Eating our way to sustainability: Are European meat and dairy processors living up to our expectations?

In Europe, sustainability in the meat and dairy industry has emerged as an issue of great concern for society. Research and pressure centre on the agricultural component and little attention has been given to the processing industry despite the integral role it plays in the European meat and dairy supply chain. This thesis aims to fill this knowledge gap by identifying the current sustainability practices of the meat and dairy processors and comparing them to society’s expectations in order to identify potential areas of improvement. Text mining of sustainability reports and web content was used to ascertain the current practices and content analysis of websites was used to identify the current expectations of society. Interviews with industry were used to determine the applicability and feasibility of the suggestions. In Europe, there are some meat and dairy processors that do not visibly engage in any sustainability management. Based on the information from the companies that do engage in sustainability management the results for the two industries generally indicate homogeneity in sustainability topics, despite minor differences between meat and dairy processors and between mediums of communication. The research found that there is high involvement and wide coverage of environmental impacts within the processing plants and the challenge currently is to work with primary production, especially with greenhouse gas emissions, land use and biodiversity issues. Economic issues were found to be underrepresented and the corporation should go beyond the strict confines of financial aid to enhance its role in sharing value, supporting community and providing resilience to economic shocks. Most social issues are also comprehensively covered in the meat and dairy industries’ sustainability disclosures; although companies need to make sure that they have implemented zero- tolerance policies for corruption, anti-competitive behaviour and human rights abuse. Facilitating consumer access to affordable and nutritious food is identified as an area requiring improvement. As regards sourcing, it became clear that supply chain responsibility is being integrated into the three sustainability pillars. In this area there are opportunities for dairy processors to work more on animal health and welfare issues and for meat processors to collaborate more holistically with farmers. Interviews conducted with industry confirmed the feasibility of the suggestions, although it is relevant for each company to use the information in the thesis to benchmark their specific practices against societal expectations and industry practices. The research also found that the use of words, headings and themes by different bodies can vary considerably in terms of content and this complicates the task of working towards uniformity within and improvement of sustainability practices

Narrowing the gap between QoS metrics and Web QoE using Above-the-fold metrics

International audiencePage load time (PLT) is still the most common application Quality of Service (QoS) metric to estimate the Quality of Experience (QoE) of Web users. Yet, recent literature abounds with proposals for alternative metrics (e.g., Above The Fold, SpeedIndex and variants) that aim at better estimating user QoE. The main purpose of this work is thus to thoroughly investigate a mapping between established and recently proposed objective metrics and user QoE. We obtain ground truth QoE via user experiments where we collect and analyze 3,400 Web accesses annotated with QoS metrics and explicit user ratings in a scale of 1 to 5, which we make available to the community. In particular, we contrast domain expert models (such as ITU-T and IQX) fed with a single QoS metric, to models trained using our ground-truth dataset over multiple QoS metrics as features. Results of our experiments show that, albeit very simple, expert models have a comparable accuracy to machine learning approaches. Furthermore, the model accuracy improves considerably when building per-page QoE models, which may raise scalability concerns as we discuss

Differentiation in the Atlantic salmon industry: A synopsis

The value chain for farmed salmon has experienced substantial changes over the past decades as a result of innovation in production technology, logistics, distribution and marketing that have helped facilitate the rapid production growth. The high level of control over the production environment in principle makes it possible for Atlantic salmon to be tailored on a number of product attributes or dimensions in response to requirements from different customer groups. However, when compared to meat production, differentiation in farmed salmon remains limited, pointing to a still immature industry. Based primarily on interviews with Norwegian producers, we offer an overview of the prominent differentiation strategies today and discuss barriers to further differentiation.acceptedVersio

Making Markets for Japanese Cinema: A Study of Distribution Practices for Japanese Films on DVD in the UK from 2008 to 2010

Thanks needed to be expressed to a number of people over the last three years – and I apologise if I forget anyone here. First of all, thank you to Rayna Denison and Keith Johnston for agreeing to oversee this research – which required reining in my enthusiasm as much as attempting to tease it out of me and turn it into coherent writing. Thanks to Mark Jancovich, who helped me get started with the PhD at UEA. A big thank you also to Andrew Kirkham and Adam Torel for doing what they do at 4Digital Asia, Third Window, and their other ventures – if they did not do it, this thesis would not exist. Also, a big thank you to my numerous other friends and family – whose support was invaluable, despite the distance between most of them and Norwich. And finally, the biggest thank you of all goes to Christina, for constantly being there with her support and encouragement

