Logistik: Hur påverkar Just-In-Time på lönsamheten av ett företag?

Ett företag har som grunduppgift att hållas verksamt genom att ekonomiskt prestera bättre för varje år. Logistik är det verksamhetsområde som står för majoriteten av ett företags kostnader. Kostnader i sig är en dålig sak för företag, men det är även en möjlighet för logistiken att sänka dessa kostnader, vilket i sin tur är bra för företagets lön-samhet. Just-In-Time (JIT) är en produktions- och styrfilosofi inom logistiken, där det huvudsakliga målet är att minska lagernivåerna och att eliminera allt onödigt. Syftet med denna studie är att finna ett samband mellan JIT och lönsamhet ur ett logistiskt perspektiv. Vid studien används DuPont-modellen som definition av lönsamhet samt som ett jämförelseverktyg där sex olika finansiella faktorer mäts. Metoden för studien är kvalitativ i form av en litteraturstudie. Materialet som analyseras hämtas endast från Arcadas databaser och analysen av materialet sker i form av innehållsanalys. Resultaten av materialet som analyserades är väldigt blandat. Många studier påpekar att det råder brist på forskning inom detta ämnesområdet, vilket även kan vara orsaken till dessa blandade resultat. Det går dock att urskilja tre finansiella mått från DuPont-modellen som påver-kas positivt av JIT. Dessa är: intäkter, kostnader och lager. Ingen studie visade att JIT skulle ha negativ inverkan på ett företags lönsamhet. Andra intressanta faktorer som JIT hade en positiv inverkan på är operativa prestanda, t.ex. minskade ledtider

Promoting Equitable Climate Resilience in Gentrifying Communities: A Needs-Based Approach in East Boston

This single holistic case study examines how Latinx activists in East Boston understand and experience the combined effects of gentrification and climate change, as well as how they conceive community-based strategies to address these problems. I integrate bodies of literature on green and climate-driven gentrification, assessing how Max-Neef’s (1991) Fundamental Human Needs (FHN) theory and theories of intersectional organizing can challenge the top-down, elite-driven discourses that have historically dominated economic, social, and now climate resilience policy in the United States. I also propose an expansion of how to apply the FHN theory as a tool to assess community wellbeing. Many urban communities experiencing rapid gentrification also face the negative impacts of climate change. Previous research has shown that climate resiliency policies and practice throughout the United States often serve to protect newly arriving gentrifiers’ property values and the interests of developers rather than addressing the needs of longtime residents, who are frequently low-income people of color (Anguelovski et al., 2016). In this way, climate resilience policies may exacerbate trends of gentrification and displacement (Shi et al., 2016; Shokry et al., 2021). East Boston, a coastal, quasi-insular neighborhood in the City of Boston, typifies this situation (Planas-Carbonell et al., 2023). It has seen rapid demographic changes in terms of socioeconomic status due to an influx of predominantly white gentrifiers, while housing instability disproportionately burdens Latinx residents (Diaz & Torres, 2012; Granados, 2018). Additionally, East Boston is and is likely to remain one of the Boston area’s most at-risk neighborhoods for flooding, due to the combined effects of sea level rise and storm surges (Climate Ready Boston, 2016). Using a community-engaged approach (Warren, 2018) and a qualitative research design involving in-depth, semi-structured interviews, four months of participant observation, and a participatory workshop, I reveal how the interaction of environmental hazards, housing insecurity, and increased discrimination and segregation undermine efforts by the Latinx community in East Boston to promote family stability and wellbeing—particularly for those who face intersecting marginalizations based on age, gender, or income. I also show how Latinx activists and other advocacy groups are educating community residents and developing strategies to improve climate awareness and create genuine community resilience in East Boston through mostly informal grassroots organizing strategies, including a recurring communal activity known as the Green Walks. The case of East Boston Latinx activists using grassroots and intersectional organizing is part of a larger movement in which majority low-income communities of color, severely impacted by climate change and gentrification—and at risk of displacement from both—are demanding a seat at the policymaking table and advocating for equitable climate resilience strategies. I ultimately argue that this type of intersectional organizing, if supported by public guidance and funding, can help shift the discussion about climate resilience from groups that have traditionally controlled the policy agenda toward a more democratic efforts that pursue climate resilience policies that also increase economic opportunities and social mobility, thereby becoming vehicles to address systemic injustice. This approach understands equitable climate resilience as something that, beyond protecting the physical environment, also promotes the wellbeing of the entire community

Learning from the Massachusetts Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness (MVP) Program in the Greater Boston Region

