Health vs. Environmental Motivation in Organic Preferences and Purchases

Economic analyses generally incorporate environmental motivations in examining the factors that determine whether consumers will buy organic and ecolabeled foods, but have not typically considered health and wellness motivations. Market research studies, using both focus groups and surveys, have found that many consumers believe that organic foods are healthier to eat, and have segmented consumers using health and wellness concerns as a factor associated with organic buying behavior. These findings have been widely interpreted in the press as indicating that health and wellness concerns are a primary motivator for buying organic. This study compares the impact of these motivators, as well as demographic and economic factors, in determining how dedicated a consumer is to organic buying as measured by whether more than 50 percent of the consumer's produce purchases are organic. The buying level results are compared to a model of stated preferences.Health Economics and Policy,

The Spectrum of Static Subtracted Geometries

Subtracted geometries are black hole solutions of the four dimensional STU model with rather interesting ties to asymptotically flat black holes. A peculiar feature is that the solutions to the Klein-Gordon equation on this subtracted background can be organized according to representations of the conformal group $SO(2,2)$. We test if this behavior persists for the linearized fluctuations of gravitational and matter fields on static, electrically charged backgrounds of this kind. We find that there is a subsector of the modes that do display conformal symmetry, while some modes do not. We also discuss two different effective actions that describe these subtracted geometries and how the spectrum of quasinormal modes is dramatically different depending upon the action used.Comment: 30 pages, 2 figures. v2: references added. v3: minor corrections to match with published versio

A Software Cache Autotuning Strategy for Dataflow Computing with UPC++ DepSpawn

This is the accepted version of the following article: B. B. Fraguela, D. Andrade. A software cache autotuning strategy for dataflow computing with UPC++ DepSpawn. Computational and Mathematical Methods, 3(6), e1148. November 2021, which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/cmm4.1148. This article may be used for noncommercial purposes in accordance with the Wiley Self-Archiving Policy [http://www.wileyauthors.com/self-archiving].[Abstract] Dataflow computing allows to start computations as soon as all their dependencies are satisfied. This is particularly useful in applications with irregular or complex patterns of dependencies which would otherwise involve either coarse grain synchronizations which would degrade performance, or high programming costs. A recent proposal for the easy development of performant dataflow algorithms in hybrid shared/distributed memory systems is UPC++ DepSpawn. Among the many techniques it applies to provide good performance is a software cache that minimizes the communications among the processes involved. In this article we provide the details of the implementation and operation of this cache and we present an autotuning strategy that simplifies its usage by freeing the user from having to estimate an adequate size for this cache. Rather, the runtime is now able to define reasonably sized caches that provide near optimal behavior.This research was funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain (TIN2016-75845-P and PID2019-104184RB-I00, AEI/FEDER/EU, 10.13039/501100011033), and by the Xunta de Galicia co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under the Consolidation Programme of Competitive Reference Groups (ED431C 2017/04). The authors acknowledge also the support from the Centro Singular de Investigación de Galicia “CITIC,” funded by Xunta de Galicia and the European Union (European Regional Development Fund- Galicia 2014-2020 Program), by grant ED431G 2019/01. They also acknowledge the Centro de Supercomputación de Galicia (CESGA) for the use of its computersXunta de Galicia; ED431C 2017/04Xunta de Galicia; ED431G/0

Using Artificial Vision Techniques for Individual Player Tracking in Sport Events

[Abstract] We introduce a hybrid approach that can track an individual football player in a video sequence. This solution achieves a good balance between speed and accuracy, combining traditional object tracking techniques with Deep Neural Networks (DNN). While traditional techniques lack accuracy, the main shortcoming of DNN is performance. Both types of techniques complement to each other to provide an accurate and fast object tracking approach that does not require human intervention. The accuracy of our solution has been validated using the SoccerNet Dataset against hand annotated video sequences. For the tracking of 4 different players of 2 different teams our approach has achieved an Area Under Curve (AUC) of 0.66, in terms of accuracy, and a frame rate of 91.75 FPS, in terms of performance, running on a Nvidia GTX 1080Ti GPU

