For many years, procurement, materials management and logistics were regarded as the responsibility of either operations or marketing departments. The late 1980s saw the shift in focus to supply management, and later to supply chain management. Since the early 1990s, the field has become increasingly important to firms as the marketplace has become more and more competitive. Strategic logistics management takes a systematic approach to managing the entire flow of materials, information, services and finance from raw materials suppliers through factories and warehousing, to the end user. Strategic logistics management covers the operational and strategic aspects of all the components of logistics from a supply chain management perspective. It focuses on the integration of all business processes that add value to the customer. The book has been divided into five sections for easy access, with the final one focusing on case studies. Terminology is clearly explained and the main points are illustrated with many practical examples. A new chapter on humanitarian logistics has been provided. Strategic logistics management is aimed at undergraduate studies as well as graduate programmes. It is the only case study-based South African textbook in this field.

The advent of globalisation has increased complexity for organisations, extending supply chains across large geographical areas, making them longer and more difficult to manage than ever before. Megatrends such as global economic shifts, increased consumer awareness, the rise in information technology, global pandemic outbreaks and climate change highlight a range of new challenges facing business. Strategic logistics management takes a systematic approach to managing the entire flow of materials, information, services and finance from raw material suppliers through manufacturing and warehousing, to the end user. Strategic logistics management covers the operational and strategic aspects of all the components of business logistics from a supply chain management perspective. It focuses on the integration of all business processes that add value to the customer. Terminology is clearly explained, and the main points are illustrated with practical examples. Strategic logistics management is aimed at undergraduate students and graduate programmes in the field of supply chain management.

Good operations and supply chain management practices are fundamental for the survival of both private and public organisations offering goods or rendering services. Because these practices are subject to evolving market and macro issues, which are themselves intrinsic to micro practices and processes, it is of great importance to study, understand and address current concerns. Contemporary issues in operations and supply chain management reveals a wide range of present-day matters that focus on the deep multiplicity of relationships between operations, supply chains and the changing business environment. Contemporary issues in operations and supply chain management offers tools and techniques to cope with the ever-increasing forces of supply versus demand, against the backdrop of limited resources and a constantly changing business environment. It offers a well-balanced approach between theory and practice by including contemporary issues and cases within the industry, Africa and the rest of the world. Contemporary issues in operations and supply chain management aims to have international reach and relevance for a broad audience, including but not necessarily limited to business practitioners of all kinds in any sector middle and senior managers in industry (both buyer and supplier organisations) academia - undergraduates and post graduates form higher education establishments, universities and colleges professional bodies (as recommended text/learning materials) members of industry trade associations and anyone else seeking insights into contemporary issues in operations and supply chain management. Professionals with years of experience in the field will benefit from this book as methods and strategies inherited from the past appear to no longer fit the realities presented by the ever changing modern business environment.

For many processes and applications in science and technology a basic knowledge of liquids and solutions is a must. Gaining a better understanding of the behavior and properties of pure liquids and solutions will help to improve many processes and to advance research in many different areas. This book provides a comprehensive, self-contained and integrated survey of this topic and is a must-have for many chemists, chemical engineers and material scientists, ranging from newcomers in the field to more experienced researchers. The author
offers a clear, well-structured didactic approach and provides an overview of the most important types of liquids and solutions. Special topics include chemical reactions, surfaces and phase transitions. Suitable both for introductory as well as intermediate level as more advanced parts are clearly marked. Includes also problems and solutions.

Present-day migration takes place in a world characterized by the compression of time and space, with cheaper air travel and the existence of new communication technologies - the internet in particular - making it easier to stay in contact with the places, people and cultures that one has left. This book investigates the online organization of, and exchanges within, the global Indian diaspora. Bringing together research from around the world and presenting studies drawn from the US, Europe and India, it engages with theoretical and methodological debates concerning the shaping and transformation of migrant culture in emerging sites of sociality, and explores issues such as religion, citizenship, nationalism, region and caste as they relate to Indian identity in global, transnational contexts. With detailed empirical case studies showing both how members of the Indian diaspora connect with one other and 'life at home' and how institutions in India maintain such links, Indian Transnationalism Online sheds light on the ways in which information and communication technology functions as both a catalyst and indicator of contemporary socio-cultural change. As such it will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists and studies of cultural studies working in the areas of migration, transnationalism and ethnic studies.

