,abundance and diet of a squamate assemblage from the Carnaval stream headwaters (Buenos Aires,Argentina)

Urban Ecosystems - The present work summarizes 10 years of field observations of an exurban squamate assemblage occupying a 1200 ha patch in the suburbs of La Plata City (Los...     

Cemeteries and biodiversity conservation in cities: how do landscape and patch-level attributes influence bird diversity in urban park cemeteries?

Urban Ecosystems - Cemeteries can help conserve biodiversity in urban landscapes, but their capacity to support native species is likely to be influenced by variables at different spatial scales....     

Child language brokering: challenges in Spanish intercultural education

Globalisation has resulted in multicultural and multilingual societies where individuals, who often do not speak the official language, need to communicate with different services offered by public institutions in the host country. School plays a vital role as an education and training institution, and must guarantee that every student receives equal opportunities, and, in accordance with the principles of intercultural education, facilitate the integration of foreign students both into society and the educational context. However, linguistic and cultural barriers may sometimes prevent communication between foreign students, their families and the education centre.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse survey responses and interview talk about communication between teachers and immigrant users who do not speak or barely know the host country language, especially the methods employed and the resources available to Spanish education centres to communicate with students and families who lack the necessary host language skills. A case study will be used as example of the situation in which both educators and families very frequently have to turn to child language brokering, using methodology based on qualitative analysis of surveys and interviews carried out in two primary schools in the Madrid area.     

A Ecological Model of Well-Being in Child Welfare Referred Children

Despite its social, political and economic relevance, child well-being remains a challenging construct to define and measure accurately. This holds true especially for children growing up in at-risk families, where their development is hindered by many adverse circumstances. Typically, the well-being of child welfare (CW) referred children has been conceptualized as the absence of negative outcomes, and the study of its determinants has been limited to children’s micro-systems. In this study, we aimed to obtain a suitable indicator of child well-being and to test a model of the determinants of CW referred children’s well-being including parental, family and wider contextual variables. The sample included 249 parents and 46 case managers from Portuguese and Spanish CW services. A three-domain solution from selected items of the Child Well-Being Scales (Physical, Academic and Socioemotional) was tested and confirmed through Confirmatory Factor Analysis. The results of structural equation modeling for each domain revealed that risk factors nested in the wider context and those related to material disadvantage were the most powerful predictors of physical well-being, while parenting and family functioning variables predicted better both academic and socio-emotional well-being. Our findings suggest that different risk and protective factors matter for different outcomes and that most of these factors are associated with each other. Therefore, interventions with at-risk children must take this specificity into account when targeting each domain of well-being, and efforts could be allocated to a few modifiable dimensions, which would in turn positively affect other parental and family factors.     

Comments on “The power of monitoring: how to make the most of a contaminated multivariate sample”

These are comments on the invited paper “The power of monitoring: How to make the most of a contaminated multivariate sample” by Andrea Cerioli, Marco Riani, Anthony Atkinson and Aldo Corbellini.     

Renaissance of a rural artifact in a city with a million people: biodiversity responses to an agro-forestry restoration in a large urban traditional fruit orchard

The rural landscapes surrounding large cities are rapidly becoming incorporated into the urban environment. The most conspicuous changes involve green spaces, such as former agro-forestry systems like fruit orchards. In this paper, we assess the influence on biodiversity of restoring a large urban traditional fruit orchard as reflected by six selected taxa: plants, lichens, butterflies, beetles, orthopteroids and birds. The study was performed in Prague, which is the capital city of the Czech Republic and has more than a million inhabitants. We studied the effect of orchard renewal in 45 patches (15 for birds and 30 for other taxa). The majority of taxa responded positively to the restoration. The restoration had a significant positive effect on the species richness of lichens, butterflies and beetles. All taxa showed significantly altered species compositions, and the number of red-listed species increased. Orchards have a high potential for multi-functional use. Orchards are productive agro-forestry systems and host numerous possible human activities. Therefore, orchard restoration also has a social aspect. Moreover, our research in this artificial ecosystem revealed that its restoration increased the biodiversity and conservation potential of the associated areas.

     

The Twitter games: media education,popular culture and multiscreen viewing in virtual concourses

Interactive media and virtual environments give rise to transmedia and multiscreen viewing in a new popular and participatory culture. This in turn requires a new type of critical, reflective media education. This article reviews expert opinions on the educational potential of The Hunger Games (THG) and the use of Twitter during the viewing of films by young audiences. The study has the twofold goal of analysing whether the tweets include the topics of ideology and values mentioned in the selected articles and whether the conversations help build knowledge of the subjects that, according to the experts, are discussed in the literary trilogy. The method, based on discourse analysis, is twofold as well, comprising, on one hand, the discussion of 61 selected academic papers on THG and, on the other, 6000 tweets posted by youngsters while watching the films in the trilogy shown on TV. The tweets were analysed using the ‘coding and counting’ technique in computer-mediated discourse analysis. The results show a great chasm between academic or educational perspectives and what youngsters see in the films. Twitter interactions show that the virtual environments where these interactions take place are mere virtual concourses rather than affinity or learning spaces. This draws attention to the need for a new type of media education which not only includes the popular culture in formal education environments, but also uses the virtual concourses where youngsters gather around media products to transform mere coexistence into convergence of interests based on the meaning of these products.     

The turning arcs: a computationally efficient algorithm to simulate isotropic vector-valued Gaussian random fields on the d-sphere

Statistics and Computing - Random fields on the sphere play a fundamental role in the natural sciences. This paper presents a simulation algorithm parenthetical to the spectral turning bands method...