The influence of psychological distance on the effects of music congruency in consumer behavior

Specific music genres (classical, country/rock) are known to have a premium pricing effect on consumer’s purchase decisions. The induction of a temporal psychological distance variable in a purchasing process alters music congruity semantic priming effects on consumer behavior, since more psychologically distant objects are said to reduce priming effects. In harmony with these concepts, a quantitative method shows how psychological distance influences background music affects through social identity, utilitarian, and ambiguous (displaying both attributes) products exposure on consumer’s overall pricing and hedonic perception; and if a contextual consumer conditioning can possibly force the perception framing of a product, when a background music is congruent with it.Específicos géneros musicais (clássica, country/rock) são conhecidos por terem um efeito de preço premium no que diz respeito às decisões de compra dos consumidores. A indução de uma variável de distancia psicológica temporal no processo de compra altera os priming effects da coerência musical, uma vez que quanto maior a distancia psicológica dos objetos menor serão os priming effects. Quando ambos conceitos se encontram em harmonia, o estudo mostra como a distancia psicológica influencia o efeito que a música de fundo tem na identidade social, no utilitarismo, e por fim, a ambiguidade (quando ambos atributos estão presentes) que a exibição do produto tem na disponibilidade para pagar e na experiência hedónica do consumidor. Este estudo também procura compreender se o condicionamento contextual do consumidor pode forçar a percepção de enquadramento do produto, quando a música de fundo é coerente com efeito de distancia psicológica

Real-time enforcement of local energy market transactions respecting distribution grid constraints

International audienceFuture electricity distribution grids will host a considerable share of the renewable energy sources needed for enforcing the energy transition. Demand side management mechanisms play a key role in the integration of such renewable energy resources by exploiting the flexibility of elastic loads, generation or electricity storage technologies. In particular, local energy markets enable households to exchange energy with each other while increasing the amount of renewable energy that is consumed locally. Nevertheless, as most ex-ante mechanisms, local market schedules rely on hour-ahead forecasts whose accuracy may be low. In this paper we cope with forecast errors by proposing a game theory approach to model the interactions among prosumers and distribution system operators for the control of electricity flows in real-time. The presented game has an aggregative equilibrium which can be attained in a semi-distributed manner, driving prosumers towards a final exchange of energy with the grid that benefits both households and operators, favoring the enforcement of prosumers' local market commitments while respecting the constraints defined by the operator. The proposed mechanism requires only one-to-all broadcast of price signals, which do not depend either on the amount of players or their local objective function and constraints, making the approach highly scalable. Its impact on distribution grid quality of supply was evaluated through load flow analysis and realistic load profiles, demonstrating the capacity of the mechanism ensure that voltage deviation and thermal limit constraints are respected

Scaling of Distributed Multi-Simulations on Multi-Core Clusters

International audienceDACCOSIM is a multi-simulation environment for continuous time systems, relying on FMI standard, making easy the design of a multi-simulation graph, and specially developed for multi-core PC clusters, in order to achieve speedup and size up. However, the distribution of the simulation graph remains complex and is still the responsibility of the simulation developer. This paper introduces DACCOSIM parallel and distributed architecture, and our strategies to achieve efficient multi-simulation graph distribution on multi-core clusters. Some performance experiments on two clusters, running up to 81 simulation components (FMU) and using up to 16 multi-core computing nodes, are shown. Performances measured on our faster cluster exhibit a good scalability, but some limitations of current DACCOSIM implementation are discussed

Photometric quality of Dome C for the winter 2008 from ASTEP South

ASTEP South is an Antarctic Search for Transiting Exo- Planets in the South pole field, from the Concordia station, Dome C, Antarctica. The instrument consists of a thermalized 10 cm refractor observing a fixed 3.88\degree x 3.88\degree field of view to perform photometry of several thousand stars at visible wavelengths (700-900 nm). The first winter campaign in 2008 led to the retrieval of nearly 1600 hours of data. We derive the fraction of photometric nights by measuring the number of detectable stars in the field. The method is sensitive to the presence of small cirrus clouds which are invisible to the naked eye. The fraction of night-time for which at least 50% of the stars are detected is 74% from June to September 2008. Most of the lost time (18.5% out of 26%) is due to periods of bad weather conditions lasting for a few days ("white outs"). Extended periods of clear weather exist. For example, between July 10 and August 10, 2008, the total fraction of time (day+night) for which photometric observations were possible was 60%. This confirms the very high quality of Dome C for nearly continuous photometric observations during the Antarctic winter

Toward an Accurate and Fast Hybrid Multi-Simulation with the FMI-CS Standard

International audienceMulti-simulation in the context of future smart electrical grids consists in associating components modeling different physical domains, but also their local or global control. Our DACCOSIM multi-simulation environment is based on the version 2.0 of the FMI-CS (Functional Mock-up Interface for Co-Simulation) standard maintained by the Modelica Association. It has been specifically designed to run large-scale and complex systems on a single PC or a cluster of multicore nodes. But it is quite challenging to accurately simulate FMUs-composed systems involving predictable and unpredictable events while preserving the system overall performance. This paper presents some additions to the FMI-CS standard aiming to improve the accuracy and the performance of distributed multi-simulations involving a mix of both time steps and various kinds of events. The proposed FMI-CS primitives are explained, as well as the Master Algorithm strategies to exploit them efficiently

Findings from the PP-SESAME experiment on board the Philae/ROSETTA lander on the surface of comet 67P

International audienceThe Permittivity Probe (PP-SESAME [1]) on-board the Philae Lander of the ROSETTA mission was designed to constrain the complex permittivity of the first 2 meters of the nucleus of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and to monitor its variations with time. Doing so, it is meant to provide unique insight into the composition (and activity if data could have been acquired longer) of the comet. In this paper, we present the analysis of the PP-SESAME measurements acquired during the first science sequence, on November 13, 2014, on the surface of the comet