Following successful outcomes of cognitive bias modification (CBM) programs for alcoholism in clinical and community samples, the present study investigated whether different varieties of CBM (attention control training and approach-bias re-training) could be delivered successfully in a fully automated web-based way and whether these interventions would help self-selected problem drinkers to reduce their drinking. Participants were recruited through online advertising, which resulted in 697 interested participants, of whom 615 were screened in. Of the 314 who initiated training, 136 completed a pretest, four sessions of computerized training and a posttest. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions (attention control or one of three varieties of approach-bias re-training) or a sham-training control condition. The general pattern of findings was that participants in all conditions (including participants in the control-training condition) reduced their drinking. It is suggested that integrating CBM with online cognitive and motivational interventions could improve results.

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The introduction of extended producer responsibility forces Original Equipment Manufacturers to set up a logistic network for take back, processing and recovery of discarded products. In this paper, we discuss a business case study carried out at Océ, a copier firm in Venlo (NL). It concerns the installment of remanufacturing processes. There is a choice from two locations in Venlo (NL) and one in Prague (Czech Republic), where assignments are subjected to managerial constraints. The study is meant to verify whether the strategic decision of Océ to move remanufacturing activities to the Czech Republic is also economically feasible. We limit ourselves to an optimisation of the HV02-machine network. We follow our general approach, in which we first determine how return products are processed (recovery strategy) and subsequently optimise the reverse logistic network design. We optimise on total operational costs over all possibilities and also compare three pregiven managerial solutions (=network designs) with a Mixed Integer Linear Programming model. Differences in economic costs appear to be very small, hence installing recovery activities in Prague for the HV02-machine must be well motivated from a strategic point of view. Moreover, we argue that besides cost minimisation, Océ should include performance indicators, such as JIT, reliability, in logistic optimisation to support its quality oriented business strategy. In addition, we discuss aspects regarding specific modelling elements in this case situation, the definition of cost functions, the possibility of optimising the forward and reverse logistic network and the use of LP-versus MILP-models in this kind of situations.

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