A new wine tasting approach based on emotional responses to rapidly recognize classic european wine styles

Conventional tasting sheets are widely used to evaluate wine quality in wine tasting competitions. However, the higher scores are mostly obtained by international commercial wines, resulting in lower scores being awarded to the classic Europeanwines. We hypothesize that this is due to the tasting methodology that fails to recognize this wine style. Therefore, the purpose of this work was to show the implementation of a new wine tasting approach to overcome this drawback. The proposed training technique is based on the emotional responses of the taster after smelling two wines of clearly opposite styles. The first wine is characterized by high aromatic intensity but low in-mouth intensity, perceived as disappointing to the taster, here defined as an “easy” wine. The second wine is characterized as a wine with low aromatic intensity but that provides an unexpectedly positive in-mouth experience, here defined as a “difficult” wine. These emotions are explained by the wine sensorial characteristics. The “easy” wine has an intense, simple smell with short persistence while the “difficult” wine has a low intensity, complex aroma, and long persistence. The first style corresponds to the international commercial wines most prized in international wine challenges. The second, frequently rejected by untrained tasters, is consistent with the “so called” classic European wines, and is characterized by light red or yellow straw colors, weak smell intensity, and aggressive mouth-feel. After no more than four training sessions and using the OIV tasting sheet, inexperienced tasters were able to score “difficult” wines equally as “easy” wines and understand their different attributes. In conclusion, this new tasting approach may be used by wine professionals to explain the characteristics of high quality wines that are not easily recognized by untrained consumersinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Multiparty talk in the novel: the distribution of tea and talk in a scene from Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief

This article argues that studies of fictional dialogue have hitherto neglected the specific dynamics of multiparty talk. I will contend that this neglect contributes to the perpetuation of an "ideal" of conversation that allows no space for either the frustrations and inequalities of such encounters or the unique pleasures they may bring to the reader. I urge the importance of distinguishing between group talk, in which there is some element of cohesion and shared goals, and multiparty talk, in which the representation foregrounds fragmentation and explores the often subtle power games played by the participants. Focusing on a scene from Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief (1986 [1932]), I argue that Waugh is sensitive to the dynamics of multiparty talk while orchestrating the representation for comic effect. I propose that analyzing such scenes of multiparty talk must make us reassess not only how we theorize fictional dialogue, but how far our models of everyday speech serve to privilege and universalize certain conversational practices and mechanisms based almost exclusively on the duologue

Emotional responses elicited by wine when pairing with high fat food

Mestrado em Viticultura e Enologia / Instituto Superior de Agronomia / Faculdade de Ciências. Universidade do PortoThis work was aimed at the evaluation of emotional responses elicited by wine before and after food consumption. The tastings were performed by one trained panel and by consumers, segmented by gender, Vinotype, 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP) sensitivity and Saliva flow rate. Three commercial red wines with different sensory features were used: i) Grand Gold awarded wine from Alentejo (2013); ii) wine from altitude vineyards in Douro (2011), iii) classical European old wine (1999) from Bairrada. Wines were evaluated using a tasting sheet with emotional and conventional tasting descriptors before and after eating a typical Portuguese dish, whose distinctive feature was its high fat content. Overall, food did not change the global evaluation scores given to the wines but some of their characteristics were scored significantly different through the emotional tasting. The results of both panels demonstrated that the emotional responses were more correlated with the global evaluation of the wines than the classical sensory descriptors. Within the trained individuals, the main correlations with global evaluation were obtained with “Initial Impression”, “Expectation for the mouth” and “Impression in relation to odor”. In particular, the global evaluation for the Bairrada wine, could be predicted by a model including these three variables with a R2=0.73. With the untrained tasters, the correlation with global evaluation was only significant for the “Impression in relation to odor”. The average scores given to the three wines by both panels did not diverge, despite their different sensory attributes. Therefore, our work only reflected trends in wine preferences. The untrained panel preferred the Alentejo wine while the trained panel preferred the Douro wine, before the food ingestion. The correlations between the global evaluation and the other sensory descriptors for the Alentejo wine could not explain this preference. We speculate that the untrained panel scored the wines based on what they are used to drink, giving lower scores to the unfamiliar one. The trained panel demonstrated a higher correlation between emotional and sensory descriptors. In fact, the trained panel seemed to understand better the different range of qualities of the wines. After ingesting food, the preference changed only for the trained panel, showing preference to the Bairrada wine. Both panels agreed that the old Bairrada was the most complex and difficult wine to understand In conclusion, the emotional tasting sheet was easy to interpret by all segments of consumers, leading to open and fair answers because it appeals to individual personal feelings. This tasting approach appears to be promising in the rapid learning of the different wine styles. In the future, it would be interesting to evaluate the evolution of scores given to unfamiliar wines that would require time to be appreciated using appropriate foods. This way, the classical European wines, that are difficult to understand by consumers, would have a better chance to be correctly appreciatedN/

