Understanding Blood versus Blond Orange Consumption: A Cross-Cultural Study in Four Countries

Understanding consumer perceptions and attitudes to specific fruit is key information for not only increasing fruit consumption, but also for marketing reasons. It may also give clues to breeders to set quality objectives. This study explores different aspects that help to explain blood vs. blond orange consumption: availability and consumption habit, satisfaction attributes, facilitators and consumption barriers, consumption contexts, expectations and purchase intention. The study was conducted in China, Mexico, Spain and Italy, where citrus fruit consumers were invited to respond an online questionnaire. Our results revealed Italy as the country with the highest availability and consumption of blood oranges, followed by China, Mexico and Spain. "Liking" and "healthy properties" were the most important reasons for consumption irrespectively of orange type, but certain differences among countries were detected in secondary reasons. In all the countries, "juicy" was the most relevant attribute for consumer satisfaction, followed by flavour/taste attributes. "Aromatic" and "unfibrous" were substantial requirements for Italians and Chinese, while Spaniards attached importance to the blood oranges colour. Regarding consumption contexts, "eat with salt or chilly powder" was specific for Mexico, while "to improve health", "as a gift" or "at a restaurant" were contexts mainly cited in China. Despite taste preferences for other fruit being the main consumption barrier in all the countries for both orange types, the relevance of other barriers depended on culture and orange type. Mexican participants seemed to take a more neophobic attitude to blood oranges, while "inconvenient" was reported as a barrier for consuming blond ones in Spain and China. We conclude that blond and blood oranges can co-exist on markets at a high consumption rate, as in Italy. Specific interventions are needed in other countries because consumer attitudes to oranges, mainly blood ones, depend on culture

Reshaping the African Internet: From scattered islands to a connected continent

There is an increasing awareness amongst developing regions on the importance of localizing Internet traffic in the quest for fast, affordable, and available Internet access. In this paper, we focus on Africa, where 37 IXPs are currently interconnecting local ISPs, but mostly at the country level. An option to enrich connectivity on the continent and incentivize content providers to establish presence in the region is to interconnect ISPs present at isolated IXPs by creating a distributed IXP layout spanning the continent. The goal of this paper is to investigate whether such IXP interconnection would be possible, and if successful, to estimate the best-case benefits that could be realized in terms of traffic localization and performance. Our hope is that quantitatively demonstrating the benefits will provide incentives for ISPs to intensify their peering relationships in the region. However, it is challenging to estimate this best-case scenario, due to numerous economic, political, and geographical factors influencing the region. Towards this end, we begin with a thorough analysis of the environment in Africa. We then investigate a naive approach to IXP interconnection, which shows that a theoretically optimal solution would be infeasible in practice due to the prevailing socio-economic conditions in the region. We therefore provide an innovative, realistic four-step interconnection scheme to achieve the distributed IXP layout that considers and parameterizes external socio-economic factors using publicly available datasets. We demonstrate that our constrained solution doubles the percentage of continental intra-African paths, reduces their lengths, and drastically decreases the median of their RTTs as well as RTTs to ASes hosting the top 10 global and top 10 regional Alexa websites. Our approach highlights how, given real-world constraints, a solution requires careful considerations in order to be practically realizable.Rodérick Fanou was partially supported by IMDEA Networks Institute, US NSF grant CNS-1414177, and the project BRADE (P2013/ICE-2958) from the Directorate General of Universities and Research, Board of Education, Madrid Regional Governement. Francisco Valera was partially funded by the European Commission under FP7 project LEONE (FP7-317647). Amogh Dhamdhere was partially funded by US NSF grants CNS-1414177 and CNS-1513847.Publicad

Insights on the use of wind speed vertical extrapolation methods

The present work aims to study the influence of using different methods for wind speed extrapolation in energy production calculations. A dataset of 21 meteorological masts from several landscape characteristics and locations, with at least one year of 10-minute wind speed/direction data, was used as the basis for calculations. Both the power law through estimation of wind shear coefficients, and the logarithmic-based profile using WAsP, were used as mathematical models for predicting wind shear. Wind speed extrapolation was performed either from the top-most height, using a distance method that incorporated all measurement heights, or using the function for wind shear coefficient prediction. It was found that using the logarithmicbased profile was the less reliable of all studied methods. The study showed that the most accurate method was the power law with wind shear coefficients estimated from the two upper heights closest to the extrapolation height, by wind direction sector of 30º, and the wind speeds extrapolation from the topmost height of the two. It is suggested that the use of this method reduces uncertainty in AEP estimates.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Purinergic receptors in ocular inflammation

