Scientific evidence of human impact on the natural environment, such as global warming, continues to mount. Green manufacturing systems that focus on minimizing environmental impact of manufacturing processes and products are ever more important to our sustainable future. Green manufacturing systems are slow to gain acceptance as manufacturers are focused on implementing Lean manufacturing systems, generally considered the most competitive manufacturing systems in the world. In recent years, researchers and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have sought to "build a bridge" between Lean and Green manufacturing systems, in hopes that the rapid expanse of Lean can serve as a catalyst to the implementation of Green manufacturing systems.This study contributes to this growing body of knowledge by determining if leading Lean manufacturers are transcending beyond the traditional limits of Lean and implementing Green manufacturing systems as part of their overallwaste reduction strategy. In this work Lean manufacturing plants that have been evaluated by a panel of experts from the Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing are surveyed on the diffusion of Green manufacturing system practices throughout their operation. A full system correlation analysis is performed utilizing forty-eight measures of Lean and Green manufacturing systems under the categories of management system, waste reducing techniques, and results. Data analysis indicates that known Lean manufacturers are significantly Greener than the general population of manufacturers in twenty-five of twenty-six measures of Green manufacturing. Lean manufacturers who implement Green manufacturing systems have the strongest results in both Lean and Green result areas, particularly cost reduction, indicating synergy between Lean and Green manufacturing systems. Manufacturing plants that choose to vertically integrate versus horizontally integrate their Lean systems transcend to Green manufacturing. Mexican plants in the study practice significantly higher levels of material resource efficiency and are more inclined to develop industrial partnerships to resolve environmental issues. The study also identifies a critical need for integrating Lean and Green management systems to drive synergistic waste reducing techniques throughout the operation. An integrated Lean and Green manufacturing system model, dubbed "Zero Waste Manufacturing", is proposed as a solution for economically and environmentally sustainable manufacturing.

Iterative rounding has been an increasingly popular approach to solving network design optimization problems ever since Jain introduced the concept in his revolutionary 2-approximation for the Survivable Network Design Problem (SNDP). This paper looks at several important iterative rounding approximation algorithms and makes improvements to some of their proofs. We generalize a matrix restatement of Nagarajan et al.'s token argument, which we can use to simplify the proofs of Jain's 2-approximation for SNDP and Fleischer et al.'s 2-approximation for the Element Connectivity (ELC) problem. Lau et al. show how one can construct a (2,2B + 3)-approximation for the degree bounded ELC problem, and this thesis provides the proof. We provide some structural results for basic feasible solutions of the Prize-Collecting Steiner Tree problem, and introduce a new problem that arises, which we call the Prize-Collecting Generalized Steiner Tree problem.

This project examines the corpus of novels that have been nominated for the Man Booker Prize and, using the prize as a creator of a contemporary literary canon, attempts to develop a model of a contemporary best text. Using the distant reading techniques proposed by digital humanities scholar Franco Moretti to track and graph a variety of formal and structural variables across the corpus of nominees, it becomes apparent that the kind of novel that typically wins the Booker Prize and thus the kind of novel that qualifies as a contemporary best text fits a distinct mold. These novels are solemn, serious texts written by British or Irish men, and the stories they tell concern young British or Irish men struggling, often alone, in pain, and under the threat of impending age, through a brutal, violent, and amoral world.

Thesis (Honors)--College of William and Mary, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 60-64). Also available via the World Wide Web.

The topic of this diploma thesis is aimed at the analysis of corporate social responsibility in the context of the Prize for social responsibility "We do business responsibly".

Made available in DSpace on 2015-05-08T14:44:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 595975 bytes, checksum: 8cf7a61f41118265dc951e4423f7f656 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009-07-01 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / The Theory of Behavior Finance shows an approach that faces the Modern Theory of Finance, when considering some features such as psychology, emotional and social, that make the decisions of the economic agents. Regarding to the decisions based on whether rational or cognitive foundations, this work aims at analyzing, through a descriptive research, the prize expectation by the pupils of Economics at UFPB. The research population was classified into four major groups, concerning to the knowledge of Finance and Financial Market and each group counts of 20 students. A questionnaire was accomplished to collect the data. The main results points out that in average the students who have less knowledge about the financial market are those who also have lower risk behave and that the groups have different perception of risk measurement. Also, it can be pointed out that the different perception of the risk makes the difference of prize exigencies by the pupils and that the dispersion of the exigencies is smaller as the knowledge of the risk is stronger. / A Teoria das Finanças Comportamentais apresenta uma abordagem que se defronta com a Teoria Moderna de Finanças, por considerar a existência de fatores, como os de ordem psicológica, emocional e social, que influenciam as decisões dos agentes econômicos. No âmbito da discussão sobre as tomadas de decisões dos indivíduos, baseada em fundamentos racionais ou influenciada por vieses cognitivos, o presente trabalho teve como escopo analisar, por meio de uma pesquisa descritiva, as exigências de prêmio por parte dos alunos do curso de Economia da UFPB. A população foi classificada em quatro grupos de acordo com o suposto nível de conhecimento sobre Finanças e Mercado Financeiro e a amostra, por conveniência, correspondeu a 20 alunos em cada grupo. Os dados foram coletados através da aplicação de questionários. Os principais resultados indicaram de que, em média, os alunos que, teoricamente, detém menos informações ou conhecimento sobre o mercado financeiro, apresentam um comportamento menos aversivo ao risco e de que os grupos interpretam distintamente as diferentes medidas de riscos. Além disso, constatou-se que as grandes diferenças quanto às exigências de prêmios entre os alunos podem ser justificadas pelas diferentes interpretações sobre os riscos e que, quanto maior o nível de conhecimento, menor a dispersão nessas exigências.

