Bøger af Simon Schaffer

Master's Thesis from the year 2020 in the subject Business economics - Operations Research, grade: 1,0, The University of Liverpool (Operations and Supply Chain Management), language: English, abstract: Food waste remains a major economic, environmental, and social challenge for different food supply chain actors. Grocery retailers play a central role in food waste mitigation due to their unique position next to producers and consumers. Root causes of retail food waste are manifold and complex but can be related to systemic operational mismatches between demand prediction and supply forecasting. Existing solutions and mitigation strategies mainly focus on today¿s ¿brick-and-mortar¿ retail operation designs. Socio-economic environment and consumer habits constantly evolve with food retailers adapting operations strategies. This literature-based research explores the impact of future retail trends on retail-related food waste and provides risks and opportunities to inform retail operations strategy. Findings suggest that omnichannel business models, personalisation, experience shopping and instore technology offer opportunities for food waste mitigation across waste-hierarchy destinations. Retail operation strategies should address increasing household responsibility and avoid food waste, shifting towards later consumption stages in food supply chains. Contributions are not empirically validated through primary data, but results may form the basis for further studies in future retail operations and/or retail food waste.

Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author of the political treatise Leviathan and vehement critic of systematic experimentation in natural philosophy, and Robert Boyle, mechanical philosopher and owner of the newly invented air-pump. The issues at stake in their disputes ranged from the physical integrity of the air-pump to the intellectual integrity of the knowledge it might yield. Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild. The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens--facts, interpretations, experiment, truth--were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer use the confrontation between Hobbes and Boyle as a way of understanding what was at stake in the early history of scientific experimentation. They describe the protagonists' divergent views of natural knowledge, and situate the Hobbes-Boyle disputes within contemporary debates over the role of intellectuals in public life and the problems of social order and assent in Restoration England. In a new introduction, the authors describe how science and its social context were understood when this book was first published, and how the study of the history of science has changed since then.

Discusses scientific topics.

Examination of the work of artist Anish Kapoor.