ANALYSIS AND MODELS FOR THE REDUCTION OF FOOD WASTE IN ORGANIZED LARGE-SCALE RETAIL DISTRIBUTION IN EASTERN SICILY

Nowadays, food waste is one of the main global para doxes and raises profound questions from the social point of view. The causes of food losses and food waste are varied and differ according to the various stages of the food chain. The problem of fo od waste prompted the European Parliament to proclaim 2014 the "European year against food waste " and to adopt a resolution which should lead to a reduction of 50% of waste by the year 2025. This study proposes the possible corrective actions, to be taken at the level of retail distribution and fa cing the end customer, to achieve the goal reducing of food waste (Fiore et al ., 2005). The research was conducted by a group of scholars of the Department of Economics, Business, Environmental and Quantitative Methods, at the University of Messina, on a sample area of eastern Sicily. In particular thirte en retail outlets were analyzed by collecting and processing data on sales, broken down by sector, fo r the period 2009 to 2013. The research conducted has shown that the food sector that contributes mos t to food waste, in the area investigated, is that of fruit and vegetables, the study has provided a deta iled analysis of the ten most wasted foods. The wor k finally comes to processes that involve many differ ent scenarios for reducing waste, encouraging a comparison, of the products most wasted, by providi ng potential solutions or corrective actions aimed at reducing the phenomenon analyzed

BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License

The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics' resources: focus on curated databases

The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (www.isb-sib.ch) provides world-class bioinformatics databases, software tools, services and training to the international life science community in academia and industry. These solutions allow life scientists to turn the exponentially growing amount of data into knowledge. Here, we provide an overview of SIB's resources and competence areas, with a strong focus on curated databases and SIB's most popular and widely used resources. In particular, SIB's Bioinformatics resource portal ExPASy features over 150 resources, including UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, ENZYME, PROSITE, neXtProt, STRING, UniCarbKB, SugarBindDB, SwissRegulon, EPD, arrayMap, Bgee, SWISS-MODEL Repository, OMA, OrthoDB and other databases, which are briefly described in this article

ECONOMIC, ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES OF AGROENERGY CHAINS. AN OVERVIEW OF THE EU AGRICULTURAL POLICY AND THE CONCEPT OF “MULTIFUNCTIONALITY”

It is now widely acknowledged that almost all human activity is seriously dependent on energy produced from fossil fuels. Energy consumption is one of the most reliable indicators of the development and quality of life of a country and the need to satisfy the demand for energy over a certain time period is the basis of energy planning. The increasing demand for energy and the expected shortage in the long term solicit new strategies to fill the widening demand-supply gap. The European Commission intends to implement these strategies in a context where both environmental and social goals are considered. It is recognized that a sustainable strategy must be addressed to achieve, first of all, the following goals: guarantee the security of the energy market; minimize the environmental impact; avoid the social consequences of energy shortage; improve the quality of life in rural areas and encourage diversification of the rural economy. In recent years the RES based on agricultural production has rendered agriculture multifunctional in the context of the EU Agricultural Policy. In this view, awareness of the multifunctional character of agriculture can act as a useful means for identifying the importance of social, environmental and economic functions, and define the best balance between them. Bioenergy production, as a function of multifunctional agriculture, can be used so as to reduce to the minimum the impact on the environment; it can also, in rural or in developing areas, enhance employment and contribute to improving this balance

Is There a Gender Gap in the Propensity to Travel of People With Disabilities?

People with disabilities (PwDs) face various constraints connected to their participation in tourism activities. This topic has become of greater academic interest in recent years, however, the study of gender issues in this context is still marginal. The present paper seeks to analyze gender differences in PwDs’ propensity to travel, explicitly examining constraints that may limit social inclusion in tourism activities. The empirical analysis is focused on sample data of the Italian population of PwDs gathered through an online questionnaire administered between April and July 2020. The findings reveal gender differences in PwDs travel participation, underlining matters related to constraints “impose,” by society as a whole. The paper discusses the implications of breaking down barriers and provides insights into the tourism industry so as to ensure accessibility, accurate information, and inclusivit

An Application of Qualitative Risk Analysis as a Tool Adopted by Public Organizations for Evaluating “Green Projects”

This paper intends to explore the application of Qualitative Risk Analysis in evaluating the risk level associated with several public projects based on urban and peri-urban agriculture as a model of sustainable development of a territory. Therefore, urban agriculture is seen as an experimental model through which we can analyze the interaction between local institutions and citizens, as well as being a marketing tool to promote sustainability aspects linked to the territory. To this end, after a bibliographic review on the Qualitative Risk Analysis and the involvement of stakeholders in decisions relating to the public sector, a valuation of certain projects on the theme of urban and peri-urban agriculture, advanced by the local public Administration will be shown. The analysis proceeds with the classification of projects according to defined risk categories and their graphical representation through probability-impact matrix. The matrix shows that the data scores and the ranking vary significantly for each of the different projects involved. In this respect, the main purpose of this paper is to reveal how the success of a marketing policy based on the concept of sustainable marketing for promoting the territory depends, in many cases, not only on the characteristics of the territory analyzed, but also on the level of “riskiness” associated with the projects. Consequently, the empirical results of the paper can be a guide for public organizations, dealing with a plurality of projects but with limited resources, to assess and to prioritize projects using the level of “riskiness” as a criterion. Furthermore, economic resources could be directed to manage projects after taking into account the relevant risk ranking

Best-compromise solutions for waste management: Decision support system for policymaking

: Proper management of urban waste might support sustainable and circular development, while mismanagement increases both costs and socio-environmental negative outcomes. In particular, the organic fraction constitutes the largest share of urban waste. In the circular economy framework, it is described as a valuable resource, to be converted into soil improver, biogas and energy. The aim of the paper is to propose a Decision Support System (DSS) for policymakers, based on linear programming techniques. This model is expected to improve the current methodologies for planning and managing organic fraction of municipal solid waste and provide useful insights about public resources allocation. The proposed optimization model is tested on Campania Region (Italy), which is a clear example of the negative implications of improper waste management. Based on the goals recently set by Campania regional government, the model allows to select the most cost-effective and sustainable solutions for treating organic waste. Results show three different scenarios associated to the impacts that each possible outcome has on the stated objectives. The "Ideal Solution" is not achievable, but it is used as a benchmark; the "Max NPV Solution" is feasible, but it reports several major drawbacks. Finally, the "Best Compromise Solution" allows to increase regional composting capability by six time and biogas availability by seven times, with environmental implications that are very similar to the ideal ones