Present-day migration takes place in a world characterized by the compression of time and space, with cheaper air travel and the existence of new communication technologies - the internet in particular - making it easier to stay in contact with the places, people and cultures that one has left. This book investigates the online organization of, and exchanges within, the global Indian diaspora. Bringing together research from around the world and presenting studies drawn from the US, Europe and India, it engages with theoretical and methodological debates concerning the shaping and transformation of migrant culture in emerging sites of sociality, and explores issues such as religion, citizenship, nationalism, region and caste as they relate to Indian identity in global, transnational contexts. With detailed empirical case studies showing both how members of the Indian diaspora connect with one other and 'life at home' and how institutions in India maintain such links, Indian Transnationalism Online sheds light on the ways in which information and communication technology functions as both a catalyst and indicator of contemporary socio-cultural change. As such it will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists and studies of cultural studies working in the areas of migration, transnationalism and ethnic studies.

Across the United States, Black people have shorter life expectancies than white people-reflecting structural racism and deep-rooted drivers of population health. But are some cities more equal than others? The elimination of racial and ethnic inequities-differences that are avoidable, unnecessary, and unfair-has been one of the overarching health-related goals of the United States for decades. Yet dramatic differences in health outcomes between Black people and white people persist, rooted in structural and social determinants of health. Nationally, a Black baby can expect to live four years less than a white baby. But mortality outcomes and inequities vary widely across cities. In Washington, DC, for example, the average life expectancy for Blacks is twelve years less than that of whites. But in other cities, mortality differences between races are less striking or nonexistent. If health equity can be achieved in some cities, why not all? This is arguably the most important health equity issue of our time. In Unequal Cities, Maureen R. Benjamins and Fernando G. De Maio gather a team of experts to explore these racial inequities, as well as the ten-year gap in life expectancy between our healthiest and unhealthiest big cities. Rigorous analyses give readers access to previously unavailable data on life expectancy, mortality from leading causes of death, and related Black-white inequities for the country's 30 biggest cities. The theoretically grounded essays also explore how characteristics of cities, including their levels of income inequality and racial segregation, impact overall health and Black-white inequities. The first book to specifically examine racial health inequities within and across US cities, Unequal Cities offers a social justice framework for addressing the newly identified inequities, as well as specific case studies to help public health advocates, civic leaders, and other stakeholders envision the steps needed to improve their cities' current health outcomes and achieve racial equity. A powerful call to action for health equity advocates and city leaders alike, this book is essential reading. Contributors: David Ansell, Darlene Oliver Hightower, Jana Hirschtick, Sharon Homan, Ayesha Jaco, Emily LaFlamme, Brittney S. Lange-Maia, Kristin Monnard, Nikhil G. Prachand, Pamela T. Roesch, Michael Rozier, Nazia Saiyed, Eve Shapiro, Abigail Silva, Veenu Verma, the West Side United Metrics Working Group, Ruqaiijah Yearby

Bruno Latour is among the most important figures in contemporary philosophy and social science. His ethnographic studies have revolutionized our understanding of areas as diverse as science, law, politics and religion. To facilitate a more realistic understanding of the world, Latour has introduced a radically fresh philosophical terminology and a new approach to social science, Actor-Network Theory . In seminal works such as Laboratory Life, We Have Never Been Modern and An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Latour has outlined an alternative to the foundational categories of modern western thought D particularly its distinction between society and nature D that has major consequences for our understanding of the ecological crisis and of the role of science in democratic societies. Latour s empirical philosophy has evolved considerably over the past four decades. In this lucid and compelling book, Gerard de Vries provides one of the first overviews of Latour s work. He guides readers through Latour s main publications, from his early ethnographies to his more recent philosophical works, showing with considerable skill how Latour s ideas have developed. This book will be of great value to students and scholars attempting to come to terms with the immense challenge posed by Latour s thought. It will be of interest to those studying philosophy, anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, and almost all other branches of the social sciences and humanities.