This report examines the implementation and impacts of Massachusetts\u27 Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness (MVP) Program, with a particular focus on adaptation planning and action in the Greater Boston region. Initiated by the Commonwealth in 2016, the MVP Program aims to build local capacity and advance municipal climate adaptation through state-funded planning and action grants. Drawing on case studies, interviews, and document analysis, the report explores how the program fosters stakeholder engagement, supports vendor-led planning processes, and integrates environmental justice principles. While the MVP Program has made significant strides in promoting climate dialogue and nature-based solutions, it faces persistent challenges including uneven funding, limited institutional capacity in under-resourced municipalities, and gaps in regional governance. The report concludes with recommendations for enhancing program effectiveness by embedding equity more systematically, strengthening regional collaboration, and investing in long-term, locally rooted adaptation capacity

Opportunity in the Complexity: Recommendations for Equitable Climate Resilience in East Boston

East Boston is a diverse, working-class, coastal neighborhood of the City of Boston that is currently undergoing rapid gentrification. At the same time, local environmental problems – such as air and noise pollution from the operation of the nearby Logan International Airport – continue to harm residents, particularly the most marginalized communities. In addition to housing pressures and the pollution from Logan Airport, technical and scientific assessments warn that a large part of the neighborhood is at risk of being severely affected by climate change impacts such as sea-level rise, storm surges, and heatwaves. City-led planning efforts and climate resilience strategies to address these interconnected challenges have, to date, prioritized the preservation of current power dynamics. These “business as usual” paths of development and residential mobility are aggravating patterns of overcrowding and displacement of long-time residents. Currently, proposed interventions, including hard, soft, and hybrid resiliency strategies, offer a wide range of opportunities to consider for planners, developers, and communities. However, they also raise the question of whether coastal protection interventions and localized co-benefits are sufficient to structure a comprehensive strategy that protects marginalized communities, improving their quality of life in the long term. By drawing from literature in climate and environmental justice, this research (1) explores residents’ priorities, (2) generates a better understanding of how these fit (or do not) in the current planning for a resilience public agenda, and (3) provides recommendations for local communities and planners to frame planning for resilience through a justice lens. Using a framework of just adaptation, we convey the residents’ views about environmental concerns, access to open spaces and the waterfront, the housing crisis, education issues, and employment opportunities, alongside the power asymmetries currently existing in the relationship between the communities and the Massachusetts Port Authority, which is the owner of Logan Airport and the largest employer in the area. Our research suggests that planning for resilience ought to be based on solid equity principles to concurrently address the most pressing economic, social, and environmental problems of East Boston. Our work in the field has led us to provide recommendations for communities to achieve increased and meaningful participation, strategies to address intersecting injustices, and a proposal towards a more incremental evaluation of planning objectives

Robust inference with GhostKnockoffs in genome-wide association studies

Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have been extensively adopted to depict the underlying genetic architecture of complex diseases. Motivated by GWASs' limitations in identifying small effect loci to understand complex traits' polygenicity and fine-mapping putative causal variants from proxy ones, we propose a knockoff-based method which only requires summary statistics from GWASs and demonstrate its validity in the presence of relatedness. We show that GhostKnockoffs inference is robust to its input Z-scores as long as they are from valid marginal association tests and their correlations are consistent with the correlations among the corresponding genetic variants. The property generalizes GhostKnockoffs to other GWASs settings, such as the meta-analysis of multiple overlapping studies and studies based on association test statistics deviated from score tests. We demonstrate GhostKnockoffs' performance using empirical simulation and a meta-analysis of nine European ancestral genome-wide association studies and whole exome/genome sequencing studies. Both results demonstrate that GhostKnockoffs identify more putative causal variants with weak genotype-phenotype associations that are missed by conventional GWASs

A Fast and Robust Strategy to Remove Variant-Level Artifacts in Alzheimer Disease Sequencing Project Data

Exome sequencing (ES) and genome sequencing (GS) are expected to be critical to further elucidate the missing genetic heritability of Alzheimer disease (AD) risk by identifying rare coding and/or noncoding variants that contribute to AD pathogenesis. In the United States, the Alzheimer Disease Sequencing Project (ADSP) has taken a leading role in sequencing AD-related samples at scale, with the resultant data being made publicly available to researchers to generate new insights into the genetic etiology of AD. To achieve sufficient power, the ADSP has adapted a study design where subsets of larger AD cohorts are collected and sequenced across multiple centers, using a variety of sequencing platforms. This approach may lead to variable variant quality across sequencing centers and/or platforms. In this study, we sought to implement and evaluate filters that can be applied fast to robustly remove variant-level artifacts in the ADSP data

