Coping with floods: impacts, preparedness and resilience capacity of Greek micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises in flood-affected areas

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate aspects of flood experience, attitudes and responses of micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in Greece and to indicate a typology of strategies associated with their relative effort to build flood resilience capacity. Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative study protocol was used, based on pertinent literature that considers how business entities withstand, adapt and/or recover from non-linear climate change impacts, natural hazards and extreme weather. Data was obtained by conducting semi-structured interviews with 82 MSMEs’ owners-managers who had recently experienced flooding. Findings: The study reports limited activities of MSMEs towards flood resilience capacity despite the threat of relevant disasters. Findings suggest that most owners-managers of these enterprises are not adequately preparing their businesses for the impacts of flooding. Research limitations/implications: The findings call for multi-level and dynamic perspectives to be examined in assessing MSME resilience capacity to floods. It is attitudinal, managerial, organisational, behavioural and regulatory (as well as other institutional) factors that merit further investigation. Such an investigation would allow a better understanding as to whether these factors hinder or enable conditions for microeconomic flood preparedness and resilience as well as how they may interact with each other or create feedback loops. Practical implications: The study carries managerial implications and policy recommendations in terms of nurturing opportunities towards awareness-raising campaigns for reducing deficits in managerial knowledge and competencies. It also encapsulates practical implications in terms of emphasising supporting mechanisms from key institutional stakeholders to allow MSMEs scan available options they have in effectively reinforcing the business premises from the forces of rising waters. Originality/value: Most of the related studies have examined flood impacts, responses and/or resilience capacity at the household- or community-level. Empirical work that is conducted to ascertain how MSMEs cope with flooding remains thin on the ground. In response to this, the current study and the typology of MSMEs’ strategic postures that are suggested seek to contribute to this under-researched topic

Digital subtraction radiographic analysis of the combination of bioabsorbable membrane and bovine morphogenetic protein pool in human periodontal infrabony defects

Objectives: This study assessed the bone density gain and its relationship with the periodontal clinical parameters in a case series of a regenerative therapy procedure. Material and Methods: Using a split-mouth study design, 10 pairs of infrabony defects from 15 patients were treated with a pool of bovine bone morphogenetic proteins associated with collagen membrane (test sites) or collagen membrane only (control sites). The periodontal healing was clinically and radiographically monitored for six months. Standardized presurgical and 6-month postoperative radiographs were digitized for digital subtraction analysis, which showed relative bone density gain in both groups of 0.034 ± 0.423 and 0.105 ± 0.423 in the test and control group, respectively (p>0.05). Results: As regards the area size of bone density change, the influence of the therapy was detected in 2.5 mm2 in the test group and 2 mm2 in the control group (p>0.05). Additionally, no correlation was observed between the favorable clinical results and the bone density gain measured by digital subtraction radiography (p>0.05). Conclusions: The findings of this study suggest that the clinical benefit of the regenerative therapy observed did not come with significant bone density gains. Long-term evaluation may lead to a different conclusions

Introducing fundamental accountability principles in sustainability reporting assessment: A cross-sectoral analysis from the Greek business sector

In recent years, sustainability reports have been gradually adopted by businesses and organizations in order to enhance their preparedness, competitiveness, and ability to adapt to a rapidly changing world. The aim of this study was to assess the comprehensiveness of 44 Greek companies’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports published in 2016. For this purpose, an evaluation methodology was developed in line with the accountability reporting principles suggested by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)-G4 guidelines for preparing and publishing sustainability reports. The overall findings indicate moderate levels of satisfaction as the sample Greek firms performed adequately at embedding the GRI reporting principles into their corporate disclosures. Most firms’ integration of the “accuracy” and “reliability” principles was poor. Emerging from the latter outcome, together with the low integration of some materiality issues, are problems of transparency, credibility, balance, and completeness related to the publishing of CSR reports. It is likely that operational features such as type, size, and sector have the potential to influence the style and comprehensiveness of reports. © 2020 Wiley Periodicals LL

Success of non-surgical periodontal therapy in adult periodontitis patients:A retrospective analysis

Objective: To evaluate the results of active non-surgical treatment in patients diagnosed with adult periodontitis treated in a specialized clinic for periodontology. Material & Methods: In total, 1182 patients with adult periodontitis received active non-surgical therapy, which involved professional oral hygiene instruction, scaling and root planing, supragingival polishing and elective systemic antimicrobial medication. The results of this therapy were based on a full-mouth periodontal chart as assessed at the time of evaluation. Successful treatment as periodontal pocket depth (PPD) ≤5 mm was the main outcome parameter with bleeding on pocket probing as secondary outcome. Patient-related factors such as smoking and severity of periodontitis at baseline and site-related factors such as tooth type, furcation involvement and endodontic treatment were analysed. Possible relations with assessed parameters and the success of active periodontal therapy were evaluated. Results: Overall 39% of the patients reached the successful treatment objective and a mean bleeding on pocket probing tendency of 14%. Treatment success appeared to be dependent on tooth type where the results at single-rooted front teeth (85%) and premolar teeth (78%) were more successful than at molar teeth (47%). Analysis revealed that in 55% of the cases furcation involvement at molars was associated with the absence of success. Endodontic treatment was associated with absence of success in 8%-11% of the cases. Smoking negatively influences successful treatment outcome (P < 0.001). Conclusion: Active non-surgical periodontal therapy in patients with adult periodontitis resulted in approximately one third of the cases in the success endpoint of PPD ≤ 5mm. Sub-analysis showed that the outcome appeared to be dependent on tooth type, furcation involvement, severity of periodontal disease at intake and smoking status

Environment and Agreement Technologies ⋆

The notion of Multi-Agent System (MAS) environment, as remarked by recent literature, has gained a key role, becoming a mediating entity, functioning as enabler but possibly also as a manager and constrainer of agent actions, perceptions, and interactions 1 while addressing the requirements of openness and scalability. According to such a perspective, the environment is not a merely passive source of agent perceptions and target of agent actions which is, actually, the dominant perspective in agency, but a first-class abstraction that can be suitably designed to encapsulate some fundamental functionalities and services, such as coordination and organization, besides agent mobility, communications, security, etc [2]. Then, the environment dimension appears to intersect with all the dimensions that should be addressed to define an agreement between autonomous agents, that is, all the different Agreement Technologies giving support to the building, development and management of agreements in decentralized and open systems between autonomous agents. Those dimensions are the ones related to the development of technologies dealing with: Semantics, Norms, Organizations, Argumentation &amp; Negotiation, and Trust

Non-linear Programming Method for Buffer Allocation in Unreliable Production Lines

International audienceThis paper proposes a new algorithm based on a non-linear programming approach to deal with the buffer allocation problem in the case of unreliable production lines. Processing, failure and repair times are assumed to be random variables exponentially distributed. The proposed approach can be used to solve the different versions of the buffer allocation problem: primal, dual and generalized.This method is based on the modeling and the analysis of the serial production line using an equivalent machines method. The idea is to model the different possible states of each buffer using dedicated birth-death Markov processes to calculate the blockage and starvation probabilities of each machine. Then, each original machine is replaced by an equivalent one taking into account these probabilities.A comparative study based on different test instances issued from the literature is presented and discussed. The obtained results show the effectiveness and the accuracy of the proposed approach