A framework for closed-loop supply chains of reusable articles

Reuse practices contribute to the environmental and economical sustainability of production and distribution systems. Surprisingly, reuse closed-loop supply chains (CLSC) have not been widely researched for the moment. In this paper, we explore the scientific literature on reuse and we propose a framework for reusable articles. This conceptual structure includes a typology integrating under the reusable articles term different categories of articles (transportation items, packaging materials, tools) and addresses the management issues that arise in reuse CLSC. We ground our results in a set of case studies developed in real industrial settings, which have also been contrasted with cases available in existing literature.reverse logistics;case studies;closed-loop supply chains;returns managment

PERCEIVED EXTRINSIC FACTORS AFFECTING MUSIC PERFORMANCE ANXIETY IN UNDERGRADUATE MUSICIANS

The researcher explored existing literature on music performance anxiety (MPA) that addressed the physiological effects of MPA, its causes, and various methods of mitigating its effects. The influence of self-efficacy and cognitive factors, such as the concepts of focus-of-attention and flow, were researched as they relate to MPA. The music culture and pedagogical approach utilized in institutions providing music education may affect the levels of MPA experienced by music students. Thus, the role of the music educator in reducing MPA in students was also explored. Furthermore, there may be a need for pedagogy within music education curricula that addresses MPA during applied lessons and ensemble rehearsals. The researcher conducted a survey of undergraduate music students in a private liberal arts university in the southeastern United States. Participants completed a questionnaire regarding their musical background and levels of comfort in a variety of performing conditions. On average, the musicians were most comfortable performing in ensembles rather than as soloists, and most uncomfortable when performing in front of an audience or adjudicators

Impacts of Nitrogen Enrichment on Corals – A Remote Sensing Approach

Anthropogenic activities have resulted in ever-increasing threats to coral reefs globally, wherein the rate of environmental changes have exceeded the historical capacity of corals to adapt. This has threatened the persistence of coral ecosystems and their associated ecosystem services, which billions of people rely on for their livelihoods. The most prevalent stressor is nitrogen enrichment, which while present naturally, is exacerbated by the anthropogenic input of nutrients via the discharge of agricultural and urban waste waters. The focus is to answer the central research question of how nitrogen enrichment impacts corals, and how it interacts with other stressors with particular focus on the Caribbean Sea. Nitrogen enrichment directly impacts corals by promoting algae dominance of coral ecosystems, disrupting coral symbiotic relationships, increasing disease prevalence, and indirectly by creating hypoxic conditions and affecting coral calcification rates. The case study of the PNN Los Corales del Rosario y San Bernardo served to demonstrate the use of remote sensing for monitoring chlorophyl-a concentrations and sea surface temperatures, where these two water quality parameters were negatively correlated from 2003 to 2021. Promoting the use of these tools is of crucial importance in the Caribbean region, where many local communities lack accessible resources available for environmental management. It is evident that, in addition to reducing nitrogen enrichment events, managers need to implement coordinated management to reduce multiple environmental stressors that affects corals. Finally, it is necessary to provide education that allows local communities to not only identify the challenges that corals face but also the solutions moving forward

