Education in 'life cycle sustainability assessment': caring for all 3 P's in one

Starting from the observation that externalities, reflecting societal concerns, emerge from costs and benefits which are not reflected in the market price, the authors of the paper emphasize the importance in education of life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) as a triple-bottom line tool to assess the three dimensions of sustainable development (environment, social and economy) – often referred to as the inclusive 3 P’s-approach (planet, people and profit) – of products, from cradle to grave. Especially the social LCA, as part of the overarching LCSA, has been developed to identify and to assess the social conditions throughout the life cycle of a product in order to improve human well-being. The concept of ‘social justice’ and its operationalization form the background for the development of different stakeholder categories, subcategories and indicators to undertake the social and socio-economic assessment. Two international publications (Benoît and Mazijn, 2009; Valdivia et al., 2011) are used during teaching and training session to give an overview of the social LCA and the LCSA. These guidance for the assessment of products resulted from inter- and multidisciplinary work. It was developed with the support of the authors, who have all an engineering background, but who worked for ten years now together, inter alia, with experts from social sciences. Different training sessions have been set up and LCSA (incl. social LCA) has been part of courses at universities, all with multiple objectives of a learning curve for engineering education within the context of sustainable development. Based on that experience in different countries, the authors are formulating recommendations for future educational material. Looking back at the Declaration of Barcelona (EESD 2004) and comparing with the objectives of the formal and non-formal education on LCSA, the authors claim that LCSA (and the on-going research) provides an excellent opportunity to fulfil the requirements of Engineering Education for Sustainable Development. Answering the question ‘What is a sustainable product?’ by using LCSA is learning to deal with complexity and uncertainty across the boundaries of a diversity of disciplines

Fast-slow bursters in the unfolding of a high codimension singularity and the ultra-slow transitions of classes

Bursting is a phenomenon found in a variety of physical and biological systems. For example, in neuroscience, bursting is believed to play a key role in the way information is transferred in the nervous system. In this work, we propose a model that, appropriately tuned, can display several types of bursting behaviors. The model contains two subsystems acting at different timescales. For the fast subsystem we use the planar unfolding of a high codimension singularity. In its bifurcation diagram, we locate paths that underly the right sequence of bifurcations necessary for bursting. The slow subsystem steers the fast one back and forth along these paths leading to bursting behavior. The model is able to produce almost all the classes of bursting predicted for systems with a planar fast subsystems. Transitions between classes can be obtained through an ultra-slow modulation of the model's parameters. A detailed exploration of the parameter space allows predicting possible transitions. This provides a single framework to understand the coexistence of diverse bursting patterns in physical and biological systems or in models.Comment: 22 pages, 15 figure

A Solution for Multi-Alignment by Transformation Synchronisation

The alignment of a set of objects by means of transformations plays an important role in computer vision. Whilst the case for only two objects can be solved globally, when multiple objects are considered usually iterative methods are used. In practice the iterative methods perform well if the relative transformations between any pair of objects are free of noise. However, if only noisy relative transformations are available (e.g. due to missing data or wrong correspondences) the iterative methods may fail. Based on the observation that the underlying noise-free transformations can be retrieved from the null space of a matrix that can directly be obtained from pairwise alignments, this paper presents a novel method for the synchronisation of pairwise transformations such that they are transitively consistent. Simulations demonstrate that for noisy transformations, a large proportion of missing data and even for wrong correspondence assignments the method delivers encouraging results.Comment: Accepted for CVPR 2015 (please cite CVPR version

Sustainable Value: an application to the Swiss dairy farms of the mountainous area

The improvement of the sustainable performance of the agricultural sector is a priority of the Swiss agricultural policy. The sustainability of Swiss dairy farms located in the mountainous area might be critical as many of them show a weak performance in the use of their economic and/or social resources, and sometimes also of their environmental resources. An improvement of the sustainability of these farms prerequisites to better know on a large scale their sustainable performance and its determinants. For a representative sample of 480 dairy farms, we perform an assessment of their sustainable efficiency with the “sustainable value”, an approach to assess corporate sustainability based on the capital and opportunity cost theories. Using a linear regression, we analyze the determinants of the sustainable efficiency. The results show a tight positive relationship between sustainable performance and pure economic performance. The intensity of the use of intermediate consumptions is found to be the most important determinant of the sustainable efficiency. Farms with a high sustainable efficiency are those that use their intermediate consumptions in the most efficient way. The part of direct payments in the gross profit is shown to negatively affect the sustainable efficiency. The structural characteristics of the farms and the sociologic characteristics of the farmer managers are shown to hardly influence the sustainable efficiency.corporate sustainable performance, dairy farms, Switzerland, Farm Management, Livestock Production/Industries,

The Charm Quark on the Lattice

We formulate lattice fermions in a way that encompasses Wilson fermions as well as the static and non-relativistic approximations. In particular, we treat $m_qa$ systematically ($m_q$ is the fermion mass) showing how to understand the Wilson action as an effective action for systems with \vek{p}\ll m_q. The results show how to extract matrix elements and the spectrum from simulations with $m_qa\approx1$, which is relevant for the charm quark.Comment: 4 pages LaTeX using espcrc2.sty and epsf.sty. FERMILAB-CONF-92/329-

Networks and trade

Trade occurs between firms both across borders and within countries, and the vast majority of trade transactions includes at least one large firm with many trading partners. This paper reviews the literature on firm-to-firm connections in trade. A growing body of evidence coming from domestic and international transaction data has established empirical regularities which have inspired the development of new theories emphasizing firm heterogeneity among both buyers and suppliers in production networks. Theoretical work has considered both static and dynamic matching environments in a framework of many-to-many matching. The literature on trade and production networks is at an early stage, and there are a large number of unanswered empirical and theoretical questions

Effect of tensile pre-strain on bending and unloading of automotive steels

In recent years, advanced high strength steels (AHSS) have been used in a wide range of automotive applications; they may have property variations through the thickness and the properties may also be dependent of prior processing including pre-straining. In order to model forming processes precisely using, for example, finite element analysis, it is important that material input data should adequately reflect these effects. It is known that shape defects in roll forming are related to small strains in material that has undergone prior deformation in a different strain path. Much research has already been performed on the change in the Young’s Modulus once a steel sheet has been plastically deformed,however many of these tests have only been conducted using tensile testing, and therefore may not take into account differences in compressive and tensile unloading. This research investigates the effect of tensile pre-straining on bending behaviour for various types of material;in bending, one half of the sheet will load and unload in compression and hence experience deformation under a reversed stress. Four different materials were pre-strained in tension with 1%, 3%, 7%, 11% and 25% elongation. Using a free bending test, moment curvature diagrams were obtained for bending and unloading. The results showed that the characteristics of the moment curvature diagram depended on the degree of pre-straining; more highly strained samples showed an earlier elastic-plastic transformation and a decreased Young\u27s Modulus during unloading. This was compared to previous literature results using only tensile tests. Our results could influence the modeling of springback in low tension sheet operations, such as roll forming