Dutch Focus Groups results. TR 3.54 Interactions with citizens and consumers at local scale

As part of the Endure project, funded by the EU Sixth Framework Programme, two focus group sessions were carried out in January 2010 in the Netherlands. Aim of these focus group sessions was to understand the believes, associations and attitudes people have concerning the use of pesticides and integrated pest management (IPM) in regard to apples and pears. In total 15 people participated in the focus group session and participants were heterogeneous in gender, age and background. They all bought apples and most of them visited farms are farmers markets

The Development of a Quality Scale to Measure the Impact of Quality on Supermarket Fruit Demand

This research examines how fluctuations in quality affect consumer expenditures for fresh fruit at the retail level. This paper examines how consumersÂ’' purchasing behaviors react to changes in fresh fruit quality by quantifying quality characteristics based on weekly observations. A four-point scale was created and used to quantify four different quality characteristics: bruising, markings, brilliance, and maturity. A non-linear Almost Ideal Demand System was used to model the share equations for Gala apples, Fuji apples, Red Delicious apples, other sweet apples, tart apples, pears, bananas, and oranges. Seventy-nine weeks of data on weekly store sales were collected from two grocery stores in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area. Results from the quality measures are provided and discussed. Suggestions are made for modifications to the quality measures to improve the modeling results of future fruit-demand studies.Demand and Price Analysis,

The Conceptualization of Grammatical Number

The current study investigated the nature of the mental representation of grammatical number. We used methodology from Stanfield and Zwaan (2001) in an attempt to distinguish amodal from perceptual systems. Participants read a sentence that ended with either a singular or plural noun. After reading the sentence, they viewed a picture that matched or mismatched the number of the sentence final-noun. They then judged whether the referent in the picture had been in the sentence. Participants were slower when matching a singular lexical stimulus (e.g. apple) to a plural graphic stimulus (See Figure 2) compared to the other three conditions. The results did not follow the pattern found by Stanfield & Zwaan (2001). The results are more consistent with logical entailment

Vol. 10, No. 16, Sep. 16, 2004: Illinois Fruit and Vegetable News

published or submitted for publicationnot peer reviewe

forall x: Calgary. An Introduction to Formal Logic

forall x: Calgary is a full-featured textbook on formal logic. It covers key notions of logic such as consequence and validity of arguments, the syntax of truth-functional propositional logic TFL and truth-table semantics, the syntax of first-order (predicate) logic FOL with identity (first-order interpretations), translating (formalizing) English in TFL and FOL, and Fitch-style natural deduction proof systems for both TFL and FOL. It also deals with some advanced topics such as truth-functional completeness and modal logic. Exercises with solutions are available. It is provided in PDF (for screen reading, printing, and a special version for dyslexics) and in LaTeX source code

Sam Van Aken: New Edens

Hybridized fruit trees, grafted orchids on shiny, reflective aluminum pedestals, fluorescent lights placed vertically on stands, and sheets of silver Mylar create a lush and somewhat disorienting space in contemporary artist Sam Van Aken’s most recent body of work New Edens. Van Aken makes Gettysburg College’s Schmucker Art Gallery into a kind of fantastical and futuristic winter garden. Without daylight and despite the cool fall weather of the Northeast, the dozen trees in the gallery are leafy and green, some even bearing fruit. Peach, plum, cherry, nectarine and apricot branches emerge from a single trunk and grow productively alongside their sister fruits. These surprising new plants, carefully designed and created by the artist, are titled Trees of 40 Fruits, and as time passes the artist will continue to graft more branches of various kinds of fruits onto each “parent” rootstock until he has reached forty. The saplings on display are relatively small, but eventually these trees will reach an approximate height of twenty feet. Van Aken created a nursery as part of his studio in Syracuse, New York. As an artist-cum-horticulturalist, he, like a nurturing parent, cares for his grafted fruit trees with a steadfast devotion. In his studio Van Aken carefully concocts the best fertilizers, waters carefully and diligently, removes hoards of Japanese beetles from the leaves one-by-one, and provides adequate warmth and protection for the young trees (with huge mounds of mulch and careful wrappings) during harsh New York winters. [excerpt]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/artcatalogs/1007/thumbnail.jp