Supplier selection in the circular economy : Case study of service providers in Finland

With the increasing awareness of sustainable development when doing business, many companies are involving in promoting circular economy. Along with that, supplier selection would support the transformation from the company’s traditional linear economy to the circular economy. The purpose of this research is to analyze the supplier selection activity in companies promoting the circular economy. Extant literature for circular economy context, procurement process and supplier selection criteria are reviewed, which support the researcher to build an initial framework of supplier selection activity in a company towards the circular economy. The empirical research applies a qualitative approach with the use of three case studies which are service providers and are considered as pioneers in promoting circular economy in Finland. Data are collected in the form of semi-structured interviews as well as the information on companies’ webpages. The data are analyzed first within-case, and to be followed by cross-case analysis through Nvivo system to recognize the similarities and differences among the case companies. The research’s findings show that companies would engage various stakeholders in the procurement process to promote the circular economy. Trust and transparency are significantly important elements in building a long-term collaboration between the purchaser and the supplier. Moreover, at the beginning of the procurement process, the purchaser should re-think about actual needs in order to minimize waste later. Last but not least, when se-lecting suppliers, both traditional criteria and green criteria related to environmental, social and ethical aspects are widely considered and the selection decision would be made based on the “price per service” that the supplier can provide. This research contributes to the existing literature by analyzing the supplier selection activity in the circular economy practice and adding selection criteria. The research is helpful for companies building procurement strategy to develop the circular economy, as well as companies supplying materials or services to the sustainable market.Với nhận thức ngày càng tăng về phát triển kinh tế bền vững, nhiều công ty đang tham gia vào việc thúc đẩy nền kinh tế tuần hoàn. Lựa chọn nhà cung cấp cũng là một chiến lược quan trọng trong việc chuyển đổi từ nền kinh tế tuyến tính truyền thống sang nền kinh tế tuần hoàn. Mục đích của nghiên cứu này là để phân tích hoạt động lựa chọn nhà cung cấp trong các công ty đang thúc đẩy nền kinh tế tuần hoàn. Lý thuyết về bối cảnh nền kinh tế tuần hoàn, quy trình mua sắm và các tiêu chí lựa chọn nhà cung cấp được xem xét. Dựa vào đó, tác giả xây dựng một mô hình ban đầu về hoạt động lựa chọn nhà cung cấp trong một công ty hướng tới nền kinh tế tuần hoàn. Nghiên cứu sử dụng phương pháp định tính với ba case study là các công ty tiên phong trong việc thúc đẩy nền kinh tế tuần hoàn ở Phần Lan. Dữ liệu được thu thập thông qua các cuộc phỏng vấn bán cấu trúc, kết hợp với những thông tin có sẵn trên trang web của các công ty. Khi phân tích dữ liệu, đầu tiên tác giả phân tích dữ liệu theo từng công ty, và sau đó tác giả phân tích dữ liệu chéo giữa các công ty thông qua hệ thống Nvivo để nhận ra những điểm tương đồng và khác biệt. Kết quả nghiên cứu cho thấy các công ty thường hợp tác với nhiều bên liên quan trong quá trình mua sắm để thúc đẩy nền kinh tế tuần hoàn. Sự tin tưởng và minh bạch là những yếu tố quan trọng trong việc xây dựng sự hợp tác lâu dài giữa người mua và nhà cung cấp. Hơn nữa, khi bắt đầu quá trình mua sắm, người mua nên suy nghĩ kỹ về nhu cầu thực tế để giảm thiểu chất thải sau này. Cuối cùng nhưng không kém phần quan trọng, khi lựa chọn nhà cung cấp, các tiêu chí truyền thống và các tiêu chí “xanh” liên quan đến khía cạnh môi trường, xã hội và đạo đức đều được xem xét rộng rãi. Quyết định lựa chọn nhà cung cấp sẽ phụ thuộc vào giá của dịch vụ mà nhà cung cấp có thể mang lại cho người mua. Nghiên cứu này đóng góp cho lý thuyết hiện hành thông qua phân tích sâu về hoạt động lựa chọn nhà cung cấp kinh tế tuần hoàn và thêm các tiêu chí lựa chọn liên quan đến vấn đề đạo đức. Nghiên cứu này hữu ích cho các công ty đang xây dựng và hoàn thiện chiến lược mua sắm để phát triển nền kinh tế tuần hoàn, cũng như các công ty cung cấp nguyên liệu hoặc dịch vụ cho thị trường bền vững

