Exploring the Abilities of 3D Printing and its Viability for Consumption in the Fashion Industry

Abstract With the ever-evolving state of today’s technology, designers and retailers in the apparel industry are seeking out new technological methods that have the capacity to revolutionize and individualize their brand, as well as meet consumer needs and preferences. An emerging technology is 3D printing, which utilizes computer-aided technology and a variety of filaments to construct an object. Though 3D printing technology offers the ability for rapid prototyping, a condensed supply chain, and a sustainable additive manufacturing process, there is question as to whether or not consumers are ready for 3D printed clothing to enter their wardrobes. In this creative study, the authors designed a 3D printed garment in order to test whether 3D printers could be used to make wearable clothing of similar characteristics to clothing typically made of fabric. A survey was then conducted on the University of Arkansas campus to measure consumer response to the project garment. Three primary factors were measured: prior exposure and interest in 3D printing, general fashion interest, and aesthetic appeal of the project 3D printed garment. Overall perceptions of the project garment as well as further use of 3D printing for the apparel industry were positive. The ability of this study to create a fully 3D printed garment as well as understand consumer response to 3D printed clothing provides insight into this emerging technology. The results warrant further research into its capabilities for fashion and that the fashion industry could move towards adopting this technology on a wider scale in coming years. The results indicate that a major transformation in ready-to-wear style is feasible and beneficial to the apparel industry because of 3D printing. Keywords: 3D printing, fashion, consumer preference, sustainability, apparel, technolog

Efficient Parallel Carrier Recovery for Ultrahigh Speed Coherent QAM Receivers with Application to Optical Channels

This work presents a new efficient parallel carrier recovery architecture suitable for ultrahigh speed intradyne coherent optical receivers (e.g., ≥100 Gb/s) with quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). The proposed scheme combines a novel low-latency parallel digital phase locked loop (DPLL) with a feedforward carrier phase recovery (CPR) algorithm. The new low-latency parallel DPLL is designed to compensate not only carrier frequency offset but also frequency fluctuations such as those induced by mechanical vibrations or power supply noise. Such carrier frequency fluctuations must be compensated since they lead to higher phase error variance in traditional feedforward CPR techniques, significantly degrading the receiver performance. In order to enable a parallel-processing implementation in multigigabit per second receivers, a new approximation to the DPLL computation is introduced. The proposed technique reduces the latency within the feedback loop of the DPLL introduced by parallel processing, while at the same time it provides a bandwidth and capture range close to those achieved by a serial DPLL. Simulation results demonstrate that the effects caused by frequency deviations can be eliminated with the proposed low latency parallel carrier recovery architecture.Fil: Gianni, Pablo. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas Físicas y Naturales. Departamento de Electrónica. Laboratorio de Comunicaciones Digitales; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Ferster, Laura. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas Físicas y Naturales. Departamento de Electrónica. Laboratorio de Comunicaciones Digitales; ArgentinaFil: Corral Briones, Graciela. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas Físicas y Naturales. Departamento de Electrónica. Laboratorio de Comunicaciones Digitales; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Hueda, Mario Rafael. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas Físicas y Naturales. Departamento de Electrónica. Laboratorio de Comunicaciones Digitales; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

The racial biopolitics of humanitarianism in Africa: examining European resilience-building in the Sahel and lake Chad Basin