Connecting for Equitable Climate Adaptation: Mapping Stakeholder Relationships in Metro Boston

Climate change is already disproportionately impacting historically marginalized populations. Without intentional interventions, adaptation efforts will amplify existing social and economic inequities. At the same time, society will mobilize massive resources to address increasing climate-related threats. This means that climate change also presents opportunities to address persistent and systemic inequities. However, equitable adaptation efforts are impeded by multiple factors. For example, many frontline communities do not have the capacity to work on adaptation efforts if it means diverting attention from addressing existing inequities. Even as policymakers, practitioners, and planners increasingly prioritize climate adaptation, frontline communities are not brought into the process early and deeply enough. And there is a broader issue, which is that knowledge about what equitable adaptation looks like and how to achieve it is still limited. The knowledge gaps are heightened by siloes preventing people in diferent felds - and across academic and community divides - from learning from one another. Given these factors, the Sustainable Solutions Lab Metro Boston Climate Adaptation Stakeholder Mapping Project (henceforth, “SSL” and “ Stakeholder Mapping Project) is one contribution toward efforts to bridge knowledge and practice gaps between different actors in the local climate justice field. The Stakeholder Mapping Project aims to identify a set of people and organizations collaborating in climate adaptation work and to bring together stakeholders to determine paths forward in advancing climate adaptation equity. We show the existing and, by default, the missing connections between climate adaptation actors in the Metro Boston area. By establishing what is, we can then ask questions about what should be and what it would take to get there. While the Stakeholder Mapping Project cannot tell us how practitioners, activists, researchers, and officials establish and nurture various forms of collaborative practices, it does provide a snapshot of the relational outcomes - who works with whom - that result from the existing structures, norms, and policies driving climate adaptation work locally

Development of a Novel Printed Circuit Board Technology for Inductive Device Applications

This paper describes the fabrication and characterisation of 2-dimensional inductive devices integrated inside printed circuit boards . PCB and flex-foils. These devices basically are composed of three layers of which the outer layers bear the printed coil patterns and the inner layer is a high permeability ferromagnetic sheet core. Both magnetic metal and copper layers are patterned using standard lithographic techniques. Electroplated interconnections between the outer layers complete the windings. We have fabricated both transformers and fluxgate magnetic field sensing devices with a thickness of 200 mm for the flex-foil devices and 600 mm for the PCB-based devices. Lateral dimensions are approximately 1 cm. We realise relatively high inductances of 1–10 mH at a frequency of 1 kHz for the transformers and a magnetic field detection limit of 43 mT at 20 kHz for the fluxgate devices

Powder blasting for three-dimensional microstructuring of glass

We report on powder blasting as a promising technology for the three-dimensional structuring of brittle materials. We investigate the basic parameters of this process, which is based on the erosion of a masked substrate by a high-velocity eroding powder beam, using glass substrates. We study the effect of various parameters on the etching rate, like the powder velocity and the mask feature size, which induces geometrical effects to the erosion process. We introduce oblique powder blasting and investigate, in particular, sidewall effects of the micropatterned structures. A few examples of devices micromachined by powder blasting are also presented. Keywords: Sand blasting; Powder blasting; Microfabrication; Erosion; Etchin

Influence of the 3-Hydroxyvalerate Content on the Processability, Nucleating and Blending Ability of Poly(3-Hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyvalerate)-Based Materials

Poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyvalerate (P(3HB-co-3HV) copolymers are an attractive class of biopolymers whose properties can be tailored by changing the 3-hydroxyvalerate monomer (3HV) concentration, offering the possibility of counteracting problems related to high crystallinity, brittleness, and processability. However, there are few studies about the effects of 3HV content on the processability of copolymers. The present study aims to provide new insights into the effect of 3HV content on the processing step including common practices like compounding, addition of nucleation agents and/or amorphous polymers as plasticizers. P(3HB-co-3HV)-based films containing 3, 18, and 28 mol % 3HV were processed into films by extrusion and subsequent molding. The characterization results confirmed that increasing the 3HV content from 3 to 28 mol % resulted in a decrease in the melting point (from 175 to 100 °C) and an improvement in mechanical properties (i.e., elongation at break from 7 ± 1% to 120 ± 3%). The behavior of P(3HB-co-3HV) in the presence of additives was also investigated. It was shown that an increase in the 3HV content leads to better miscibility with amorphous polymers