Automatic Extraction of Keywords and Co-occurrence Keyword Sets

Internet search has become an essential part of almost everyone’s daily life and work. To make wise personal and business decisions in a timely fashion, one must access the most relevant information efficiently. Because the amount of information on the Internet is enormous, it is important that a search engine ranks the information appropriately when it presents search results to users. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) addresses relevance ranking based on how significant a search word is in each document. Some innovative approaches of computing higher dimensional LSI (HD-LSI) were explored in this project. In traditional LSI, the term frequency-inverse document frequency (TFIDF) is calculated based on how significant a single word is in a document. The goal of this project is to generalize LSI to higher dimensions regarding the traditional LSI as the one-dimensional special case. A benefit of the project is to enable a search engine to rank documents based on the special meaning of multi-word phrases, such as “wall street,” which is captured by a two-dimensional LSI method. Another benefit of the project is the reusable Java software components that compute HD-LSI and store the indexes into a relational database, from which many types of applications can access the HD-LSI data. The software components may be reused for studying the proximity of semantics among documents in high dimensional space in future research. Besides the software engineering aspect, this project contributes to computer science by studying the different approaches to HD-LSI computation. In particular, the dimensional trends in each case were analyzed

MICROPLASTIC FIBER ACCUMULATION IN SOME WILD AND CULTURED SHRIMP SPECIES

This study was conducted to examine the microplastic fiber abundance and its characteristics in two wild and two cultured shrimp species collected at coastal areas in Hoai Nhon district, Binh Dinh Province. A total of 84 individuals of four shrimp species, Litopenaeus vannamei, Penaeus monodon, Metapenaeus ensis, and Penaeus semisulcatus were collected for analysis. All shrimp specimens were dissected to remove the digestive tracts, which were then treated with 10% KOH to collect microplastic fibers by filtering. The microplastic fiber concentrations varied from 1.96 ± 0.09 to 19.33 ± 10.82 fibers/specimen or 0.20 ± 0.12 to 2.26 ± 1.26 fibers/g of wet body weight. The abundance of fibers in the wild shrimps (Penaeus semisulcatus and Metapenaeus ensis) was higher than in the cultured shrimps (Penaeus monodon and Litopenaeus vannamei). Most fibers observed in the four shrimp species had lengths between 300 and 1500 μm, accounting for 78.72% to 92.82% of the total). White fibers were dominant (30.38%), followed by gray (11.87%), and green (10.60%)

FOSTERING VIETNAMESE EFL LEARNERS’ LEARNER AUTONOMY AND READING COMPREHENSION ABILITY THROUGH ONLINE PLATFORMS

The ability of learner autonomy is a prerequisite for many university students in Vietnam. However, it is a daunting task for EFL teachers and learners to achieve that learning outcome. The present study aims to delineate second-year English majors’ perceived learner autonomy and reading comprehension ability in an online reading course at Van Lang University, Vietnam, with two online platforms (synchronous via Microsoft Teams and asynchronous via Moodle). During the ten weeks of this course, different online reading and vocabulary practices were assigned to 65 students in two intact classes. The results were obtained from reading tests, questionnaires, and a follow-up interview. The findings revealed that they could perceive their learner autonomy more positively and statistically remarkably improve their reading comprehension ability after the course. The students’ insights into the course’s effectiveness confirmed several benefits in addition to a few barriers (i.e., technical issues, English proficiency levels, learning motivation, and online self-study skills). The results have specific implications for the practice of English reading instruction at the faculty. Viable online platforms and pedagogical techniques should be applied to foster the students’ learner autonomy and reading comprehension ability.  Article visualizations

