Operations & supply chain management: principles and practice

Operations and Supply Chain Management (OSCM) has continually evolved, incorporating a broad array of strategies, frameworks, and technologies to address complex challenges across industries. This encyclopedic article provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary strategies, tools, methods, principles, and best practices that define the field’s cutting-edge advancements. It also explores the diverse environments where OSCM principles have been effectively implemented. The article is meant to be read in a nonlinear fashion. It should be used as a point of reference or first-port-of-call for a diverse pool of readers: academics, researchers, students, and practitioners.

What alive means: psychoanalytic explorations, 1st edition by Thomas H. Ogden, 2025, Routledge, Abingdon Oxon and New York, NY, 122pp, £24.99 (paperback), ISBN: 9781032867168

Beating an undead horse: Toward a conceptualization of nuisance in the analytic process

Winnicott (1945a) suggested that some types of aggressive behaviour of the child returning from sustained separation from their parents may be regarded as an expression of hope, one in which they can yield their forms of defensive self-sufficiency to trust a parent again. The author parses Winnicott’s later various approaches to understanding both instinctual and reactive aggression and how applying his later views can obfuscate the meaning of aggression in nuisance-making behaviour. The author offers a specific definition of nuisance in the analysis of adults and how it manifests itself in the analytic context. In the adult patients he describes, anger and hostility have become featured as expressions of grievance or greed regarding earlier ruptures in an experience of the parent’s or analyst’s registration of the patient’s needs for attention. He considers two clinical contexts involving the conscious reluctance to agree with the analyst’s interpretations as well as making demands on the analyst outside the setting as forms of nuisance. He explores how the analyst needs to hold two psychic realities – the patient’s hope that is expressed in their nuisance-making as well as the analyst’s limits in absorbing the patient’s own self-destructive hatred of dependency. Holding these two realities helps to transform these self-destructive bids for attention into an opportunity for mourning. The analyst is required to work with his or her own subtle experiences of disturbance including hostility, helplessness and the pull to act out roles in the patient’s earlier life.

Controversial for whom? Reconsidering controversial issue discussion and deliberation in education for democracy

This article interrogates the concept of “controversial issues” in civic and democratic education. Rather than treating controversial issues as universally recognized, we examine how power, positionality, and sociopolitical context shape what is categorized as controversial and with what consequences for students and teachers. We conduct a conceptual and theoretical analysis drawing from deliberative democratic theory, critical scholarship in social studies education, and Iris Marion Young’s framework of greeting, rhetoric, and narrative. Through this lens, we problematize conventional assumptions of neutrality in classroom deliberation and propose a model of education for democracy that foregrounds inclusion and counternarratives. Our analysis demonstrates that dominant framings of controversy often silence marginalized voices by relegating their experiences to the private sphere or excluding them from curricular consideration. The widely adopted deliberative model of civic education, which privileges neutrality and consensus, reinforces exclusionary practices. Young’s framework highlights how greeting, rhetoric, and narrative can reveal these dynamics, yet implementation is constrained by political pressures, policies, and weaponized ambiguity within schools. This article reframes “controversial issue discussion” as a relative and power-laden categorization rather than a neutral pedagogical practice. By advancing a model of education for democracy that explicitly engages with counternarratives, exclusion, and structural inequality, we contribute to ongoing debates about civic education, curriculum design, and democratic legitimacy.

Multivariate Base Rates of Standard- and Skyline-Cutoff Elevations on the Personality Assessment Inventory: Do They Distinguish Simulated from Genuine PTSD?

Multivariate base rates (MBR) of elevations are an emerging psychometric paradigm for enhanced interpretation of multiscale self-report data. The aims of this study were to calculate and compare MBR of scale/subscale elevations on the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) and determine the ability of MBR to differentiate between mood disorders ( n  = 524, k  = 3), military-based posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD; n  = 252, k  = 2), and coached PTSD-simulator ( n  = 160, k  = 1) groups. Overall, having at least one standard ( T  ≥ 70) and skyline elevation on clinical scales and clinical subscales was common across the groups. However, differential abnormal elevation thresholds emerged for each group. For instance, it was unusual (i.e., MBR < 10%) for the mood disorders group to have ≥ 1 (9.7%) and for the genuine PTSD group to have ≥ 3 (9.1%) skyline-elevated clinical scales. For subscales, it was unusual for the mood and PTSD groups to have ≥ 3 (7.6%) and ≥ 7 (8.3%) skyline-elevated clinical subscales, respectively. Conversely, PTSD simulators commonly yielded profiles with standard- and skyline elevations on nearly all clinical scales and subscales. MBR cutoffs identified from receiver-operating characteristic curve analyses yielded robust sensitivity (.650-.806) and specificity (.833-.984) in differentiating genuine PTSD and mood disorder groups from PTSD simulators. MBR are useful in differentiating genuine from simulated psychopathology, consistent with broader scale-based infrequency approaches.