This book reflects the development of Latin American labour history across broad geographical, chronological and thematic perspectives, which seek to review and revisit key concepts at different levels. The contributions are closely linked to the most recent trends in Global Labour History and in turn, they enrich those trends. Here, authors from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Spain take a historical and sociological perspective and analyse a series of problems relating to labour relations. The chapters weave together different periods of Latin American colonial and republican history from the vice-royalties of New Spain (now Mexico) and Peru, the Royal Audiencia de Charcas (now Bolivia), Argentina and Uruguay (former vice-royalty of Rio de La Plata) and Chile (former Capitania General).

This book provides a thorough analysis of internal rating systems. Two case studies are devoted to building and validating statistical-based models for borrowers' ratings, using SPSS-PASW and SAS statistical packages. Mainstream approaches to building and validating models for assigning counterpart ratings to small and medium enterprises are discussed, together with their implications on lending strategy.

Key Features:

- Presents an accessible framework for bank managers, students and quantitative analysts, combining strategic issues, management needs, regulatory requirements and statistical bases.

- Discusses available methodologies to build, validate and use internal rate models.

- Demonstrates how to use statistical packages for building statistical-based credit rating systems.

- Evaluates sources of model risks and strategic risks when using statistical-based rating systems in lending.

This book will prove to be of great value to bank managers, credit and loan officers, quantitative analysts and advanced students on credit risk management courses.

On-surface synthesis is appearing as an extremely promising strategy to create organic nanoarchitectures with atomic precision. Molecular building blocks holding adequate functional groups are dosed onto surfaces that support or even drive their covalent linkage. The surface confinement and the frequent lack of solvents (most commonly being performed under vacuum conditions) create a completely new scenario fully complementary to conventional chemistry. In a pedagogical way and based on the most recent developments, this volume presents our current understanding in the field, addressing fundamental reaction mechanisms, synthetic strategies to influence the reactions according to our needs, as well as the ultimate growth and characterization of functional materials. Verging on chemistry, physics and materials science, the book is aimed at students and researchers interested in nanochemistry, surface science, supramolecular materials and molecular devices. Chapters "Mechanistic insights into surface-supported chemical reactions", "Reactivity on and of Graphene Layers: Scanning Probe Microscopy Reviels" and "Bottom-up fabrication of atomically precise graphene nanoribbons" of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

Commercial advanced planning and scheduling (APS) systems have been around for about 25 years and have seen widespread adoption in a variety of companies. The promises made by APS system implementations are high, and at the same time, APS projects are complex, costly, and carry a significant risk of failure. There is a great need for guidance on how to successfully implement APS systems, which is why this book was written. In this book, we aim to discuss all facets of APS implementation, from theoretical background to definition, vendor selection, system design and the implementation process. In addition, this book helps readers understand how the underlying concepts were formed, why a concept will work in practice, and when it will not. The contents of this book are based on many years of academic research and APS implementation experience. It draws together theory and practice in production control and explains how theories can be applied to support planning and scheduling processes in practice. This book will help anyone involved in APS implementations to achieve success: human planners generate better plans than before, using the APS.

This volume suggests a new way of doing global history. Instead of offering a sweeping and generalizing overview of the past, we propose a 'micro-spatial' approach, combining micro-history with the concept of space. A focus on primary sources and awareness of the historical discontinuities and unevennesses characterizes the global history that emerges here. We use labour as our lens in this volume. The resulting micro-spatial history of labour addresses the management and recruitment of labour, its voluntary and coerced spatial mobility, its political perception and representation and the workers' own agency and social networks. The individual chapters are written by contributors whose expertise covers the late medieval Eastern Mediterranean to present-day Sierra Leone, through early modern China and Italy, eighteenth-century Cuba and the Malvinas/Falklands, the journeys of a missionary between India and Brazil and those of Christian captives across the Ottoman empire and Spain. The result is a highly readable volume that addresses key theoretical and methodological questions in historiography. Chapter 7 is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