The Five Indicia of Virtual Property

[Excerpt] “Many Americans use “it” every day. Although it is intangible, it may be worth thousands of dollars. Because we can both control it and prevent other people from controlling it, we assume, without much thought, that we own it. Sometimes we pay someone a monthly fee to hold it for us. Sometimes, simply by using it, we increase its value. When we finish using it, we often sell it. “It” is virtual property, and it may take the form of an email address, a website, a bidding agent, a video game character, or any number of other intangible, digital commodities. If it were to be damaged or stolen, the immediate questions would be: (1) how should a court identify it; and (2) what degree of legal protection should it receive? Because no court or legislature in the United States yet has recognized virtual property interests, a combination of contract and custom currently controls the relationship between Internet users and service providers. […] The question therefore becomes, how should courts identify protectable virtual property interests? Partially due to the dramatic success of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs)9 and the rise of secondary markets for virtual characters and treasures from those games, a recent frenzy of legal scholarship has struggled to resolve this question. This note supports the legal recognition of virtual property interests, as already convincingly justified by the legal analogy to traditional property interests set forth by Professor Joshua Fairfield, buttressed by the practical reality that virtual property has significant economic value. Building on these rationales, this note proposes five indicia, common to most forms of virtual property, which a court should use to identify legally protectable virtual property interests on the Internet. These indicia are: (1) rivalry; (2) persistence; (3) interconnectivity; (4) secondary markets; and (5) value-added-by-users. This note cautions, however, against applying this newfound definition indiscriminately against the interests of the very entities without whom the property would not exist: the businesses hosting the remotely accessed computer resources (i.e., the service providers). […] Part III of this note applies the five indicia to the well-established framework of traditional property to illustrate this balancing process. Throughout the development of the law in this area, courts must retain the freedom and flexibility to craft appropriate equitable remedies on a case-by-case basis, and special attention should be directed to the practical issues commonly faced by Internet service providers. The ultimate purpose of virtual property jurisprudence should be to strike a balance that provides legal redress to users whose legitimate virtual property interests have been violated while simultaneously reducing liability and disincentives to service providers who promote and sustain the growth of the Internet.

The Influence of Social Networking Sites on Buying Behaviors of Millennials

Social media sites have become an important part of many individuals’ lives. According to the Pew Research Center (2010), Millennials, also known as Gen Y, are living their lives on the internet where 75% of them have a profile on a social networking site. When compared with only 50% of Gen Xers and 30% of Boomers, this gives them the distinct identity that they are more technologically advanced

4th. International Conference on Advanced Research Methods and Analytics (CARMA 2022)

Research methods in economics and social sciences are evolving with the increasing availability of Internet and Big Data sources of information. As these sources, methods, and applications become more interdisciplinary, the 4th International Conference on Advanced Research Methods and Analytics (CARMA) is a forum for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas and advances on how emerging research methods and sources are applied to different fields of social sciences as well as to discuss current and future challenges. Due to the covid pandemic, CARMA 2022 is planned as a virtual and face-to-face conference, simultaneouslyDoménech I De Soria, J.; Vicente Cuervo, MR. (2022). 4th. International Conference on Advanced Research Methods and Analytics (CARMA 2022). Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/CARMA2022.2022.1595

Information Leakage Attacks and Countermeasures

The scientific community has been consistently working on the pervasive problem of information leakage, uncovering numerous attack vectors, and proposing various countermeasures. Despite these efforts, leakage incidents remain prevalent, as the complexity of systems and protocols increases, and sophisticated modeling methods become more accessible to adversaries. This work studies how information leakages manifest in and impact interconnected systems and their users. We first focus on online communications and investigate leakages in the Transport Layer Security protocol (TLS). Using modern machine learning models, we show that an eavesdropping adversary can efficiently exploit meta-information (e.g., packet size) not protected by the TLS’ encryption to launch fingerprinting attacks at an unprecedented scale even under non-optimal conditions. We then turn our attention to ultrasonic communications, and discuss their security shortcomings and how adversaries could exploit them to compromise anonymity network users (even though they aim to offer a greater level of privacy compared to TLS). Following up on these, we delve into physical layer leakages that concern a wide array of (networked) systems such as servers, embedded nodes, Tor relays, and hardware cryptocurrency wallets. We revisit location-based side-channel attacks and develop an exploitation neural network. Our model demonstrates the capabilities of a modern adversary but also presents an inexpensive tool to be used by auditors for detecting such leakages early on during the development cycle. Subsequently, we investigate techniques that further minimize the impact of leakages found in production components. Our proposed system design distributes both the custody of secrets and the cryptographic operation execution across several components, thus making the exploitation of leaks difficult