Classical numerical analysis by Abner J. Salgado and Steven M. Wise, Cambridge (UK), Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp 937, £89.99 (hard), ISBN 978-1-10883-770-5

Literature Review of Preliminary Initiating Events for a Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor Conceptual Design

One of the few gas-cooled fast reactor (GFR) concepts being investigated within the United States is the General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems’ fast modular reactor (FMR). As a first step in developing the safety case for the FMR, a comprehensive range of potential accident initiators should be identified. To characterize the breadth of the initiators that could occur in GFRs, a literature review was performed to identify preliminary initiating events (PIEs) relevant to GFRs, with an emphasis on those initiators relevant to the FMR design. For the review, PIEs were defined as deviations from normal operating conditions that could lead to undesired plant states and represent the beginning of potential accident sequences. The literature review included events meeting the definition of PIEs that had previously been identified and analyzed for GFRs, high-temperature gas-cooled reactors, very high–temperature reactors, and commercial gas-cooled reactors. A total of 124 references were evaluated and 549 unique PIEs were identified. The most frequently assessed PIEs in the literature were categorized as loss-of-coolant accidents (LOCAs) and flow-related transients. Repeated treatment of these accident types, especially LOCAs, within the literature emphasizes the importance, and due analysis, of potential depressurization events in a GFR’s safety case, since such events can have potentially important downstream effects in some designs. Less emphasis was observed on initiating events associated with helium purification systems and external events, which also have the potential to challenge plant safety, and therefore may require further evaluation to support safety case development for GFRs, and the FMR specifically.

Development and Demonstration of a Prototype Molten Salt Sampling System

Molten salt reactors (MSRs) offer potential operability and safety advantages when compared to commercial light water reactors (LWRs). However, operating experience with MSRs is sparse in comparison to what exists for LWRs. Further, the chemical and isotopic composition of the fuel and/or coolant salt is dynamic and difficult to characterize continuously, posing potential safety, operability, and safeguards unknowns that need to be addressed. A molten salt sampling system (MSSS) is regarded as a necessary subsystem within first-generation MSRs used to obtain samples of salt for chemical and isotopic analysis in support of the need to monitor and control salt composition during operation. The MSSS is being developed using the Safety-in-Design (SiD) methodology, which incorporates incremental integration of safety analysis into the design process. The MSSS conceptual design emerging from the application of the early stages of the SiD methodology consists of a sample collection system and its housing, a freeze port, and inert gas control and delivery systems. This article describes the prototypes developed to test the functions of these MSSS subsystems, presents the results of testing in both dry and molten salt environments (including reliability data collection performed in accordance with the principles of SiD and the development of a semiquantitative fault tree model), and summarizes the opportunities for future design and testing enhancements based on the results of prototype testing.

Automated Hybrid Variance Reduction on Advanced Architectures in the Shift Monte Carlo Code

Monte Carlo transport methods are the most accurate schemes for solving problems with complex energy and spatial features, but they come with a high computational cost. Although hybrid methods have enabled the use of Monte Carlo transport for a large class of problems, they still require significant computing resources. Modern multicore CPUs with large numbers of compute cores and graphical processing units (GPUs) provide opportunities to optimize the memory and run-time costs of hybrid Monte Carlo methods. This paper documents the development and analysis of three Monte Carlo transport algorithms that support hybrid transport using the consistent adjoint-driven importance sampling (CADIS) and forward-weighted CADIS methods in the Shift Monte Carlo code: history-based transport using static and dynamic threading on multicore CPUs and event-based transport enabling weight window tracking on GPUs. The results are shown for two challenging hybrid problems on the Frontier supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. The results show that all three methods yield good performance and enable solutions of difficult fixed-source transport problems in less than 2 min on 20 nodes of Frontier. Dynamic threading was observed to give up to 20% better scaling behavior than static threading. Moreover, the AMD Instinct 250X GPU was found to give 9 to 11 times greater throughput per graphics compute die than the best CPU performance. Additional opportunities for optimization of hybrid transport on GPUs are discussed.

Some Vicissitudes of playing related to containment and disruption

In agreement with Winnicott, the author considers all forms of playing as a place of transit between inner and outer reality and between unsymbolized and symbolized experience. Some forms of playing serve more exclusively to clarify the current state of the patient’s separate mind, while other forms of playing additionally introduce and mark forms of separateness between patient and analyst that are more likely to cause temporary disruption. This paper aims to distinguish between these two forms of play. Through clinical vignettes, the author demonstrates how each form of play offers various forms of containment, differing in the mechanisms of how to facilitate the process of metabolization. He also suggests that sometimes we can only know a posteriori of the patient’s experience of disruption and containment rendering these distinctions between types of playing as a rough scaffolding. Playing always implies a process that is in flux.