An equivalence of results in C*-algebra valued b-metric and b-metric spaces

[EN] In this paper, we first construct ab-metric, which is a special type ofC∗-algebra-valuedb-metrics, from a givenC∗-algebra-valuedb-metricand prove some equivalences between them. Then we show that notonly fixed point results but also topological properties inC∗-algebra-valuedb-metric spaces may be deduced from certain results inb-metricspaces. In particular, everyC∗-algebra-valuedb-metric space is metriz-able.Dung, NV.; Le Hang, VT.; Dolicanin-Djekic, D. (2017). An equivalence of results in C*-algebra valued b-metric and b-metric spaces. Applied General Topology. 18(2):241-253. doi:10.4995/agt.2017.5185SWORD24125318

An empirical study of assurance in the UK government major projects portfolio: from data to recommendations, to action or inaction

© 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited. Purpose: Effective and robust governance of major projects and programmes in the public sector is crucial to the accountability of the state and the transparency of state spending. The theoretical discourse on governance, in the context of projects and programmes, is not fully mature, although is now sufficiently well developed to warrant an increased scholarly focus on practice. This paper aims to contribute to the empirical literature through a study of assurance routines in the UK Government Major Projects Portfolio (GMPP). Design/methodology/approach: A framework analysis approach to the evaluation of a subset of GMPP database generates original insights into (1) the framing of assurance review recommendations, (2) the treatment of assurance review data and (3) the subsequent tracking of the implementation of actions arising from the assurance review process. Findings: The analysis reveals that the “delivery confidence” of the major projects and programmes included in this study improves during the time that they are assured on the GMPP. This would suggest that “enhanced” governance routines are desirable in programmes and projects that exhibit high degrees of complexity and scale. Originality/value: The research findings contribute to the wider conversations in this journal and elsewhere on project governance routines and governance-as-practice in the context of government and public services

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the stressful relationship between parents and children

The stressful relationship between children and parents is the pain both go through when they find themselves unable to cope as a parent or a child. In order to find out the status, causes, and impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and suggest some solutions to reduce stress between parents and children, we surveyed the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on stressful relationships between parents and children at high school age in Da Nang city. The findings of a survey conducted on 550 randomly selected parents and 550 high school students using the Perceived Stress Scale reveal a high rate of tension between parents and their children, particularly up to 51.1% and 38.5%, respectively. In reality, many factors are affecting the stressful relationship between parents and their children at this age, in which psychological fear about health; social distancing policy; closed schools; students staying at home 24 hours a day and learning online; the disruption in children's daily routine; excessive use of electronic devices are major causes of stress in the relationship between parents and their children. From this practice, our research team has proposed such solutions as participating in creative activities and consulting the handbook instructing parents' behaviour rules toward children and vice versa, designing extra-curricular activities, and organizing training courses on life values for both parents and children to increase happiness and reduce stress in the parent-child relationship

Neural Signals of Video Advertisement Liking:Insights into Psychological Processes and their Temporal Dynamics

What drives the liking of video advertisements? The authors analyzed neural signals during ad exposure from three functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data sets (113 participants from two countries watching 85 video ads) with automated meta-analytic decoding (Neurosynth). These brain-based measures of psychological processes—including perception and language (information processing), executive function and memory (cognitive functions), and social cognition and emotion (social-affective response)—predicted subsequent self-report ad liking, with emotion and memory being the earliest predictorsafter the first three seconds. Over the span of ad exposure, while the predictiveness of emotion peaked early and fell, that of social cognition had a peak-and-stable pattern, followed by a late peak of predictiveness in perception and executive function.At the aggregate level, neural signals—especially those associated with social-affective response—improved the prediction of out-of-sample ad liking compared with traditional anatomically based neuroimaging analysis and self-report liking. Finally, earlyonset social-affective response predicted population ad liking in a behavioral replication. Overall, this study helps delineate the psychological mechanisms underlying ad processing and ad liking and proposes a novel neuroscience-based approach for generating psychological insights and improving out-of-sample predictions