THE ORGANIC LABEL: HOW TO RECONCILE ITS MEANING WITH CONSUMER PREFERENCES

The USDA's National Organic Program (NOP), with its unified definition and labeling requirements, holds great promise for increasing commerce in and decreasing transaction costs associated with purchasing organic food. However, the label and its meaning must both be well understood and reflect the traits consumers want if this promise is to be realized. This paper reports the results of a survey and experimental auction on consumers' preferences for organic standards. On one hand, the USDA NOP's Final Rule broadly conforms to consumer preferences regarding what practices should or should not be permitted in organic production and processing. Consumers support a strict definition of organic in general, opposing the use of a variety of practices historically banned by organic certifiers. For example, both the survey and auction methods found that consumers support the banning of Genetically Modified Organisms in organic food and are willing to pay a premium to avoid them. Consumers are also in accord with the Final Rule's exclusion of irradiation, biosolids, growth regulators, etc. On the other hand, the survey and auction results reveal a lack of understanding of the label's meaning as well as a disconnect between the label's function (detailing acceptable production practices) and consumers' stated motivations for buying organic (e.g., support for a local sustainable food system). Implications of these findings for decision makers in policy and industry are discussed. Of particular focus will be the role of these agents in promoting products that allow consumers to purchase items that reflect and support these values.Consumer/Household Economics,

Lipotoxicity, aging, and muscle contractility: does fiber type matter?

Sarcopenia is a universal characteristic of the aging process and is often accompanied by increases in whole-body adiposity. These changes in body composition have important clinical implications, given that loss of muscle and gain of fat mass are both significantly and independently associated with declining physical performance as well as an increased risk for disability, hospitalizations, and mortality in older individuals. This increased fat mass is not exclusively stored in adipose depots but may become deposited in non-adipose tissues, such as skeletal muscle, when the oxidative capacity of the adipose tissue itself is exceeded. The redistributed adipose tissue is thought to exert detrimental local effects on the muscle environment given the close proximity. Thus, sarcopenia observed with aging may be better defined in the context of loss of muscle quality rather than loss of muscle quantity per se. In this perspective, we briefly review the age-related physiological changes in cellularity, secretory profiles, and inflammatory status of adipose tissue which drive lipotoxicity (spillover) of skeletal muscle and then provide evidence of how this may affect specific fiber type contractility. We focus on biological contributors (cellular machinery) to contractility for which there is some evidence of vulnerability to lipid stress distinguishing between fiber types.Accepted manuscrip

Resolving the Axial Mass Anomaly in neutrino Scattering

We present a parametrization of the observed enhancement in the transverse electron quasielastic (QE) response function for nucleons bound in carbon as a function of the square of the four momentum transfer (Q2) in terms of a correction to the magnetic form factors of bound nucleons. The parametrization should also be applicable to the transverse cross section in neutrino scattering. If the transverse enhancement originates from meson exchange currents (MEC), then it is theoretically expected that any enhancement in the longitudinal or axial contributions is small. We present the predictions of the "Transverse Enhancement" model (which is based on electron scattering data only) for the neutrino and anti-neutrino differential and total QE cross sections for nucleons bound in carbon. The 2Q2 dependence of the transverse enhancement is observed to resolve much of the long standing discrepancy ("Axial Mass Anomaly}) in the QE total cross sections and differential distributions between low energy and high energy neutrino experiments on nuclear targets.Comment: 3 pages, 3 Figures, Presented by Arie Bodek at the 19th Particles and Nuclei International Conference, PANIC 2011, MIT, Cambridge, MA July 201

CONSUMER PREFERENCES FOR ORGANIC STANDARDS: GUIDING DEMAND-EXPANSION STRATEGIES FOR ORGANIC FOOD

Consumer/Household Economics,

Altitude dependence of atmospheric temperature trends: Climate models versus observation

As a consequence of greenhouse forcing, all state of the art general circulation models predict a positive temperature trend that is greater for the troposphere than the surface. This predicted positive trend increases in value with altitude until it reaches a maximum ratio with respect to the surface of as much as 1.5 to 2.0 at about 200 to 400 hPa. However, the temperature trends from several independent observational data sets show decreasing as well as mostly negative values. This disparity indicates that the three models examined here fail to account for the effects of greenhouse forcings.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure

Describing the Buckle Up program efforts to support child well-being in Oklahoma : exploring potential connections between child motor vehicle injuries, fatalities, certification status, and Buckle Up events.

In 1997 Safe Kids Worldwide and General Motors Corporation founded the Buckle Up program. The program trains and certifies individuals to become service providers whose job is to obtain the knowledge and skills on the proper techniques to install safety seats for children, and how to share that knowledge with families. Buckle Up is an important program since the leading cause of death among children ages 2 to 14 is in a motor vehicle crash. Trainings, car seat checkup events, and advocacy influence the way the environment affects child passenger safety. Advocacy opens the doors for strengthening the need to update laws since motor vehicle crashes continue to lead as a primary cause of death in children. The research will take a descriptive approach to review and compile available data to determine any associations between the Buckle Up program and the number of injuries and fatalities in Oklahoma between 2007 and 2011. Research will also utilize Urie Bronfenbrenner's Human Ecology Theory to examine hoe the Buckle Up program has been involved in the environment. Data were collected and reviewed by a Child Passenger Safety Technician and Instructor, active in the field since 2007. The analysis was made from a non-biased perspective with interest in understanding how educational efforts were contributing to the Oklahoma child occupant outcomes

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationDorsoventral lesion studies of the hippocampus (HPP) have suggested that the dorsal axis is important for spatial processing and the ventral axis is involved in olfactory learning and memory as well as anxiety. Accrued reports have indicated that subregions along the dorsal axis play specialized roles in spatial information processes and there is some evidence to indicate that the ventral CA3 and ventral CA1 subregions are involved in cued retrieval in fear conditioning and also carry out olfactory learning and memory processes similar to dorsal axis counterparts. The current study investigated the less-understood role of the ventral DG in olfaction and anxiety. A series of odor stimuli were used that provide a range of differentiation on only one level in a matching-to-sample paradigm to investigate ventral DG involvement in working memory for similar and less similar odors, in which there was a memory-based pattern separation effect. A novelty detection paradigm was used to investigate ventral DG involvement in recognition of familiar and new social odors. Finally, an elevated-plus maze and open field maze were selected in order to investigate the role of the ventral DG in the ability to modify behavior in potentially dangerous environments. The current study has provided evidence to suggest that the ventral DG plays an important role in olfactory learning and memory processes as well as anxiety-based behaviors during exploration in anxiety-provoking environments