450 research outputs found
Marketing Wine on the Web
E-commerce is penetrating agriculture, particularly for selling products directly to consumers. The wine industry is a case in point. The industry has long-term experience in direct marketing. Many wineries welcome patrons at their premises for wine tasting and for selling wine to them. Moreover, where the practice is allowed, shipping wine directly to consumers without the assistance of trade intermediaries is a significant sales channel. E-commerce was adopted early in the wine industries of wired high-income countries and the wine industry provides an opportunity for studying the adoption, use, and impact of e-commerce. Moreover, because e-commerce has not spread evenly through all branches of agriculture, lessons learned from the wine industry may provide useful insights for entrepreneurs and policy makers concerned with sections of agriculture or the food industry where e-commerce adoption lags behind. The specific objectives of the dissertation research project which we report here therefore were: (1) to assess the extent of e-commerce diffusion in the wine industries of Australia, California, Germany; (2) to identify e-commerce practices used by wineries for marketing wine; (3) to explain differences in wineries' e-commerce practices, and (4) to derive insights and implications for sections of agriculture that lag behind in ecommerce adoption.Marketing,
Look-Ahead Benchmark Bias in Portfolio Performance Evaluation
Performance of investment managers are evaluated in comparison with
benchmarks, such as financial indices. Due to the operational constraint that
most professional databases do not track the change of constitution of
benchmark portfolios, standard tests of performance suffer from the "look-ahead
benchmark bias," when they use the assets constituting the benchmarks of
reference at the end of the testing period, rather than at the beginning of the
period. Here, we report that the "look-ahead benchmark bias" can exhibit a
surprisingly large amplitude for portfolios of common stocks (up to 8% annum
for the S&P500 taken as the benchmark) -- while most studies have emphasized
related survival biases in performance of mutual and hedge funds for which the
biases can be expected to be even larger. We use the CRSP database from 1926 to
2006 and analyze the running top 500 US capitalizations to demonstrate that
this bias can account for a gross overestimation of performance metrics such as
the Sharpe ratio as well as an underestimation of risk, as measured for
instance by peak-to-valley drawdowns. We demonstrate the presence of a
significant bias in the estimation of the survival and look-ahead biases
studied in the literature. A general methodology to test the properties of
investment strategies is advanced in terms of random strategies with similar
investment constraints.Comment: 16 pages, 1 table, 4 figure
Effect of mass transport on the electrochemical oxidation of alcohols over electrodeposited film and carbon-supported pt electrodes
© 2018 The Author(s) Electrochemical oxidation of four different alcohol molecules (methanol, ethanol, n-butanol and 2-butanol) at electrodeposited Pt film and carbon-supported Pt catalyst film electrodes, as well as the effect of mass transport on the oxidation reaction, has been studied systematically using the rotating disk electrode (RDE) technique. It was shown that oxidation current decreased with an increase in the rotation rate (ω) for all alcohols studied over electrodeposited Pt film electrodes. In contrast, the oxidation current was found to increase with an increase in the ω for Pt/C in ethanol and n-butanol-containing solutions. The decrease was found to be nearly reversible for ethanol and n-butanol at the electrodeposited Pt film electrode ruling out the possibility of intermediate CO ads poisoning being the sole cause of the decrease and was attributed to the formation of soluble intermediate species which diffuse away from the electrode at higher ω. In contrast, an increase in the current with an increase in ω for the carbon supported catalyst may suggest that the increase in residence time of the soluble species within the catalyst layer, results in further oxidation of these species. Furthermore, the reversibility of the peak current on decreasing the ω could indicate that the surface state has not significantly changed due to the sluggish reaction kinetics of ethanol and n-butanol
Preventing Suicide in Prisons, Part I Recommendations fromthe International Association for Suicide Prevention Task Force on Suicide in Prisons
Abstract. In 2000 the Department of Mental Health of the World Health Organization (WHO) published a guide named Preventing Suicide. A Resource for Prison Officers as part of the WHO worldwide initiative for the prevention of suicide. In 2007 there are new epidemiological data on prison suicide, a more detailed discussion of risk factors accounting for the generally higher rate of suicide in correctional settings in comparison to the general population, and several strategies for developing screening instruments. As a first step, this paper presents an update of the WHO guide by the Task Force on Suicide in Prisons, created by the International Association for Suicide Prevention. A second paper, by the same Task Force, will present some international comparisons of suicide prevention services in correctional facilities
A combined clinical and biomarker approach to predict diuretic response in acute heart failure
Background:
Poor diuretic response in acute heart failure is related to poor clinical outcome. The underlying mechanisms and pathophysiology behind diuretic resistance are incompletely understood. We evaluated a combined approach using clinical characteristics and biomarkers to predict diuretic response in acute heart failure (AHF).
Methods and results:
We investigated explanatory and predictive models for diuretic response—weight loss at day 4 per 40 mg of furosemide—in 974 patients with AHF included in the PROTECT trial. Biomarkers, addressing multiple pathophysiological pathways, were determined at baseline and after 24 h. An explanatory baseline biomarker model of a poor diuretic response included low potassium, chloride, hemoglobin, myeloperoxidase, and high blood urea nitrogen, albumin, triglycerides, ST2 and neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (r2 = 0.086). Diuretic response after 24 h (early diuretic response) was a strong predictor of diuretic response (β = 0.467, P < 0.001; r2 = 0.523). Addition of diuretic response after 24 h to biomarkers and clinical characteristics significantly improved the predictive model (r2 = 0.586, P < 0.001).