Porous LSCF/Dense 3YSZ Interface Fracture Toughness Measured by Single Cantilever Beam Wedge Test

Sandwich specimens were prepared by firing a thin inter-layer of porous La0.6Sr0.4Co0.2Fe0.8O3-d (LSCF) to bond a thin tetragonal yttria-stabilised zirconia (YSZ) beam to a thick YSZ substrate. Fracture of the joint was evaluated by introducing a wedge between the two YSZ adherands so that the stored energy in the thin YSZ cantilever beam drives a stable crack in the adhesive bond and allows the critical energy release rate for crack extension (fracture toughness) to be measured. The crack path in most specimens showed a mixture of adhesive failure (at the YSZ-LSCF interface) and cohesive failure (within the LSCF). It was found that the extent of adhesive fracture increased with firing temperature and decreased with LSCF layer thickness. The adhesive failures were mainly at the interface between the LSCF and the thin YSZ beam and FEM modelling revealed that this is due to asymmetric stresses in the LSCF. Within the firing temperature range of 1000-1150C, the bonding fracture toughness appears to have a strong dependence on firing temperature. However, the intrinsic adhesive fracture toughness of the LSCF/YSZ interface was estimated to be 11 Jm2 and was not firing temperature dependent within the temperature range investigated.Comment: 13 figures, 1 table, journal paper publishe

Development of advanced digital techniques for data acquisition processing and communication Interim scientific report

Image correlation and computerized simulation applied to data acquisition and imaging technique

Redefining A in RGBA: Towards a Standard for Graphical 3D Printing

Advances in multimaterial 3D printing have the potential to reproduce various visual appearance attributes of an object in addition to its shape. Since many existing 3D file formats encode color and translucency by RGBA textures mapped to 3D shapes, RGBA information is particularly important for practical applications. In contrast to color (encoded by RGB), which is specified by the object's reflectance, selected viewing conditions and a standard observer, translucency (encoded by A) is neither linked to any measurable physical nor perceptual quantity. Thus, reproducing translucency encoded by A is open for interpretation. In this paper, we propose a rigorous definition for A suitable for use in graphical 3D printing, which is independent of the 3D printing hardware and software, and which links both optical material properties and perceptual uniformity for human observers. By deriving our definition from the absorption and scattering coefficients of virtual homogeneous reference materials with an isotropic phase function, we achieve two important properties. First, a simple adjustment of A is possible, which preserves the translucency appearance if an object is re-scaled for printing. Second, determining the value of A for a real (potentially non-homogeneous) material, can be achieved by minimizing a distance function between light transport measurements of this material and simulated measurements of the reference materials. Such measurements can be conducted by commercial spectrophotometers used in graphic arts. Finally, we conduct visual experiments employing the method of constant stimuli, and derive from them an embedding of A into a nearly perceptually uniform scale of translucency for the reference materials.Comment: 20 pages (incl. appendices), 20 figures. Version with higher quality images: https://cloud-ext.igd.fraunhofer.de/s/pAMH67XjstaNcrF (main article) and https://cloud-ext.igd.fraunhofer.de/s/4rR5bH3FMfNsS5q (appendix). Supplemental material including code: https://cloud-ext.igd.fraunhofer.de/s/9BrZaj5Uh5d0cOU/downloa

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 43 (09) 1990

published or submitted for publicatio

Alpha, Betti and the Megaparsec Universe: on the Topology of the Cosmic Web

We study the topology of the Megaparsec Cosmic Web in terms of the scale-dependent Betti numbers, which formalize the topological information content of the cosmic mass distribution. While the Betti numbers do not fully quantify topology, they extend the information beyond conventional cosmological studies of topology in terms of genus and Euler characteristic. The richer information content of Betti numbers goes along the availability of fast algorithms to compute them. For continuous density fields, we determine the scale-dependence of Betti numbers by invoking the cosmologically familiar filtration of sublevel or superlevel sets defined by density thresholds. For the discrete galaxy distribution, however, the analysis is based on the alpha shapes of the particles. These simplicial complexes constitute an ordered sequence of nested subsets of the Delaunay tessellation, a filtration defined by the scale parameter, $\alpha$. As they are homotopy equivalent to the sublevel sets of the distance field, they are an excellent tool for assessing the topological structure of a discrete point distribution. In order to develop an intuitive understanding for the behavior of Betti numbers as a function of $\alpha$, and their relation to the morphological patterns in the Cosmic Web, we first study them within the context of simple heuristic Voronoi clustering models. Subsequently, we address the topology of structures emerging in the standard LCDM scenario and in cosmological scenarios with alternative dark energy content. The evolution and scale-dependence of the Betti numbers is shown to reflect the hierarchical evolution of the Cosmic Web and yields a promising measure of cosmological parameters. We also discuss the expected Betti numbers as a function of the density threshold for superlevel sets of a Gaussian random field.Comment: 42 pages, 14 figure