This book provides an overview of the current state-of-the-art of nonlinear time series analysis, richly illustrated with examples, pseudocode algorithms and real-world applications. Avoiding a "theorem-proof" format, it shows concrete applications on a variety of empirical time series. The book can be used in graduate courses in nonlinear time series and at the same time also includes interesting material for more advanced readers. Though it is largely self-contained, readers require an understanding of basic linear time series concepts, Markov chains and Monte Carlo simulation methods. The book covers time-domain and frequency-domain methods for the analysis of both univariate and multivariate (vector) time series. It makes a clear distinction between parametric models on the one hand, and semi- and nonparametric models/methods on the other. This offers the reader the option of concentrating exclusively on one of these nonlinear time series analysis methods. To make the book as user friendly as possible, major supporting concepts and specialized tables are appended at the end of every chapter. In addition, each chapter concludes with a set of key terms and concepts, as well as a summary of the main findings. Lastly, the book offers numerous theoretical and empirical exercises, with answers provided by the author in an extensive solutions manual.

Political instability is nearly always accompanied by fuller prisons, and this was particularly true during the "long" Second World War, when military mobilization, social disorder, wrenching political changes, and shifting national boundaries swelled the ranks of the imprisoned and broadened the carceral reach of the state. This volume brings together theoretically sophisticated, empirically rich studies of key transitional moments that transformed the scope and nature of European prisons during and after the war. It depicts the complex interactions of both penal and administrative institutions with the men and women who experienced internment, imprisonment, and detention at a time when these categories were in perpetual flux.

This volume is a collection of articles presented at the Workshop for Nonlinear Analysis held in Joao Pessoa, Brazil, in September 2012. The influence of Bernhard Ruf, to whom this volume is dedicated on the occasion of his 60th birthday, is perceptible throughout the collection by the choice of themes and techniques. The many contributors consider modern topics in the calculus of variations, topological methods and regularity analysis, together with novel applications of partial differential equations. In keeping with the tradition of the workshop, emphasis is given to elliptic operators inserted in different contexts, both theoretical and applied. Topics include semi-linear and fully nonlinear equations and systems with different nonlinearities, at sub- and supercritical exponents, with spectral interactions of Ambrosetti-Prodi type. Also treated are analytic aspects as well as applications such as diffusion problems in mathematical genetics and finance and evolution equations related to electromechanical devices.

Verbs play an important role in how events, states and other "happenings" are mentally represented and how they are expressed in natural language. Besides their central role in linguistics, verbs have long been prominent topics of research in analytic philosophy-mostly on the nature of events and predicate-argument structure-and a topic of empirical investigation in psycholinguistics, mostly on argument structure and its role in sentence comprehension. More recently, the representation of verb meaning has been gaining momentum as a topic of research in other cognitive science branches, notably neuroscience and the psychology of concepts. The present volume is an expression of this recent surge in the investigation of verb structure and meaning from the interdisciplinary perspective of cognitive science, with up-to-date contributions by theoretical linguists, philosophers, psycholinguists and neuroscientists. The volume presents new theoretical and empirical studies on how verb structure and verb meaning are represented, how they are processed during language comprehension, how they are acquired, and how they are neurologically implemented. Cognitive Science Perspectives on Verb Representation and Processing is a reflection of the recent collaboration between the disciplines that constitute cognitive science, bringing new empirical data and theoretical insights on a key element of natural language and conceptualization.

This 1987 volume presents thirty papers on the archaeological uses of flint. They were presented at the Fourth International Flint Symposium in 1983, and together they give an interdisciplinary review. For publication by Cambridge, each paper has been carefully edited. The topics include: flint technology, particularly the experimental reconstruction of the manufacturing process; wear traces on flint implements; the mining and quarrying of flint in prehistory; and models for chert exchanges. The companion volume, The Scientific Study of Flint and Chert, is edited by G. de G. Sieveking and M. B. Hart.