View of the Void

Memories form, memories fade, and memories are lost. Small cavities of emptiness replace memories that have drifted away, where they then spread like thin cracks on the surface and diverge to form a void. Within the hollows of these voids, perplexities in mental and physical conditions emerge. Such perplexities of the void have captured my attention. With this body of Sculpture, defining and embodying the mental void within a physical presence is my ultimate goal. Methods have been instituted to aid in the creation and definition of the nonentity. Skins are developed to encase a void, enabling one to see the unseen. Fluid and static movements through the pliable, porous, and solid materials construct and deconstruct the voids. Scales in the work shift as the severity of the voids increase and decrease. With repetition, I find myself searching for the missing piece as I continuously circle the void. Such voids become an obvious recurrence throughout my sculptures, and the negated space is as significant as the physical elements themselves. The need to see the void realized spawns an intense fixation, forming to the point of insomnia. My own parasitical natures take a turn in this persistent and repetitive action, repeatedly composing and patterning materials, creating circular forms, seemingly protecting the void. These tendencies are instrumental in perpetrating the creation of objects that hold empty space. Fabricated steel joints and brackets embrace sections oflaminated wood, while excessively repeated actions of cut fabrics, alongside masses of found objects, form alternate versions of the same void. This quiet visual movement is a dialog of materials absorbing each other\u27s shape; and the process is a self-indulging, parasitic or selfperpetuating need for repetition. These voids are symbolic icons of stillness in movement that never moves. Gradual shifts in the joints push and pull each other in silence. Vast amounts of the same material, stacked and strung together, create a fixed and synchronized movement around the void. Silently the void is formed, rearranging space, moving the physical aside, and attempting to retrieve the lost. A voided space has found sanctuary within the sculpture, yet it also finds its prison. The guardian is exaggerated as ribs form around the unseen. Blemished and delicate, the surface is vainly hiding nothing as it acts as the suffocating shelter of the voided space. Silence, which surrounds the empty spaces in this visual movement, is screaming yet it emits no sound. The reverberation of this absence is more effectively felt than the space consumed by the physical elements of the sculptures themselves. It is impossible to avoid the chaos in the empty space that is seemingly calm, neither used nor dismissed. Sheltered by its skin, the protector of what is not there, emptiness is secured. Increasingly unsteady, these sculptures sit perched on edge, intensifying the risk of failure. Still they stand full of potential energy, on the verge of either mutating or stagnating. Their futures are uncertain: Out of this emerges a metaphor for dependence and independence, trust and distrust. Discord and accord coexist within the work, where its physical balance becomes the duality between the void and the physical substance of the sculpture. Parallel to one\u27s reliance on others, addictions, habits, and even religions, connections and disconnections coexist. Vacant elements in the sculpture are independent from the physical, despite the fact that they are, in reality, solely dependant on the physical. Symbiotic relationships have been forged. The sculpture does not exist without the empty space, just as the void does not exist without the sculpture. Stability between the two is a delicate but strong balance. Beneath the surface is an endless exploration into the numbness of being lost and standing still. Strange comfort is found in this empty space, and thoughts of nothing coil together, circling each other to create an even larger void. Sleep escapes and the stare of the void, though empty, is always watching and always there. Within these hollows I have searched for silence, but have found nothing but an intensified sleepless seeing - my view of the void. Seeing nothing and watching everything, the insomniac continues to gaze, listening to the sound that is never truly there. Dreams and death become dimensions of the same thing as the voids are now looking outwards. Persistence in circular forms holding the emptiness of a voided space memorize each and every minute of their own conception. The absent has won and the voids never wane. A memory is lost. All that remains is its residue and the endless hold of its space. This becomes the non-entity, the void, a broken space, a gaping hole of what once was

View of the Void

Memories form, memories fade, and memories are lost. Small cavities of emptiness replace memories that have drifted away, where they then spread like thin cracks on the surface and diverge to form a void. Within the hollows of these voids, perplexities in mental and physical conditions emerge. Such perplexities of the void have captured my attention. With this body of Sculpture, defining and embodying the mental void within a physical presence is my ultimate goal. Methods have been instituted to aid in the creation and definition of the nonentity. Skins are developed to encase a void, enabling one to see the unseen. Fluid and static movements through the pliable, porous, and solid materials construct and deconstruct the voids. Scales in the work shift as the severity of the voids increase and decrease. With repetition, I find myself searching for the missing piece as I continuously circle the void. Such voids become an obvious recurrence throughout my sculptures, and the negated space is as significant as the physical elements themselves. The need to see the void realized spawns an intense fixation, forming to the point of insomnia. My own parasitical natures take a turn in this persistent and repetitive action, repeatedly composing and patterning materials, creating circular forms, seemingly protecting the void. These tendencies are instrumental in perpetrating the creation of objects that hold empty space. Fabricated steel joints and brackets embrace sections oflaminated wood, while excessively repeated actions of cut fabrics, alongside masses of found objects, form alternate versions of the same void. This quiet visual movement is a dialog of materials absorbing each other\u27s shape; and the process is a self-indulging, parasitic or selfperpetuating need for repetition. These voids are symbolic icons of stillness in movement that never moves. Gradual shifts in the joints push and pull each other in silence. Vast amounts of the same material, stacked and strung together, create a fixed and synchronized movement around the void. Silently the void is formed, rearranging space, moving the physical aside, and attempting to retrieve the lost. A voided space has found sanctuary within the sculpture, yet it also finds its prison. The guardian is exaggerated as ribs form around the unseen. Blemished and delicate, the surface is vainly hiding nothing as it acts as the suffocating shelter of the voided space. Silence, which surrounds the empty spaces in this visual movement, is screaming yet it emits no sound. The reverberation of this absence is more effectively felt than the space consumed by the physical elements of the sculptures themselves. It is impossible to avoid the chaos in the empty space that is seemingly calm, neither used nor dismissed. Sheltered by its skin, the protector of what is not there, emptiness is secured. Increasingly unsteady, these sculptures sit perched on edge, intensifying the risk of failure. Still they stand full of potential energy, on the verge of either mutating or stagnating. Their futures are uncertain: Out of this emerges a metaphor for dependence and independence, trust and distrust. Discord and accord coexist within the work, where its physical balance becomes the duality between the void and the physical substance of the sculpture. Parallel to one\u27s reliance on others, addictions, habits, and even religions, connections and disconnections coexist. Vacant elements in the sculpture are independent from the physical, despite the fact that they are, in reality, solely dependant on the physical. Symbiotic relationships have been forged. The sculpture does not exist without the empty space, just as the void does not exist without the sculpture. Stability between the two is a delicate but strong balance. Beneath the surface is an endless exploration into the numbness of being lost and standing still. Strange comfort is found in this empty space, and thoughts of nothing coil together, circling each other to create an even larger void. Sleep escapes and the stare of the void, though empty, is always watching and always there. Within these hollows I have searched for silence, but have found nothing but an intensified sleepless seeing - my view of the void. Seeing nothing and watching everything, the insomniac continues to gaze, listening to the sound that is never truly there. Dreams and death become dimensions of the same thing as the voids are now looking outwards. Persistence in circular forms holding the emptiness of a voided space memorize each and every minute of their own conception. The absent has won and the voids never wane. A memory is lost. All that remains is its residue and the endless hold of its space. This becomes the non-entity, the void, a broken space, a gaping hole of what once was

