Reterritorialising Canada: Arctic ice’s liquid modernity and the imagining of a Canadian archipelago

Studying mobile actor networks of moving people, objects, images, and discourses, in conjunction with changing time-spaces, offers a unique opportunity to understand important, and yet relatively neglected, “relational material” dynamics of mobility. A key example of this phenomenon is the recontinentalization of Canada amidst dramatically changing articulations of the meanings and boundaries of the Canadian land-ice- ocean mass. A notable reason why Canada is being re-articulated in current times is the extensiveness of Arctic thawing. The reconfiguration of space and “motility” options in the Arctic constitutes an example of how “materiality and sociality produce themselves together.” In this paper we examine the possibilities and risks connected to this recontinentalization of Canada’s North. In exploring the past, present, and immediate future of this setting, we advance the paradigmatic view that Canada’s changing Arctic is the key element in a process of transformation of Canada into a peninsular body encompassed within a larger archipelagic entity: a place more intimately attuned to its immense (and growing) coastal and insular routes.

Dynamic pricing for used products in remanufacturing with back orders(ABS 3* Journal, Accepted with Revision on 2nd December 2011).

In remanufacturing, the supply of used products and the demand for remanufactured products are usually mismatched because of the great uncertainties on both sides. In this paper, we propose a dynamic pricing policy to balance this uncertain supply and demand. Specifically, we study a remanufacturer’s problem of pricing a single class of cores with random price-dependent returns and random demand for the remanufactured products with backlogs. We model this pricing task as a continuous-time Markov decision process, which addresses both the finite and infinite horizon problems, and provide managerial insights by analyzing the structural properties of the optimal policy. We then use several computational examples to illustrate the impacts of particular system parameters on pricing policy.