Metaphorical patterns in Anthropocene fiction

This article explores metaphorical language in the strand of contemporary fiction that Trexler discusses under the heading of ‘Anthropocene fiction’ – namely, novels that probe the convergence of human experience and geological or climatological processes in times of climate change. Why focus on metaphor? Because, as cognitive linguists working in the wake of Lakoff and Johnson have shown, metaphor plays a key role in closing the gap between everyday, embodied experience and more intangible or abstract realities – including, we suggest, the more-than-human temporal and spatial scales that come to the fore with the Anthropocene. In literary narrative, metaphorical language is typically organized in coherent clusters that amplify the effects of individual metaphors. Based on this assumption, we discuss the results of a systematic coding of metaphorical language in three Anthropocene novels by Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson, and Ian McEwan. We show that the emergent metaphorical patterns enrich and complicate the novels’ staging of the Anthropocene, and that they can destabilize the strict separation between human experience and nonhuman realities

Cooperation between Multiple Newsvendors with Warehouses

This study considers a supply chain that consists of n retailers, each of them facing a newsvendor problem, m warehouses and a supplier.The retailers are supplied with a single product via some warehouses.In these warehouses, the ordered amounts of goods of these retailers become available after some lead time.At the time that the goods arrive at the warehouses, demand realizations are known by the retailers.The retailers can increase their expected joint profits by coordinating their orders and making allocations after demand realization.For this setting, we consider an associated cooperative game between the retailers.We show that this associated cooperative game has a nonempty core. Finally, we study a variant of this game, where the retailers are allowed to leave unsold goods at the warehouses.supply chain management;newsvendor;warehouse;game theory;balancedness

Hierarchical planning in a single stage system

Single stage systems with high set-up times and high utilization levels occur in flow process industries. In this paper a two-tiered hierarchical model is developed for such a system. At the top level, the optimal value of the control parameters is determined, while the operational scheduling function is performed at the bottom level. The conceptual aggregation approach used in this model is compared to the aggregation approach used in classical hierarchical approaches

Equalization of run-out times under high demand and lost sales : technical note

No abstract

Pulse Producer Decision Making Under Risky Conditions: Will End-Point Royalties Change Preferences?

In 2015, the Agriculture for Growth Act (C-18) came into effect in Canada. This Act modernized plant breeding by including amendments that aligned it with the 1991 International Convention for the Protection of New Plant Varieties (UPOV91) (CFIA, 2017). Regulations within the Act grant plant breeders the right to charge an end-point royalty (EPR) on harvested grain. This thesis is interested in assessing how provenance and framing, influence pulse producer seed choice decisions. This study created a prospect theory behavioral experiment to answer this question. The study concluded that producers are not overly influenced by provenance and framing and instead make decisions based on the expected utility model, except when questions are manipulated by both EPR and negative framing. The study also concluded that most producers (56%) are willing to tolerate a level of risk. This provided a way to profile producers by risk tolerance and found many similarities and few minor differences between those that are always risk-seeking, always risk-averse, and occasionally risk-seeking

Action variety of planners : cognitive load and requisite variety

The complexity of planning tasks have increased over the past decade. There is relatively poor understanding what the implications are of increased task complexity in planning and scheduling operations. Previous work in the behavorial sciences have investigated the concept of cognitive load, addressing both task complecity and task workload or stress, and have concluded that decision makers tend to resort to routine action and reduce the variety in their actions with increasing complexity and workload. Alternatively, control theory suggests that a higher variety of actions is needed to deal with more complex problems. In this paper, we investigate the effects of task complexity in a chemical plant on the variety of actions deployed by the planners. The single work center resource structure and the availability of actual planning data from an ERP system allows us to both use field data and study a situation which is simple enough to measure the main effect. Our results suggest that increased task complexity without time pressure does indeed lead to increased action variety deployed by the planners