Transparency in Meat Production – Consumer Perception at the Point of Sale

As a result of a large number of food scandals, societal interest in transparency in the food sector has grown considerably. Deficits have been discovered, which new legal frameworks of the EU and the German legislative body have attempted to address. Hence, the creation of transparency in the production process has been the focus of the legislation. In this context, traceability systems for animal-based foods, for instance, have been established (Regulation (EC) 178/2002). In addition to tracking and tracing, one finds in the public discussion an increasing number of demands for further information, for instance information on food safety, animal and environmental protection and generally for sustainability of the production processes for foods. This is intended as a response to the general call for more transparency or a "gläserne Produktion ". It has not been sufficiently clarified which information about the production process, and thus which level of transparency is actually desired, or can actually be processed, by consumers at the point of sale. This is related to the question of to what extent the demands for more transparency in meat production are influenced by new campaigns of many consumer organisations and NGOs, or whether these actually represent user preferences at the point of sale. In order to analyse this topic from the viewpoint of the consumer, a large-scale empirical study has been conducted. This is intended to determine what transparency expectations, in the form of information on packaged pork, consumers have, using an adaptive conjoint analysisTransparency, pork production, adaptive conjoint analysis., Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Labor and Human Capital,

Perceptual Copyright Protection Using Multiresolution Wavelet-Based Watermarking And Fuzzy Logic

In this paper, an efficiently DWT-based watermarking technique is proposed to embed signatures in images to attest the owner identification and discourage the unauthorized copying. This paper deals with a fuzzy inference filter to choose the larger entropy of coefficients to embed watermarks. Unlike most previous watermarking frameworks which embedded watermarks in the larger coefficients of inner coarser subbands, the proposed technique is based on utilizing a context model and fuzzy inference filter by embedding watermarks in the larger-entropy coefficients of coarser DWT subbands. The proposed approaches allow us to embed adaptive casting degree of watermarks for transparency and robustness to the general image-processing attacks such as smoothing, sharpening, and JPEG compression. The approach has no need the original host image to extract watermarks. Our schemes have been shown to provide very good results in both image transparency and robustness.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure

Active Noise Control System With Adaptive Wind Noise Mitigation

This disclosure describes adaptive wind noise mitigation to provide adaptive acoustic transparency that is based on ambient wind levels. An acoustic transparency system is proposed that includes feedback and feedforward filters. The feedback filter can be dynamically throttled to mitigate low-frequency band wind noise. The feedforward filter is utilized to reduce mid-frequency band wind noise while still maintaining or enhancing high frequency acoustic transparency to enable better conversation quality. A two-microphone coherence-based metric is utilized to detect wind events and to adaptively adjust a transparency level based on the detected wind noise. Digital signal processing (DSP) control blocks are utilized to mitigate mid-and-low frequency wind noise passing into a user’s ear, while maintaining or enhancing high frequency transparency gain that enables more speech to pass through to the user’s ear, thereby improving conversational quality even in the presence of loud wind noise

Challenging the Need for Transparency, Controllability, and Consistency in Usable Adaptation Design

Adaptive applications constitute the basis for many ubiquitous computing scenarios as they can dynamically adapt to changing contexts. The usability design principles transparency, controllability, and consistency have been recommended for the design of adaptive interfaces. However, designing self-adaptive applications that may act completely autonomous is still a challenging task because there is no set of usability design guidelines. Applying the three principles in the design of the five different adaptations of the mobile adaptive application Meet-U revealed as difficult. Based on an analysis of the design problem space, we elaborate an approach for the design of usable adaptations. Our approach is based on a notification design concept which calculates the attention costs and utility benefits of notified adaptations by varying the design aspects transparency and controllability. We present several designs for the adaptations of Meet‑U. The results of a user study shows that the notification design approach is beneficial for the design of adaptations. Varying transparency and controllability is necessary to adjust an adaptation’s design to the particular context of use. This leads to a partially inconsistent design for adaptations within an application

TILT: A GDPR-Aligned Transparency Information Language and Toolkit for Practical Privacy Engineering