This paper examines humanitarianism in the “Global South” through engaging with resilience projects in the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin (LCB) in Africa. It addresses how recent humanitarianism has moved away from top-down interventions which sought to either intervene to save those that have been rendered as “bare life” (Agamben, 1998: 4) by their own governments or improve the state’s —especially “fragile” and “failing” ones— capacity to govern, towards society-based projects which seek to produce resilient subjects. While previous accounts of security and development emphasized why fragile states and authoritarian regimes could constitute a threat to their people and the international system, society, or community, where justifications for interventions were based on their flouting of specific international norms and conventions. In contrast, recent humanitarianism has become less targeted at regime change as was evident with the reluctance that followed the unproductive cases in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya where assumptions that regime change, or democracy promotion could achieve or promote the ends of liberal governance. Moving away from these statist focus, post-intervention has moved towards strengthening the capacities of communities to withstand shocks, adapt and self-transform their own the broader social milieu. My contention is that the move towards resilience is not only an acknowledgement of the cognitive imperfections of the liberal subject but more importantly (Chandler, 2013b), it raises questions about historical claims concerning “liberal” and “illiberal” subjecthood. These imperfections have historically been reserved for non-whites and non-Europeans since the Enlightenment, i.e., issues related to (ir-)rationality and (un-)reason; the homo economicus is a myth after all (Thaler and Sunstein, 2009; Chandler, 2013a). By moving away from humanitarian activities that require intervention to post-intervention, which involves claims about the subject’s internal capacity to “self-govern” (Chandler, 2012; Chandler, 2013a), migration, development and security have become closely intertwined with some suggesting a migration-development-security nexus where humanitarian aid serves the purpose of accomplishing global governance of complexity (Stern and Öjendal, 2010; Truong and Gasper, 2011; Deridder et al., 2020). While useful, this paper problematizes this understanding of resilience which concerns itself with the biopolitics of enhancing life’s capacity to self-govern by unpacking the various ways in which “resilience processes are marked by inequities and by the consequences of a history of the coloniality of power, oppression, and privilege” (Atallah et al., 2021: 9), especially in the Global South. In particular, the move towards resilience has entailed further incursions into people’s lives such that various rationalities and techniques of governmentality target the population which may raise further questions when these populations are those of other countries or within regions that have a history of colonisation and subjugation. By reconceptualising biopolitics as racial biopolitics and by decentring the state and instead looking at assemblages, i.e., a multiplicity of actors and rationalities and technologies, and practices which function as totalities and produce passive or active agents with or without capacity for resistance, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of agencement which is translated to English as “Assemblages”, is useful to capture the rationalities and techniques of resilience projects in the Sahel and LCB. I reconceptualise this powerful concept as “racialised assemblages,” made up of a set of “racial components” that produce “racialised ensembles,” i.e., a multiplicity of actors, rationalities, and technologies which attempt to interpellate subjects within these spheres of influence. This paper shows how resilience-building projects by Western state and non-state actors such as the United Kingdom, France and the EU and other humanitarian actors such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM) within the Sahel and the LCB are both exclusionary and raced and how these attempts seek to exploit the historical infantilization of the non-white subject or subjectivity within these regions. Engaging with humanitarian activities in the Sahel and LCB, the paper argues that through racialised and exclusionary racial biopolitics which function through racialised assemblages, European humanitarian aid and assistance through upstreaming border control management such as biometrics, exploit and sustain colonialities that seek achieve European outcomes abroad. While projects such as migration and border control in the Niger-Nigeria border through biometric management and development projects that seek to address the “root causes” of insecurity, underdevelopment and forced displacement are promoted as humanitarian issues and are facilitated through development aid, such racialised discourses and practices are a continuation of racist historical depictions associated with whiteness and non-whiteness which made assumptions about humans, the environment, and the relationship between the two. For those who emerged in European discourse as lacking the capacity to transform their environment, access to full personhood was either denied or delayed which could be found in recent attempts to interpellate persons and communities in the Sahel and LCB as “vulnerable” and “poor”, and states as “fragile” or “failing” to highlight their deficient resilience and how this could impact on other developed populations or countries who have achieved better resilience. For example, attempts to regularize various forms of desirable movements and criminalise others within the Sahel and LCB could be viewed as attempts to control those viewed as potentially risky to European security interests. For example, border policing and management posts in Konni-Illela and Eroufa in the Tahoua Region of Niger which both seek to manage and control movement across the Niger-Nigeria border are promoted as enhancing Niger’s own border management policy while it was set up through collaborative humanitarian efforts of various actors and was funded by the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) of the U.S. Department of State (IOM, 2023). This paper shows how these all constitute racialised biopolitical assemblages which attempt to govern complexity within the African context which is a continuation of various historical colonialities where their inherent infantilizing tendencies assume the incapacity of full self-governance, and self-transformation; they perpetuate colonialities which within the Sahel, may stifle other possibilities of non-Western resilience such as those associated with human relationality where the definitions of the human and the environment may be different and their relationship may be more complex. It becomes necessary to problematize the various resilience projects, including those that have explicit humanitarian dimensions such as “assistance” and “aid” by asking critical questions about what they do which could expose the ways in which those that experience them may resist these attempts. Further research should investigate the l ways in which individuals and communities in the Sahel interact with these resilience projects and how various so-called African partners —state and non-state— who play integral roles in facilitating and implementing them become positioned and how they position themselves. Such research could adopt focus groups, in-depth interviews, or ethnographic methods to capture ways in which resilience projects are engaged with, modified, or even resisted by those who emerge as targets of European post-interventionist racial biopolitics

