Sustainability in the Fashion Industry: Two Case Studies Highlighting Consumer Purchasing Actions Related to Brand Sustainability

The rise of competition in the fashion industry has called for companies to differentiate themselves. One way of differentiation that has been seen in recent years is an increase in sustainable and environmentally friendly practices. This paper explores the use of press releases by fashion companies to see if the releases impact the companies’ bottom line. The purpose of this study was to evaluate if sustainability related press releases impact consumers in the United States decision making in purchasing products or supporting certain brands or companies. To conduct this study, yearly and quarterly financial data was collected to find trends within a company’s revenue, as well as data on press releases that advertise the company’s sustainability efforts. These two data sources were connected to then analyze if environmental press releases impacted the company’s bottom line. To connect this information to the real world, two case studies were conducted: H&M, a well-known fast fashion company, and Levi’s, a tried-and-true sustainable denim company. As these companies were different sizes, the percent change formula was applied between years and quarters to ensure that the data was not skewed by historically higher or lower revenues. In analyzing the data, results indicated that years with sustainability related press releases resulted in a 2.89% higher percent change than total average percent change between yearly revenue, and a 4.81% higher percent change than total average quarterly percent change between quarters. This provided evidence that press releases that include the company’s promise to act sustainably impacted consumer decisions and in turn created more profits in the quarter and year the press release was published, overall benefitting the company’s bottom line. Paper prepared for the Environmental Studies Senior Seminar/Geography Capstone. Faculty Advisor: Dr. Todd Lookingbil

The dragonfly nearby galaxies survey. Iv. A giant stellar disk in ngc 2841

Neutral gas is commonly believed to dominate over stars in the outskirts of galaxies, and investigations of the disk-halo interface are generally considered to be in the domain of radio astronomy. This may simply be a consequence of the fact that deep HI observations typically probe to a lower mass surface density than visible wavelength data. This paper presents low surface brightness optimized visible wavelength observations of the extreme outskirts of the nearby spiral galaxy NGC 2841. We report the discovery of an enormous low-surface brightness stellar disk in this object. When azimuthally averaged, the stellar disk can be traced out to a radius of $\sim$70 kpc (5 $R_{25}$ or 23 inner disk scale lengths). The structure in the stellar disk traces the morphology of HI emission and extended UV emission. Contrary to expectations, the stellar mass surface density does not fall below that of the gas mass surface density at any radius. In fact, at all radii greater than $\sim$20 kpc, the ratio of the stellar to gas mass surface density is a constant 3:1. Beyond $\sim$30 kpc, the low surface brightness stellar disk begins to warp, which may be an indication of a physical connection between the outskirts of the galaxy and infall from the circumgalactic medium. A combination of stellar migration, accretion and in-situ star formation might be responsible for building up the outer stellar disk, but whatever mechanisms formed the outer disk must also explain the constant ratio between stellar and gas mass in the outskirts of this galaxy.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

Electrocardiographic repolarization-related variables as predictors of coronary heart disease death in the women's health initiative study.

BackgroundWe evaluated 25 repolarization-related ECG variables for the risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) death in 52 994 postmenopausal women from the Women's Health Initiative study.Methods and resultsHazard ratios from Cox regression were computed for subgroups of women with and without cardiovascular disease (CVD). During the average follow-up of 16.9 years, 941 CHD deaths occurred. Based on electrophysiological considerations, 2 sets of ECG variables with low correlations were considered as candidates for independent predictors of CHD death: Set 1, Ѳ(Tp|Tref), the spatial angle between T peak (Tp) and normal T reference (Tref) vectors; Ѳ(Tinit|Tterm), the angle between the initial and terminal T vectors; STJ depression in V6 and rate-adjusted QTp interval (QTpa); and Set 2, TaVR and TV1 amplitudes, heart rate, and QRS duration. Strong independent predictors with over 2-fold increased risk for CHD death in women with and without CVD were Ѳ(Tp|Tref) >42° from Set 1 and TaVR amplitude >-100 μV from Set 2. The risk for these CHD death predictors remained significant after multivariable adjustment for demographic/clinical factors. Other significant predictors for CHD death in fully adjusted risk models were Ѳ(Tinit|Tterm) >30°, TV1 >175 μV, and QRS duration >100 ms.ConclusionsѲ(Tp|Tref) angle and TaVR amplitude are associated with CHD mortality in postmenopausal women. The use of these measures to identify high-risk women for further diagnostic evaluation or more intense preventive intervention warrants further study.Clinical trial registration urlhttp://www.clinicaltrials.gov. Unique identifier: NCT00000611

The seeds of the black ghetto were sown in the 1880s, longbefore the Great Migration

More than a year after the tragic shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri by a white police officer, the influence and legacy of historic racial segregation still looms large in the US. In new research, John R. Logan, Weiwei Zhang, Richard Turner, and Allison Shertzer argue that the process of black ghettoization in Northern cities has roots in the 1880s – much farther back than has been previously thought. Making use of census data covering smaller areas than traditional census tracts, they find that ’embryonic ghettos’ were present in many cities more than 50 years before the Great Migration, helping to make possible the extreme form of the ghetto that existed in 1940 and beyond

Curvature of Multiply Warped Products

In this paper, we study Ricci-flat and Einstein Lorentzian multiply warped products. We also consider the case of having constant scalar curvatures for this class of warped products. Finally, after we introduce a new class of spacetimes called as generalized Kasner space-times, we apply our results to this kind of space-times as well as other relativistic space-times, i.e., Reissner-Nordstrom, Kasner space-times, Banados-Teitelboim-Zanelli and de Sitter Black hole solutions.Comment: 28 pages, corrected typos, to appear in Journal of Geometry and Physic