India’s national food security programme: a strategic insight

Indian National Food Security Programme, with a goal to provide highly subsidized food grains to more than 800 million people in every nook and corner of the vast country, faces strategic challenges related to production, procurement, storage, transportation, distribution, finance, and organization. While the production issues are related to low yield, small farm size, and lack of financial support, the procurement process is skewed and lacks integration with the markets. The storage facilities are inadequate and are non-optimally located. Transportation facilities lack coordination leading to multiple loading and unloading of the food grains. Leakage and improper distribution of food grains are also big challenges. Very high subsidy, inefficient processes, and a large work force have brought to the fore the question of financial viability of the programme. There are also organizational issues related to payment disparity and resistance to labor reforms. The paper has also given a framework for efficient implementation of the programme using cloud system with effective procurement and stock management policy measures.     

Impact of h-index on author’s rankings: an improvement to the h-index for lower-ranked authors

Scientometrics - In academia, the research performance of a faculty is evaluated based on the number of publications, the number of citations, and the impact of publication where one publishes....     

A profile of Mexico’s technological agglomerations: The case of the aerospace and nanotechnology industry in Querétaro and Monterrey

This article analyzes the dynamics of emergence of technological clusters in Mexico. In recent years, Mexico has had several initiatives towards the agglomeration of technological capabilities, however, very few cases are successful. The question we are interested in is about how does the technological crowds get configurated. Two Mexican case studies were analyzed in order to identify key endogenous and exogenous factors in the installation and development of technology clusters in the aerospace and nanotechnology. The review of the process of installing both clusters shows the importance of industrial and economic trajectories, the local policy, and the mobilization of local and global actors in the configuration of technological agglomerations. Geographical distances between the technological platforms is important as well, but it requires global players to make the articulation between the local capacities with global trends in emerging technologies.     

De Beers’s Diamond Mine in the 1880s: Robert Harris and the Kimberley Searching System

In the mid 1880s a little-known photographer named Robert Harris produced a series of albumen prints showing the stages of body searching that black labourers in De Beers diamond mines were obliged to undergo by state ordinance enacted in 1883. The original photographs surfaced briefly in the saleroom in 2007 but have since disappeared. Two sets of copies survive. Bearing in mind the history of documentary photography in South Africa, this article examines the historical and textual significance of this series of photographs in the context of the history of mining and discusses the imperatives and ethics of locating, researching, and publishing controversial imagery in the Internet age.     

Towards optimal configuration of a manufacturer’s supply network with demand flexibility

Demand flexibility exhibits the degree to which customers are often willing to compromise on product features or performance levels for budgetary (reflected in price) or schedule (reflected in delivery) reasons. It is essential for a manufacturer to map demand flexibility into the supply side and investigate its impact on supply network configuration to maximise its total profit. This paper is among the first contributions that seek to address the challenge of optimal configuration of a manufacturer’s supply network that consists of raw material suppliers and contract manufacturers, considering demand flexibility and commonality among different product families. A new mixed integer programming model is developed to describe the characteristics of this problem. The objective was to maximise the manufacturer’s total profit subject to various operating constraints of the supply chain. In view of the complexity and non-deterministic polynomial-time (NP)-hard nature of the problem, a hybrid constraint programming and simulated annealing algorithm is proposed to solve the problem optimally. Extensive numerical studies are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed model and the hybrid algorithm.     

Human factor: the competitive advantage driver of the EU’s logistics sector

This article aims to test the weight that main sub-components of the global competitiveness index might have on the logistics performance index. We deploy a novel technique based on three newly particularised clusters (‘infrastructure’, ‘institutions’ and ‘human factor’) to look into whether such clusters are related to efficiency in the 28 European Union’s countries. It is manifest that the human factor is far more important for improving the logistics performance index than infrastructure and institutions. It follows that in this new domain of analysis, all initiatives to prioritise investment on the human factor are appropriate means of stimulating innovation and economic outlook, perceived that the logistics sector accounts for an average of 10% of the European Union’s GDP.     