Frequency doubling of femtosecond pulses in walk-off compensated npp

Summary form only given. N-(4-nitrophenyl)-L-prolinol (NPP) is an organic molecular crystal developped by molecular engineering, that exhibits one of the highest phase-matchable second-order susceptibilities reported so far in the near-infrared spectral range (d/sub eff//spl ap/56 pm/V). However, the large spatial and temporal walk-off existing in NPP can limit severely the usefulness of the material away from the noncritical phase-matching (ncpm) wavelength and for shorter pulses. Here we show that subpicosecond pulses can be efficiently frequency-doubled and mixed in NPP with moderate pump intensities, by employing tilted pulse techniques. These techniques make use of the large Poynting vector walk-off exhibited by NPP crystals outside the ncpm. Such techniques are based on the diffraction of the input pump wave by a grating so that each spectral component is dispersed in a different direction, thus the resulting signal is a tilted pulse.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Nueva ruralidad comunitaria y sustentabilidad : contribuciones al campo emergente de la economía-ecológica

La perspectiva ética (ecojusticia, justicia distributiva) es una vertiente en exploración en el proceso de la emergencia de la economía ecológica como campo diferenciado de la racionalidad económica ortodoxa; sobre todo para la significación de la sustentabilidad en el contexto socioambiental latinoamericano. La interacción desarrollada con diferentes grupos de trabajo en comunidades rurales de los estados mexicanos de Oaxaca y Michoacán (inmersos en procesos de una nueva ruralidad comunitaria), ofrecen referentes empíricos y analíticos en esta tarea. Estas praxis campesinas despliegan heterogéneos procesos de apropiación social de la naturaleza caracterizada por procurar una mayor articulación entre la responsabilidad social y la ambiental. De ahí la posibilidad de favorecer un diálogo de saberes como propuesta metodológica en la formulación de estrategias alternativas para la gestión sustentable de recursos. Este conjunto de estrategias se expresan a través de un modelo analítico.Ecological economics criticizes mainstream economic approaches to rationality and supports alternative models based on environmental and distributive justice concerns. As these models can be particularly relevant for analyzing environmental issues in Latin America, this study employs them to consider the interaction of several rural communities, immersed in processes of constructing new concepts and practices of communitarian rurality in the Mexican states of Oaxaca and Michoacán. We argue that the study of these processes offers valuable empirical and analytical insights, which suggest that these initiatives aim at the social appropriation of nature by incorporating the need for a greater coordination between social and environmental responsibility. Furthermore, the study of these processes can offer useful lessons for developing a methodology that can help foster a dialogue among different knowledge systems as part of the search for defining alternative strategies for sustainable resource management. Finally, we formalize this set of strategies into an analytical model