Inflammation is a complex process that implies the interaction between cells and molecular mediators, which, when not properly 'tuned,' can lead to disease. When inflammation affects the eye, it can produce severe disorders affecting the superficial and internal parts of the visual organ. The nucleoside adenosine and nucleotides including adenine mononucleotides like ADP and ATP and dinucleotides such as P(1),P(4)-diadenosine tetraphosphate (Ap4A), and P(1),P(5)-diadenosine pentaphosphate (Ap5A) are present in different ocular locations and therefore they may contribute/modulate inflammatory processes. Adenosine receptors, in particular A2A adenosine receptors, present anti-inflammatory action in acute and chronic retinal inflammation. Regarding the A3 receptor, selective agonists like N(6)-(3-iodobenzyl)-5'-N-methylcarboxamidoadenosine (CF101) have been used for the treatment of inflammatory ophthalmic diseases such as dry eye and uveoretinitis. Sideways, diverse stimuli (sensory stimulation, large intraocular pressure increases) can produce a release of ATP from ocular sensory innervation or after injury to ocular tissues. Then, ATP will activate purinergic P2 receptors present in sensory nerve endings, the iris, the ciliary body, or other tissues surrounding the anterior chamber of the eye to produce uveitis/endophthalmitis. In summary, adenosine and nucleotides can activate receptors in ocular structures susceptible to suffer from inflammatory processes. This involvement suggests the possible use of purinergic agonists and antagonists as therapeutic targets for ocular inflammation

ImageNet-Patch: A dataset for benchmarking machine learning robustness against adversarial patches

Adversarial patches are optimized contiguous pixel blocks in an input image that cause a machine-learning model to misclassify it. However, their optimization is computationally demanding, and requires careful hyperparameter tuning, potentially leading to suboptimal robustness evaluations. To overcome these issues, we propose ImageNet-Patch, a dataset to benchmark machine-learning models against adversarial patches. The dataset is built by first optimizing a set of adversarial patches against an ensemble of models, using a state-of-the-art attack that creates transferable patches. The corresponding patches are then randomly rotated and translated, and finally applied to the ImageNet data. We use ImageNet-Patch to benchmark the robustness of 127 models against patch attacks, and also validate the effectiveness of the given patches in the physical domain (i.e., by printing and applying them to real-world objects). We conclude by discussing how our dataset could be used as a benchmark for robustness, and how our methodology can be generalized to other domains. We open source our dataset and evaluation code at https://github.com/pralab/ImageNet-Patch

Cardiovascular disease behavioral risk factors among Latinos by citizenship and documentation status.

BACKGROUND:Studies have observed that recent Latino immigrants tend to have a physical health advantage compared to immigrants who have been in the US for many years or Latinos who are born in the United States. An explanation of this phenomenon is that recent immigrants have positive health behaviors that protect them from chronic disease risk. This study aims to determine if trends in positive cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk behaviors extend to Latino immigrants in California according to citizenship and documentation status. METHODS:We examined CVD behavioral risk factors by citizenship/documentation statuses among Latinos and non-Latino US-born whites in the 2011-2015 waves of the California Health Interview Survey. Adjusted multivariable logistic regressions estimated the odds for CVD behavioral risk factors, and analyses were stratified by sex. RESULTS:In adjusted analyses, using US-born Latinos as the reference group, undocumented Latino immigrants had the lowest odds of current smoking, binge drinking, and frequency of fast food consumption. There were no differences across the groups for fruit/vegetable intake and walking for leisure. Among those with high blood pressure, undocumented immigrants were least likely to be on medication. Undocumented immigrant women had better patterns of CVD behavioral risk factors on some measures compared with other Latino citizenship and documentation groups. CONCLUSIONS:This study observes that the healthy Latino immigrant advantage seems to apply to undocumented female immigrants, but it does not necessarily extend to undocumented male immigrants who had similar behavioral risk profiles to US-born Latinos