In this paper, we present TILT, a transparency information language and toolkit explicitly designed to represent and process transparency information in line with the requirements of the GDPR and allowing for a more automated and adaptive use of such information than established, legalese data protection policies do. We provide a detailed analysis of transparency obligations from the GDPR to identify the expressiveness required for a formal transparency language intended to meet respective legal requirements. In addition, we identify a set of further, non-functional requirements that need to be met to foster practical adoption in real-world (web) information systems engineering. On this basis, we specify our formal language and present a respective, fully implemented toolkit around it. We then evaluate the practical applicability of our language and toolkit and demonstrate the additional prospects it unlocks through two different use cases: a) the inter-organizational analysis of personal data-related practices allowing, for instance, to uncover data sharing networks based on explicitly announced transparency information and b) the presentation of formally represented transparency information to users through novel, more comprehensible, and potentially adaptive user interfaces, heightening data subjects' actual informedness about data-related practices and, thus, their sovereignty. Altogether, our transparency information language and toolkit allow - differently from previous work - to express transparency information in line with actual legal requirements and practices of modern (web) information systems engineering and thereby pave the way for a multitude of novel possibilities to heighten transparency and user sovereignty in practice.Comment: Accepted for publication at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency 2021 (ACM FAccT'21). This is a preprint manuscript (authors' own version before final copy-editing

Adapting Human Rights

Governmental leaders, scholars, and activists have advocated for human rights to food, water, education, health care, and energy. Such rights, also called positive rights, place an affirmative duty upon the state to provide a minimum quantity and quality of these goods and services to all citizens. But food, education, water, and health care are so different–in how they are produced, consumed, and financed–that the implementation of a positive right must be adapted to the distinctive characteristics of the good or service it guarantees. The primary aims of this adaptive implementation are transparency, enforceability and sustainability in the provision of positive rights. Only by adapting a positive right to its policy environment can such a right function as a viable means of protecting disadvantaged members of society. This article uses the example of positive rights to public utilities, such as water and energy, to illustrate adaptive implementation of positive rights. In doing so, this article explains why and how a positive right must be adapted to the unique policy environment of a given public utility

Laminar Cortical Dynamics of 3D Surface Perception: Stratification, transparency, and Neon Color Spreading

How does the laminar organization of cortical circuitry in areas VI and V2 give rise to 3D percepts of stratification, transparency, and neon color spreading in response to 2D pictures and 3D scenes? Psychophysical experiments have shown that such 3D percepts are sensitive to whether contiguous image regions have the same relative contrast polarity (dark-light or lightdark), yet long-range perceptual grouping is known to pool over opposite contrast polarities. The ocularity of contiguous regions is also critical for neon color spreading: Having different ocularity despite the contrast relationship that favors neon spreading blocks the spread. In addition, half visible points in a stereogram can induce near-depth transparency if the contrast relationship favors transparency in the half visible areas. It thus seems critical to have the whole contrast relationship in a monocular configuration, since splitting it between two stereogram images cancels the effect. What adaptive functions of perceptual grouping enable it to both preserve sensitivity to monocular contrast and also to pool over opposite contrasts? Aspects of cortical development, grouping, attention, perceptual learning, stereopsis and 3D planar surface perception have previously been analyzed using a 3D LAMINART model of cortical areas VI, V2, and V4. The present work consistently extends this model to show how like-polarity competition between VI simple cells in layer 4 may be combined with other LAMINART grouping mechanisms, such as cooperative pooling of opposite polarities at layer 2/3 complex cells. The model also explains how the Metelli Rules can lead to transparent percepts, how bistable transparency percepts can arise in which either surface can be perceived as transparent, and how such a transparency reversal can be facilitated by an attention shift. The like-polarity inhibition prediction is consistent with lateral masking experiments in which two f1anking Gabor patches with the same contrast polarity as the target increase the target detection threshold when they approach the target. It is also consistent with LAMINART simulations of cortical development. Other model explanations and testable predictions will also be presented.Air Force Office of Naval Research (F49620-01-1-0397); Office of Naval Research (N00014-01-1-0624