Assessing the health research’s social impact: a systematic review

Scientometrics - In recent year, a growing attention is dedicated to the assessment of research’s social impact. While prior research has often dealt with results of research, the last decade...     

The Cut and the Continuum: Sophie Ristelhueber’s Anatomical Atlas

From her early photographs of the ruinous aftermath of the Lebanon War in Beirut (1982) to her more recent images of bomb craters in Eleven Blowups (2006), the French artist Sophie Ristelhueber has been intent to maintain, in her own metaphor, ‘the analytical distance of an anatomy lesson’. Exhibiting the evidence of warfare but withholding their explanation, Ristelhueber’s provocative gesture of making art of war, removing human conflicts from their political contexts to render them as still-lifes, ready-mades, earthworks, or surrealist poems, is patently anti-journalistic. In keeping with the artist’s surgical analogy, this article explores Ristelhueber’s aesthetic mode of address as one that shares its fundamental operation with that of photography – namely, to make a cut. Retracing the morphology of recurring imprints and injuries that appear across the terrestrial and corporeal expanses traversed in her work, the article considers the ways in which these cuts pertain to the transformative power of violence and images alike.     

The drunkard’s search: Looking for ‘HRM’ in all the wrong places

Abstract and Key Results

Pro Pelle Cutem: Photographing Furs for the Hudson’s Bay Company’s 250th Anniversary Celebrations in Canada

In 1920, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) celebrated its 250^th anniversary through national and international events, as well as honours and benefits for its employees. The year 1920 was an important moment for the HBC, as it underwent institutional change to support the expansion of its department store operations through public relations and advertising strategies. Central to these strategies was an emphasis on the HBC’s central role in Canadian nation formation, and in particular its fur trade history. This article discusses the use of photography in the HBC’s 250^th anniversary celebrations through an analysis of photographs of fur. I trace photographic representations of fur through three moments: in the process of extraction (as trapped animal or dead pelt); in the process of preparation (as Indigenous bush labour); and in the process of consumption (as fur goods in a department store window). While the fur trade was declining in significance at the time of the 250^th anniversary celebrations, its symbolic status was essential to the Company’s burgeoning retail operations. In this article, I argue that the photograph of fur replaced the fur pelt as the central trade item of the HBC, and, further, that photography fused together nationalist and capitalist expansion in Canada.     

Euclid’s Elements in the Czech Lands

[Terentianus 1st – 2nd century A.D.]

This article is dedicated to Euclid’s Elements, to translations of this work into Czech, and to the translators who have taken on the task of translation. It contains a short overview of the results achieved during a three-year project supported by the Czech Grant Agency.We explored how Euclid’s Elements were spread around the Czech lands.We will try to describe the circumstances that lay behind attempts to translate the Elements into the Czech language.     

An EU without the UK: mapping the UK’s changing roles in the EU scientific research

In science, technology and innovation, the consequences of Britain’s exit (Brexit) for both Britain and the Europe Union (EU) are still uncertain. However, there is no doubt that in the years to come, the UK will need to re-calibrate its scientific collaborations with other EU countries. In this research, we aim to identify which EU countries would suffer the greatest loss and which research fields would be most affected by Brexit. Based on the scientific output of each EU country, as indexed by the Web of Science, we demonstrate that international scientific collaboration frequently involves the UK. We also define four types of roles according to the UK’s performance in production and collaboration; these roles are of great significance to our understanding of the status of the UK in the EU. In this sense, the UK acted as a leader in health sciences, a pioneer in social sciences, an assistant in physical sciences, and a participant in engineering.     

Bold missions and the big picture: the societal impact of America’s space program

When it comes to our enterprise in space, the desire for short-term benefits and fulfillment often clouds our perception and appreciation of any long-term societal impact. Too often, exploration is seen as a means to the technologies, or “spin-offs,” that can be transferred to the private sector. The opposite is true. For a space program, technology is the means to the end that is more exploration and more discoveries. A space program exists to take on the daring, sometimes even audacious, missions the private sector never could. Its destination is not the bottom line but the loftiest of goals: inspiration and the unrestrained intellectual pursuit of knowledge itself.