El Premio Nobel de Química de 2013 ha sido otorgado a A. Warshel, M. Levitt y M. Karplus debido al desarrollo de métodos híbridos de cálculo para química computacional. En este artículo se presentará una breve introducción del uso de los métodos de química computacional. Se describirá cómo se desarrollaron, y por qué, los métodos híbridos de cálculo, conocidos como QM/MM (Quantum Mechanics/Molecular Mechanics) para el estudio de sistemas macromoleculares, sobre todo para el caso de su aplicación en enzimas y bioquímica. Finalmente, se comentarán los alcances y expectativas futuras para estos métodos, desarrollados en los años 70. / The 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to A.Warshel, M.Levitt and M.Karplus for their contribution to the development of hybrid methods for computational chemistry. In this article a brief introduction about computational chemistry methods is presented. This paper will show the order in which the QM/MM (Quantum Mechanics/Molecular Mechanics) methods were developed for the study of macromolecular systems and specially their application in enzymes and biochemistry. Finally, the reach and future prospects of these methods originally developed by A. Warshel, M.Levitt and M. Karplus in the seventies will be discussed.

The purpose of this essay is to investigate how the Nobel Committee uses the concept of peace in their press releases about the Nobel Peace Prize. This essay starts by investigating various articles and books to establish a basic understanding of how to efficiently investigate peace. This research then prompts us to investigate the related concepts of War, Conflict and Violence. It also tasks us to investigate a possible expansion of the concept in the context of a expanding globalised world. We could also relate ideas of peace to ideas of democracy and world order. This is done through Kosellecks methods of ”begriffsgeschichte”, by investigating the use of these various terms as well as their semantic field, we get an idea of how they’re conceived, and thus, the context in which they are used. This essay uses press releases found on the Nobel Prize Committee website as well as the award speeches as complements. This essay shows us how the concept of peace has grown, incorperating new ideas of justice, democracy and human rights. This can be seen in the context of an increasingly complex, westernized, globalised world, furthering the need for wider, more nebulous concepts to describe it.

Dans cette thèse, nous étudions les décompositions arborescentes qui satisfont certaines contraintes supplémentaires et nous proposons des algorithmes pour les calculer dans certaines classes de graphes. Finalement, nous résolvons des problèmes liés au routage en utilisant ces décompositions ainsi que des propriétés structurelles des graphes. Cette thèse est divisée en deux parties. Dans la première partie, nous étudions les décompositions arborescentes satisfaisant des propriétés spécifiques. Dans le Chapitre 2, nous étudions les décompositions de taille minimum, c’est-À-Dire avec un nombre minimum de sacs. Etant donné une entier k 4 fixé, nous prouvons que le problème de calculer une décomposition arborescente de largeur au plus k et de taille minimum est NP-Complet dans les graphes de largeur arborescente au plus 4. Nous décrivons ensuite des algorithmes qui calculent des décompositions de taille minimum dans certaines classes de graphes de largeur arborescente au plus 3. Ces résultats ont été présentés au workshop international ICGT 2014. Dans le Chapitre 3, nous étudions la cordalité des graphes et nous introduisons la notion de k-Good décomposition arborescente. Nous étudions tout d’abord les jeux de Gendarmes et Voleur dans les graphes sans long cycle induit. Notre résultat principal est un algorithme polynomial qui, étant donné un graphe G, soit trouve un cycle induit de longueur au moins k+1, ou calcule une k-Good décomposition de G. Ces résultats ont été publiés à la conférence internationale ICALP’12 et dans la revue internationale Algorithmica. Dans la seconde partie de la thèse, nous nous concentrons sur des problèmes de routage. / A tree decomposition of a graph is a way to represent it as a tree by preserving some connectivity properties of the initial graph. Tree decompositions have been widely studied for their algorithmic applications, in particular using dynamic programming approach. In this thesis, we study tree decompositions satisfying various constraints and design algorithms to compute them in some graph classes. We then use tree decompositions or specific graph properties to solve several problems related to routing. The thesis is divided into two parts. In the first part, we study tree decompositions satisfying some properties. In Chapter 2, we investigate minimum size tree decompositions, i.e., with minimum number of bags. Given a fixed k 4, we prove it is NP-Hard to compute a minimum size decomposition with width at most k in the class of graphs with treewidth at least 4. We design polynomial time algorithms to compute minimum size tree decompositions in some classes of graphs with treewidth at most 3 (including trees). Part of these results will be presented in ICGT 2014. In Chapter 3, we study the chordality (longest induced cycle) of graphs and introduce the notion of good tree decomposition (where each bag must satisfy some particular structure). Precisely, we study the Cops and Robber games in graphs with no long induced cycles. Our main result is the design of a polynomial-Time algorithm that either returns an induced cycle of length at least k+1 of a graph G or compute a k-Good tree decomposition of G. These results have been published in ICALP 2012 and Algorithmica. In the second part of the thesis, we focus on routing problems.

The marketing concepts are the key topic of this thesis. Its aim is to define the point of creation of marketing concepts in the field of restaurant services. The intention here is to present the "good practice", via analysis of valued marketing concepts of chosen restaurants. The theoretical part is focused on the definition of marketing, main marketing elements and their application on tourism and hospitality. The practical part consists of three chapters featuring interview with the specialists from the field. Attention of the author is also directed towards the identification of key determinants affecting the choice of the concept and to determination of the relationship between marketing concepts and gastronomy awards.