REGULATORY TARGETS AND REGIMES FOR FOOD SAFETY: A COMPARISON OF NORTH AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN APPROACHES

Food quality, international trade, harmonization, mutual recognition, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

COBRA framework to evaluate e-government services: A citizen-centric perspective

E-government services involve many stakeholders who have different objectives that can have an impact on success. Among these stakeholders, citizens are the primary stakeholders of government activities. Accordingly, their satisfaction plays an important role in e-government success. Although several models have been proposed to assess the success of e-government services through measuring users' satisfaction levels, they fail to provide a comprehensive evaluation model. This study provides an insight and critical analysis of the extant literature to identify the most critical factors and their manifested variables for user satisfaction in the provision of e-government services. The various manifested variables are then grouped into a new quantitative analysis framework consisting of four main constructs: cost; benefit; risk and opportunity (COBRA) by analogy to the well-known SWOT qualitative analysis framework. The COBRA measurement scale is developed, tested, refined and validated on a sample group of e-government service users in Turkey. A structured equation model is used to establish relationships among the identified constructs, associated variables and users' satisfaction. The results confirm that COBRA framework is a useful approach for evaluating the success of e-government services from citizens' perspective and it can be generalised to other perspectives and measurement contexts. Crown Copyright © 2014.PIAP-GA-2008-230658) from the European Union Framework Program and another grant (NPRP 09-1023-5-158) from the Qatar National Research Fund (amember of Qatar Foundation

Hypermedia support for argumentation-based rationale: 15 years on from gIBIS and QOC

Having developed, used and evaluated some of the early IBIS-based approaches to design rationale (DR) such as gIBIS and QOC in the late 1980s/mid-1990s, we describe the subsequent evolution of the argumentation-based paradigm through software support, and perspectives drawn from modeling and meeting facilitation. Particular attention is given to the challenge of negotiating the overheads of capturing this form of rationale. Our approach has maintained a strong emphasis on keeping the representational scheme as simple as possible to enable real time meeting mediation and capture, attending explicitly to the skills required to use the approach well, particularly for the sort of participatory, multi-stakeholder requirements analysis demanded by many design problems. However, we can then specialize the notation and the way in which the tool is used in the service of specific methodologies, supported by a customizable hypermedia environment, and interoperable with other software tools. After presenting this approach, called Compendium, we present examples to illustrate the capabilities for support security argumentation in requirements engineering, template driven modeling for document generation, and IBIS-based indexing of and navigation around video records of meetings

Imagining Corporate Sustainability as a Public Good Rather than a Corporate Bad

Corporations have been criticized for their environmental misdeeds for over a century, so it is not surprising that many view corporate approaches to sustainability with skepticism. Reports of green-washing and other forms of misleading advertising by a handful of corporations only serve to reinforce this negative perception.The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Busines

Developing systems to control food adulteration

The objective of this study is to explore the current strategies available to monitor and detect the economically and criminally motivated adulteration of food, identifying their strengths and weaknesses and recommend new approaches and policies to strengthen future capabilities to counter adulteration in a globalized food environment. Many techniques are used to detect the presence of adulterants. However, this approach relies on the adulterant, or means of substitution, being "known" and an analytical method being available. Further techniques verify provenance claims made about a food product e.g. breed, variety etc. as well as the original geographic location of food production. These consider wholeness, or not, of a food item and so do not need to necessarily identify the actual adulterant just whether the food is complete. The conceptual framework developed in this research focuses on the process of predicting, reacting and detecting economically and criminally motivated food adulteratio

Point of Purchase Communication: Role of Information Search, Store Benefit and Shopping Involvement

Point of Purchase (PoP) is the place where a customer is about to buy the product. This is the crucial point where the exchange takes place. It offers us a last chance to remind or attract customers. In spite of a considerable expenditure on point of purchase material by companies, there is a lack of an established method of measuring the effectiveness of communication at the retail outlet. The current study is an attempt to define and measure the extent of usage of PoP by consumers while shopping. It explores the phenomenon with the help of an experimentation using two main variables; level of information search and store benefits sought. It uses shopping involvement as a mediating variable. During the course of study scales for usage of PoP communication and shopping involvement were developed. In-depth interviews were carried among shoppers to understand their motivations and gratifications with regard to shopping. The interview findings were used to develop scales, which were tested before being used during the experiment. The experiments involved building scenarios specific to shopping situations. Participant observations were carried out at stores with different formats. The study found that all the three variables were significant in terms of main as well as interaction effects. Based on the findings the authors suggest a framework for enhancing the effectiveness of PoP Communication.

Evaluation of Airport Security Training Programs: Perspectives and Issues

While many governments and airport operators have emphasized the importance of security training and committed a large amount of budget to security training programs, the implementation of security training programs was not proactive but reactive. Moreover, most of the security training programs were employed as a demand or a trendchasing activity from the government. In order to identify issues in airport security training and to develop desirable security training procedures in an airport, this preliminary study aims at providing (1) the description of current state of airport security training and training in general, (2) the study design and interview guide for studying airport security training, and (3) expected outcome from the study