Supply chain excellence has a real huge impact on business strategy. Building supply chains (SCs) as flexible system represents one of the most exciting opportunities to create value. This requires integrated decision making amongst autonomous chain partners with effective decision knowledge sharing among them. The key to success lies in knowing which decision has more impact on the supply chai...

This paper presents a competitive supply chain network design problem in which one, two, or three supply chains are planning to enter the price-dependent markets simultaneously in uncertain environments and decide to set the prices and shape their networks. The chains produce competitive products either identical or highly substitutable. Fuzzy multi-level mixed integer programming is used to mo...

Therapeutic effect of Portulaca oleraceae on respiratory diseases is indicated in Iranian ancient medical books. The relaxant effect of this plant also observed on smooth muscles in previous studies. Therefore, in the present study, the possible mechanism (s) for the relaxant effects of boiled and aqueous extracts of Portulaca oleraceae on tracheal chains of guinea pigs were examined. The relax...

Background: Waldenstrom macroglobulinemia is a lymphoplasmacytic lymphoma with elevated serum immunoglobulin M and multi-organ involvement. Primary systemic amyloidosis usually develops due to immunoglobulin light chains depositions in different organs due to an underlying gammopathy. Case presentation: Our patient was an 86-year-old man with macroglossia, ecchymotic patches and bullous lesion...

The paper begins with a discussion of the definition of cultural industries. The paper’s three main themes are concerned with, first: 1) a contestation of the generic application of the global commodity chain concept, 2) the need for a unique focus on cultural industries associated with the particular nature of its production process, and 3) the role of embedded judgments of quality is an integ...

background and aims: elastomeric chains and niti coil springs are two major traction aids in orthodontic tooth movements. force degradation occurs over time in both groups, with higher percentages in elastic chains. the effects of environmental factors and some mouth rinses on this force decay have been previously studied. no study has been performed to evaluate the effect of current popular mo...

In this paper we investigate three types of convergence for geometrically ergodic Markov chains (MCs) with countable state space, which in general lead to different ‘rates of convergence’. For reversible Markov chains it is shown that these rates coincide. For general MCs we show some connections between their rates and those of the associated reversed MCs. Moreover, we study the relations betw...

Monoclonal anti-I-Jk antibodies (mAbs) were found to inhibit syngeneic and allogeneic mixed lymphocyte reactions by blocking the responder T cells but not the stimulator cells. Only the responses of H-2k and H-2a strains were inhibited. Three different anti-I-Jk mAbs (1G8, 4B11, and KN34) showed different inhibitory patterns in allogeneic mixed lymphocyte reactions of individual H-2k strains, d...

This paper assesses the achievements and limitations of the commodity chains framework as it has evolved over the last near-decade, and concludes by suggesting directions for future research. First, I examine the evolution of the chain approach by briefly discussing the differences between the two camps that employ the commodity chain concept: the world-systems school (whose proponents coined t...