Design and practical deployment of a network-centric remotely piloted aircraft system

Remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPASs) are gaining more are more relevance during the last decade since more applications are being enabled by lighter planes with increasing autonomy, higher ceilings, and more powerful transmission technologies. The integration of the RPAS as part of network-centric warfare would be a very important milestone to achieve because of the huge amount of information and capabilities that all these aircrafts can incorporate into the global scheme. This integration is easier for handheld (short-range) RPASs since their communications are typically based on digital transmission like WiFi or WiMAX, but it may not be as obvious for bigger RPASs (long-range, e.g., tactical or medium/high altitude systems) because their line of sight communications are frequently based on analog transmissions. This implies indirect integration into network-centric warfare by means of the ground control station (satellite communications, when available, may suffer notorious delay for certain applications). This article presents a recent practical experience, including flight test campaigns, deploying an all- IP communication architecture into one of the most relevant Spanish tactical RPASs, the SIVA, used by both the Spanish Army and the Spanish Air Force for the last 10 years. This deployment enables cost-effective integration of this RPAS (and its natural successor, the MILANO, a medium- altitude RPAS) into the network-centric warfare by means of direct TCP/IP transmissions over a long-range digital line of sight channel combined with satellite communications for beyond line of sight operations. The proposed design includes network-level security over the radio interfaces, automatic data link selection, support of remote video terminals, and access connectivity toward external IPv6 networks.This work has been partially granted by the Spanish Ministry of Defense through the DRONE project (DN8644-COINCIDENTE-10032110042). The authors want to acknowledge the INTA and Erzia Technologies S.L. personnel who participated in the DRONE project for fruitful collaboration and excellent work. The work of Francisco Valera has been partially funded by the Spanish Government through the MINECO eeCONTENT Project (TEC2011-29688-C02-02)

Structure–activity relationships of dinucleotides: Potent and selective agonists of P2Y receptors

Dinucleoside polyphosphates act as agonists on purinergic P2Y receptors to mediate a variety of cellular processes. Symmetrical, naturally occurring purine dinucleotides are found in most living cells and their actions are generally known. Unsymmetrical purine dinucleotides and all pyrimidine containing dinucleotides, however, are not as common and therefore their actions are not well understood. To carry out a thorough examination of the activities and specificities of these dinucleotides, a robust method of synthesis was developed to allow manipulation of either nucleoside of the dinucleotide as well as the phosphate chain lengths. Adenosine containing dinucleotides exhibit some level of activity on P2Y1 while uridine containing dinucleotides have some level of agonist response on P2Y2 and P2Y6. The length of the linking phosphate chain determines a different specificity; diphosphates are most accurately mimicked by dinucleoside triphosphates and triphosphates most resemble dinucleoside tetraphosphates. The pharmacological activities and relative metabolic stabilities of these dinucleotides are reported with their potential therapeutic applications being discussed

Moving meshes to solve the time-dependent neutron diffusion equation in hexagonal geometry

To simulate the behaviour of a nuclear power reactor it is necessary to be able to integrate the time-dependent neutron diffusion equation inside the reactor core. Here the spatial discretization of this equation is done using a finite element method that permits h-p refinements for different geometries. This means that the accuracy of the solution can be improved refining the spatial mesh (h-refinement) and also increasing the degree of the polynomial expansions used in the finite element method (p-refinement). Transients involving the movement of the control rod banks have the problem known as the rod-cusping effect. Previous studies have usually approached the problem using a fixed mesh scheme defining averaged material properties. The present work proposes the use of a moving mesh scheme that uses spatial meshes that change with the movement of the control rods avoiding the necessity of using equivalent material cross sections for the partially inserted cells. The performance of the moving mesh scheme is tested studying one-dimensional and three-dimensional benchmark problems. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion under project ENE2011-22823, the Generalitat Valenciana under projects II/2014/08 and ACOMP/2013/237, and the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia under project UPPTE/2012/118.Vidal-Ferràndiz, A.; Fayez Moustafa Moawad, R.; Ginestar Peiro, D.; Verdú Martín, GJ. (2016). Moving meshes to solve the time-dependent neutron diffusion equation in hexagonal geometry. Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics. 291:197-208. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cam.2015.03.040S19720829