The thirty papers in this 1986 volume review the scientific knowledge of the nature of flint and chert at this time. These papers were presented at a 1983 interdisciplinary and international conference on flint and other cherts. Each contribution has been meticulously assessed and edited prior to publication. This collection is principally concerned with the geology and geochemistry of flint in European chert. Topics include the origin of flint; scanning electron microscopy of surface textures; and the behaviour of flint under periglacial conditions. There is a companion volume, edited by G. de G. Sieveking and M. B. Hart, on the archaeological uses of flint.

This volume is a collection of articles presented at the Workshop for Nonlinear Analysis held in Joao Pessoa, Brazil, in September 2012. The influence of Bernhard Ruf, to whom this volume is dedicated on the occasion of his 60th birthday, is perceptible throughout the collection by the choice of themes and techniques. The many contributors consider modern topics in the calculus of variations, topological methods and regularity analysis, together with novel applications of partial differential equations. In keeping with the tradition of the workshop, emphasis is given to elliptic operators inserted in different contexts, both theoretical and applied. Topics include semi-linear and fully nonlinear equations and systems with different nonlinearities, at sub and supercritical exponents, with spectral interactions of Ambrosetti-Prodi type. Also treated are analytic aspects as well as applications such as diffusion problems in mathematical genetics and finance and evolution equations related to electromechanical devices."

Law and economics can be considered as the most exciting development in legal scholarship in recent decades. This volume is the first all-encompassing bibliography in this area. It lists approximately 7000 publications, covering the whole area of law and economics, including `old' law and economics (topics such as antitrust law, labor law, tax law, social security, economic regulation, etc.) as well as `new' law and economics with such topics as tort law, contract law, family law, procedure, criminal law, etc.). The volume also includes the literature on the philosophical foundations and the fundamental concepts of the approach. Part Two gives a special survey of law and economics publications in Europe, written in other languages than English. The Bibliography of Law and Economics is an invaluable reference work for students, scholars, lawyers, economists and other people interested in this field.

This volume presents a collection of selected papers by the prominent Brazilian mathematician Djairo G. de Figueiredo, who has made significant contributions in the area of Differential Equations and Analysis. His work has been highly influential as a challenge and inspiration to young mathematicians as well as in development of the general area of analysis in his home country of Brazil.

In addition to a large body of research covering a variety of areas including geometry of Banach spaces, monotone operators, nonlinear elliptic problems and variational methods applied to differential equations, de Figueiredo is known for his many monographs and books. Among others, this book offers a sample of the work of Djairo, as he is commonly addressed, advancing the study of superlinear elliptic problems (both scalar and system cases), including questions on critical Sobolev exponents and maximum principles for non-cooperative elliptic systems in Hamiltonian form.

This book aims to bring together clinical information on the biology, diagnosis, therapy and management of patients with inflammatory breast cancer. Authored by experts from the Instituto Nacional de Cancerologia in Mexico, this book will provide the reader with the state-of-the art treatment of this rare but pernicious disease.

The behavioral neuroscience of thirst and sodium appetite are research ventures that have expanded dramatically in recent years. Work done in the mid-1950s and early 1960s made it clear that drinking behavior could be affected by direct manipulations of the brain, especially by brain damage and by pharmacological treat ments. Since that. time experimental approaches have diversified and the research enterprise has attracted the interest of a broad international community of scientists. Many aspects of both thirst and sodium appetite are being studied. The most prominent of these are: 1) phylogenetic and ontogenetic aspects of the phenomena of drink ing behavior, 2) the mechanisms of a variety of dipsogenic and antidipsogenic treatments, both drugs and hormones, 3) the biological controls of drinking and their interaction with the regulation of blood volume and blood pressure, 4) the peripheral signals of drinking including the role of the baro- and volume-receptors, 5) the receptor systems within the brain and the neuroanatomical circuitry for thirst and sodium appetite, and 6) the possible roles of brain sodium and of the hormones of sodium conservation ln the arousal of sodium appetite. This acceleration of basic research activity has given in sights into the clinical disorders of thirst and salt appetite and has produced pharmacological agents of potential therapeutic use."