Chapter X: The Tour de France: a success story in spite of competitive imbalance and doping

International audienceThe chapter goes as follows. In the first section it is demonstrated how the Tour de France is a high quality product. This is a result from its accurate design, its management, its economic model and its finance structure, both in comparison to other mega-sporting events and with reference to tournament theory. It is not easy to assess the competitive balance in the Tour de France since, as was demonstrated in chapter 10, it is at the same time an individual and a team sport contest. After reviewing some results published in literature so far, a new metrics for evaluating competitive balanced in the Tour de France is presented in section 2. Finally, the Tour de France cannot ignore doping as a potential threat to fan attendance and TV viewing. We therefore discuss the issue of doping and a new procedure to deal with doping in section 3

On communicating extruded aluminium surface quality along the supply chain – a customer approach to sustainable surfaces

Abstract Today, far too many products are scrapped due to surface related issues, products with perfect function but with minor surface blemishes. The complaints are often offset by goodwill commitments from suppliers at great cost to them and delivery delays and lead time costs for customers. The reason is that the industry relies on several non-standardized classification systems for surface quality that are based on various combinations of and designations for surface defects, assessed by visual inspections at a defined distance to determine the severity of any detected surface deviations. These similar classification systems provide far too much scope for subjective and non-repeatable assessments causing communication problems between customer and producer at all stages in the supply chain. To challenge this situation, a common toolbox to communicate, describe and define surface quality should be developed, i.e. a standardisation of surface quality assessment including various effects and defects with a jointly established nomenclature and evaluation parameters. This work presents the first step of a research project bringing together 11 suppliers and OEMs along the supply chain, from the delivery of raw aluminium to finished alumina profiles included in consumer products. The final goal of the project is to develop an ‘objective classification of visual requirements’ on alumina profiles towards increased sustainability and decreased material wastage. Presented result is a common terminology with links to the process chain, surface defect geometry and visual appearance aiming at making the communication between producers and buyers of the aluminium profiles clearer and more unambiguous when it comes to specification and requirements of profile surfaces in each of the supply-chain links. Future work will add measurable parameters specifying surface quality.</jats:p

Disuguaglianze sociali oggi : territori, lavoro, societ\ue0

After an Introduction by the editors, the volume offers a selection of the best papers presented at the annual conference of the economic section of the Italian Sociological Association, held in Naples in 2007. The general theme of the conference regarded the current characteristics of social inequalities. The contributions collected approached the general theme focusing on diverse topics from a wide range of different perspectives