Exploring the Abilities of 3-D Printing and its Viability

The fashion industry encounters its most general difficulties regarding cost of samples, lead time, sustainability, and fit. An emerging technology that could solve these issues is 3-D printing, which utilizes computer-aided technology and a variety of filaments to construct an object. Though 3-D printing technology offers the ability for rapid prototyping, a condensed supply chain by way of creating samples domestically rather than internationally, and a sustainable additive manufacturing process that results in manufacturing with zero excess material, there is question as to whether consumers are ready for 3-D printed clothing to enter their wardrobes. The purpose of this study was to construct a 3-D-printed garment and measure consumer response to the application of this technology to ready-to-wear clothing. Wearability was achieved with the 3-D-printed garment, meaning it mirrors a traditional ready-to-wear garment. The survey instrument measured three factors: perception of 3-D printing, fashion interest, and opinions of the 3-D-printed project garment. Data were analyzed using a t-test for male versus female responses and descriptive statistical methods were utilized to report means and compare responses on the three factors from each age group and ethnicity. Overall the responses for all three factors were positive. The results of this research indicate that a major transformation in ready-to-wear style is feasible and beneficial to the apparel industry because of 3-D printing

Construyendo Empresa

La empresa LA MEJOR S.A es una multinacional mexicana que lleva 85 años en el mercado de comercialización y desarrollo de productos de consumo masivo para el hogar, su categoría foco es la categoría de papel higiénico. Incursionaron al mercado colombiano en el año de 2008 importando los mismos productos que comercializaban en México, con los diseños, colores y texturas que eran acordes al consumidor mexicano. Al iniciar operaciones en el mercado colombiano se propusieron ganar el 20% de participación de mercado pero solo lograron llegar con mucho esfuerzo al 15%. Los resultados financieros iniciales de la compañía no fueron los esperados, lo que ocasiono una gran incertidumbre entre los empleados y directivos sobre su continuidad, se necesitó replantear la estrategia y validar la razón por la cual no se logra la venta esperada de sus productos Hicieron un análisis del mercado y encontraron que los productos mexicanos no eran los adecuados para el mercado Colombiano y que estos no se asemejaban a los productos líderes del mercado, al igual que no contaban con una propuesta de incentivos ganadora que motivara a su fuerza de venta a lograr unos mejores resultados. Para ello necesitaron replantear los productos desde lo más básico, realizando conteos y empaques acordes a los ya utilizados por el consumidor colombiano con un plus adicional sobre los productos líderes (Mayor contenido, mas suavidad y al mismo precio). Adicionalmente, se reformulo el plan de incentivos de su fuerza de venta motivando a mayor escala un ingreso económico a medida que los resultados corporativos fueran los presupuestados. Ya para el 2012 los resultados de ventas fueron excepcionales contando con productos adecuados y una fuerza de venta comprometida y ganadora posicionando a LA MEJOR S.A como una de las empresas líderes del mercado Colombian

Subinspectores de Empleo y Seguridad Social

This case on the work of the Inspection has been raised as a third exercise in the announcement of the competition for entry into the Corps of Labour Sub-inspectors, Scale of Employment and Social Security, corresponding to 2018 –Resolution of 11 October 2018 (BOE of 22 October)–. An analysis of the questions derived from the approach is made, incorporating the legal basis of the response.El presente caso práctico reproduce el enunciado del supuesto referido a la actividad de la Inspección planteado como tercer ejercicio en la convocatoria de la oposición para el ingreso en el Cuerpo de Subinspectores Laborales, Escala de Empleo y Seguridad Social, correspondiente a 2018 –Resolución de 11 de octubre de 2018 (BOE de 22 de octubre)–. En él se efectúa un análisis de las cuestiones derivadas del planteamiento, incorporando la fundamentación jurídica de la respuesta

Women as editors-in-chief of environmental science journals

This research note describes an analysis regarding the role of women as editors-in chief of environmental science journals. The list of journals analyzed was obtained from the database of “Web of Science”, published in 2015. This database does not include information on the name or gender of the editors-in-chief of journals, so a web search was performed. The results show that gender inequality is present in this important field of science. Causes of this bias merit more and profound research. The bias observed may not apply to journals of others areas of science

PSYCHOLOGICAL MEANINGS OF “POSITIVE SPIRITUAL ENVIRONMENT” AND “PLACES TO COMMUNICATE WITH GOD”

The spaces that surround and sustain daily life significantly influence people’s way of thinking, feeling and behaving. They also reflect personal and meaningful aspects of their lives. This study was aimed at investigating conceptions regarding spiritual environments and characteristics of places wherein individuals communicate with God or a “higher power”, seeking to find empirical support to the idea of positive spiritual environments (spiritual contexts that, simultaneously, promote human wellbeing and environmental conservation). Ninety-one undergraduate students participated in the study. The network of spiritual environment generated a network size of 137 words with a core of 28 words. The highest semantic weights were produced by peace, God, tranquility, love, faith, church, pray, harmony, beliefs, wellbeing, happiness, and relaxation. Characteristics of the place wherein people communicate with God produced a network size of 104 words and a core of 27 words. The most important of those words were: church, home, calm, room, quiet, school, sacred, natural, alone, street, prayer, and clean. Few words communicating concern for environmentally conservation behaviors were found within the network