Vulnerability and robustness of SME supply chains: An empirical study of risk and disturbance management of fresh food processors in a developing market

The aim of this paper is to analyse vulnerability and robustness of small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) supply chains and to consider contextual factors that might influence the success of their disturbance management: Risky product and business environment. By using an exploratory case study it is shown how these contextual factors attribute vulnerability sources, contribute to the robustness of a company’s performance and supply chain vulnerability, as well as how a company seeks to manage internal and external vulnerability sources. The exploratory case is based on a fresh food supply chain of a manufacturing SME operating in a developing market.
Case findings suggest that fresh food supply chains of a manufacturing SME in developing markets are prone to disruptions of their logistics and production processes due to ‘riskiness’ of fresh food products, the ‘riskiness’ of developing markets, as well as ‘riskiness’ of SMEs themselves. However, this does not necessarily indicate the vulnerability of an SME and its entire supply chain. Findings indicate that SMEs can be very successful in disturbance management by selective use of redesign strategies that aim to prevent or reduce the impact of disturbances. More precise, it is likely that an SME can achieve robust performance by employing preventive redesign strategies in managing disturbances that result from internal, company related vulnerability sources, while impact reduction strategies are likely to contribute to robust performance of an SME if used to manage disturbances that result from internal, supply chain related vulnerability sources, as well as external vulnerability sources.

Medical consensus, guidelines, and position papers: A policy for the ECFS

The terms consensus, guideline and position paper are sometimes employed as if they were interchangeable, but the purpose of such documents and the robustness of advice vary as the evidence base does not have the same depth in each. The Board of the European Cystic Fibrosis Society deemed it to be helpful to provide a short commentary on the definition of these terms, on their interconnections and on how ECFS considers them in documents endorsed by the society.

Empirical evaluation of multi-device profiling side-channel attacks

Side-channel analysis of cryptographic systems can allow for the recovery of secret information by an adversary even where the underlying algorithms have been shown to be provably secure. This is achieved by exploiting the unintentional leakages inherent in the underlying implementation of the algorithm in software or hardware. Within this field of research, a class of attacks known as profiling attacks, or more specifically as used here template attacks, have been shown to be extremely efficient at extracting secret keys. Template attacks assume a strong adversarial model, in that an attacker has an identical device with which to profile the power consumption of various operations. This can then be used to efficiently attack the target device. Inherent in this assumption is that the power consumption across the devices under test is somewhat similar. This central tenet of the attack is largely unexplored in the literature with the research community generally performing the profiling stage on the same device as being attacked. This is beneficial for evaluation or penetration testing as it is essentially the best case scenario for an attacker where the model built during the profiling stage matches exactly that of the target device, however it is not necessarily a reflection on how the attack will work in reality. In this work, a large scale evaluation of this assumption is performed, comparing the key recovery performance across 20 identical smart-cards when performing a profiling attack.

Environmental Inequalities and Democratic Citizenship: Linking Normative Theory with Empirical Research

The aim of this paper is to link empirical findings concerning environmental inequalities with different normative yard-sticks for assessing whether these inequalities should be deemed unjust, or not. We argue that such an inquiry must necessarily take into account some caveats regarding both empirical research and normative theory. We suggest that empirical results must be contextualised by establishing geographies of risk. As a normative yard-stick we propose a moderately demanding social-egalitarian account of justice and democratic citizenship, which we take to be best suited to identify unjust as well as legitimate instances of socio-environmental inequality.

Empirical testing of genuine savings as an indicator of weak sustainability: a three-country analysis of long run trends

Genuine Savings has emerged as a widely used indicator of sustainable development. In this paper, we use long -term data stretching back to 1870 to undertake empirical tests of the relationship between Genuine Savings (GS) and future well-being for three countries: Britain, the USA and Germany. Our tests are based on an underlying theoretical relationship between GS and changes in the present value of future consumption. Based on both single country and panel results, we find evidence supporting the existence of javascript:void(0);a cointegrating (long run equilibrium) relationship between GS and future well-being, and fail to reject the basic theoretical result on the relationship between these two macroeconomic variables. This provides some support for the GS measure of weak sustainability.