Green management: the reality of being green in business

Green management and going green are not as clear cut and easy as hyped by the general media. While going ecologically green is indeed beneficial and appropriate the process and procedure of becoming green is anything but easy. Firstly turning green is largely not a legal requirement but a voluntary process. Thus even though LEED (which is by far the more publicly known green certification standard) governs the certification of the green management effort it is not a compulsory condition for practitioners to go green. Secondly even with the encouragement of incentives to comply practitioners are skeptical in becoming green due to: (a) a lack of true understanding of the benefit of ecologically friendly procedures (the practice of profits versus the theory of benefits); (b) lack of short term gain in life cycle costing (practitioners want instant incentives); and (c) mostly because it is not a legal requirement for the vast majority of municipalities.La gestión ambiental sostenible y el tornarse ecológico no es tan claro ni factible como lo pregona la prensa. Mientras que volverse ecológicamente “verde” es sin duda beneficioso y apropiado el proceso y el procedimiento de hacerlo es todo menos fácil. En primer lugar transformarse ecológicamente eficiente no es un requerimiento legal sino un proceso voluntario. Entonces mientras la certificación LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design que es con mucho la certificación ecológica estándar más conocida) lidera los esfuerzos para la certificación de gestión ecológica ésta no es una condición obligatoria para los involucrados. En segundo lugar aún con el estímulo de incentivos para cumplir con los requerimientos los gestores dudan en integrarse ecológicamente debido a lo siguiente: (a) falta entender correctamente los beneficios de los procedimientos ecológicos (la práctica de las ganancias versus la teoría de los beneficios); (b) ausencia de beneficios a corto plazo dentro del costo del ciclo de vida (los actores desean incentivos inmediatos); y (c) mayormente no es un requisito legal en la gran mayoría de las municipalidades

Multi-Wavelength Properties of Barred Galaxies in the Local Universe. I: Virgo Cluster

We study in detail how the barred galaxy fraction varies as a function of luminosity, HI gas mass, morphology and color in the Virgo cluster in order to provide a well defined, statistically robust measurement of the bar fraction in the local universe spanning a wide range in luminosity (factor of ~100) and HI gas mass. We combine multiple public data-sets (UKIDSS near-infrared imaging, ALFALFA HI gas masses, GOLDMine photometry). After excluding highly inclined systems, we define three samples where galaxies are selected by their B-band luminosity, H-band luminosity, and HI gas mass. We visually assign bars using the high resolution H-band imaging from UKIDSS. When all morphologies are included, the barred fraction is ~17-24% while for morphologically selected discs, we find that the barred fraction in Virgo is ~29-34%: it does not depend strongly on how the sample is defined and does not show variations with luminosity or HI gas mass. The barred fraction depends most strongly on the morphological composition of the sample: when the disc populations are separated into lenticulars (S0--S0/a), early-type spirals (Sa--Sb), and late-type spirals (Sbc--Sm), we find that the early-type spirals have a higher barred fraction (~45-50%) compared to the lenticulars and late-type spirals (~22-36%). This difference may be due to the higher baryon fraction of early-type discs which makes them more susceptible to bar instabilities. We do not find any evidence of barred galaxies being preferentially blue.Comment: 13 pages, 14 figures. Submitted to Ap

Polar Dynamics

CONCEPT STATEMENT Artificial Intelligence is becoming increasingly applicable in many ways in our society, and some companies in Japan are attempting to enter the eldercare business using this technology. Several companies have developed robots to be used in nursing homes, such as Robear and Paro, but no company has yet to produce a cohesive system combining all aspects of the care needed. Polar Dynamics is endeavoring to change this by bringing a developed, all-encompassing system to the United States