Conclusions:
Biomarkers indicate that diuretic unresponsiveness is associated with an atherosclerotic profile with abnormal renal function and electrolytes. However, predicting diuretic response is difficult and biomarkers have limited additive value. Patients at risk of poor diuretic response can be identified by measuring early diuretic response after 24 h
Photo-z optimization for measurements of the BAO radial direction
Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) in the radial direction offer a method to
directly measure the Universe expansion history, and to set limits to space
curvature when combined to the angular BAO signal. In addition to spectroscopic
surveys, radial BAO might be measured from accurate enough photometric
redshifts obtained with narrow-band filters. We explore the requirements for a
photometric survey using Luminous Red Galaxies (LRG) to competitively measure
the radial BAO signal and discuss the possible systematic errors of this
approach. If LRG were a highly homogeneous population, we show that the photo-z
accuracy would not substantially improve by increasing the number of filters
beyond , except for a small fraction of the sources detected at high
signal-to-noise, and broad-band filters would suffice to achieve the target
for measuring radial BAO. Using the LRG spectra
obtained from SDSS, we find that the spectral variability of LRG substantially
worsens the achievable photometric redshift errors, and that the optimal system
consists of 30 filters of width . A
is generally necessary at the filters on the red side of the
break to reach the target photometric accuracy. We estimate that a
5-year survey in a dedicated telescope with etendue in excess of 60 would be necessary to obtain a high enough density of galaxies to
measure radial BAO with sufficiently low shot noise up to . We
conclude that spectroscopic surveys have a superior performance than
photometric ones for measuring BAO in the radial direction.Comment: Replaced with minor editorial comments and one extra figure. Results
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On Black Hole Scalar Hair in Asymptotically Anti de Sitter Spacetimes
The unexpected discovery of hairy black hole solutions in theories with
scalar fields simply by considering asymptotically Anti de-Sitter, rather than
asymptotically flat, boundary conditions is analyzed in a way that exhibits in
a clear manner the differences between the two situations.
It is shown that the trivial Schwarzschild Anti de Sitter becomes unstable in
some of these situations, and the possible relevance of this fact for the
ADS/CFT conjecture is pointed out.Comment: 12 pages. Published versio
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Validation of OMI Tropospheric NO2 Observations During INTEX-B and Application to Constrain NOx Emissions Over the Eastern United States and Mexico
We compare tropospheric NO2 column measurements from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) aboard the EOS Aura satellite with coincident in situ aircraft measurements on vertical spirals over the southern United States, Mexico, and the Gulf of Mexico during the INTEX-B campaign in March 2006. Good correlation with no significant bias (r2=0.67, slope=0.99±0.17, n=12) is found for the ensemble of comparisons when the aircraft could spiral sufficiently low to sample most of the NO2 column. Urban spirals where large extrapolations were needed below the aircraft floor (1000 ft) showed poorer agreement. We use the OMI observations together with a global chemical transport model (GEOS-Chem) to estimate emissions of nitrogen oxides over the eastern United States and Mexico in March 2006. Comparison to EPA's National Emissions Inventory 1999 (NEI99) calls for a decrease in power plant emissions and an increase in on-road vehicle emissions relative to that inventory. The rise in vehicular emissions is offsetting the reduction in power plant and industry emissions. These findings are consistent with independent assessments. Our OMI-derived emission estimates for Mexico are higher by a factor of 2.0±0.5 than bottom-up emissions, similar to a comparison between the recently released Mexican NEI99 inventory and the bottom-up showing that the Mexican NEI99 inventory is 1.6–1.8× higher.Earth and Planetary SciencesEngineering and Applied Science
Ship-to-Shore Wireless Communication for Asynchronous Data Delivery to the Remote Islands
Nowadays, many people who live in remote islands of Indonesia are still facing difficulties in terms of access to information. In the locations where end-to-end communication is not available, the asynchronous approach can be utilized to send information in the form of digital data. In some areas, we could utilize passenger ships or ferries as physical carriers to deliver digital data to the people in the remote islands which are located at a particular range of distance from the ship’s passing routes. This paper reports the channel performance of long-range WiFi connection oversea at 5 GHz using the real ship’s route at the North Sulawesi province‘s water in Indonesia as a sample scenario. The measurement results showed that the most stable ship-to-shore communication can be achieved in ±15 minutes at the maximum distance between the ship and shore of about 4 km. The maximum channel capacity was 120 Mbps for upload (from ship to shore) and 53 Mbps for download (from shore to ship), which is enough to deliver gigabytes of information to the people at the islands every time the ship passes by
Chaos in a double driven dissipative nonlinear oscillator
We propose an anharmonic oscillator driven by two periodic forces of
different frequencies as a new time-dependent model for investigating quantum
dissipative chaos. Our analysis is done in the frame of statistical ensemble of
quantum trajectories in quantum state diffusion approach. Quantum dynamical
manifestation of chaotic behavior, including the emergence of chaos, properties
of strange attractors, and quantum entanglement are studied by numerical
simulation of ensemble averaged Wigner function and von Neumann entropy.Comment: 9 pages, 18 figure
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