Easy Dataflow Programming in Clusters with UPC++ DepSpawn

Versión final aceptada de: https://doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2018.2884716This version of the article has been accepted for publication, after peer review. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. The Version of Record is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2018.2884716[Abstract]: The Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming model is one of the most relevant proposals to improve the ability of developers to exploit distributed memory systems. However, despite its important advantages with respect to the traditional message-passing paradigm, PGAS has not been yet widely adopted. We think that PGAS libraries are more promising than languages because they avoid the requirement to (re)write the applications using them, with the implied uncertainties related to portability and interoperability with the vast amount of APIs and libraries that exist for widespread languages. Nevertheless, the need to embed these libraries within a host language can limit their expressiveness and very useful features can be missing. This paper contributes to the advance of PGAS by enabling the simple development of arbitrarily complex task-parallel codes following a dataflow approach on top of the PGAS UPC++ library, implemented in C++. In addition, our proposal, called UPC++ DepSpawn, relies on an optimized multithreaded runtime that provides very competitive performance, as our experimental evaluation shows.This research was supported by the Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad of Spain and FEDER funds of the EU (TIN2016-75845-P), and by the Xunta de Galicia co-founded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under the Consolidation Programme of Competitive Reference Groups (ED431C 2017/04) as well as under the Centro Singular de Investigación de Galicia accreditation 2016-2019 (ED431G/01). We also acknowledge the Centro de Supercomputación de Galicia (CESGA) for the use of their computers.Xunta de Galicia; ED431C 2017/04Xunta de Galicia; ED431G/0

High-performance dataflow computing in hybrid memory systems with UPC++ DepSpawn

[Abstract]: Dataflow computing is a very attractive paradigm for high-performance computing, given its ability to trigger computations as soon as their inputs are available. UPC++ DepSpawn is a novel task-based library that supports this model in hybrid shared/distributed memory systems on top of a Partitioned Global Address Space environment. While the initial version of the library provided good results, it suffered from a key restriction that heavily limited its performance and scalability. Namely, each process had to consider all the tasks in the application rather than only those of interest to it, an overhead that naturally grows with both the number of processes and tasks in the system. In this paper, this restriction is lifted, enabling our library to provide higher levels of performance. This way, in experiments using 768 cores the performance improved up to 40.1%, the average improvement being 16.1%.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación; TIN2016-75845-PMinisterio de Ciencia e Innovación; PID2019-104184RB-I00Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación; 10.13039/501100011033Xunta de Galicia; ED431C 2017/0

Universidade e Leitura: Um olhar crítico sobre as medições do hábito de leitura

This article addresses as a problem of inquiry the fact that the reading habit is far from being preached by an absolute proportion of university students. That is to say, still a large sector of the students does not have this habit as expressed in multiple investigations. In this sense, it is argued that the low reading rates in higher education are due to a non-rigorous commitment of the different subjects to reading. In particular, the special way in which each subject outlines its own learning objectives, which do not have to use reading radically, leads to the habit of reading not being strictly encouraged as it is in those classes where it is essential to read. Likewise, the methodological perspective assumes an analytical-comparative approach with which it seeks to articulate a duality of functions: on the one hand, a review and examination of the literature and, on the other, an ordered reflection on its fundamental content. As a conclusion, it must be said that the university is not spreading the habit of reading as it would be expected to do through the curriculum and, consequently, it is still necessary to rethink transversal policies to the curriculum that promote reading in the university.  Este artículo trata como problema de indagación el hecho de que el hábito de lectura está lejos de predicarse de una proporción absoluta de universitarios. Es decir, todavía un sector extenso del estudiantado no lo cuenta en su haber según expresan múltiples investigaciones. En este sentido, pretende argumentarse que los bajos índices de lectura en la educación superior obedecen a un compromiso no riguroso de las diferentes asignaturas con la lectura. En particular, el modo especial con que cada asignatura traza sus propios objetivos de aprendizaje, los cuales no tienen por qué utilizar la lectura con radicalidad, conduce a que el hábito lector no sea impulsado de forma estricta a como ocurre en aquellas clases donde resulta imprescindible leer. Asimismo, la perspectiva metodológica asume un enfoque analítico-comparativo con el que busca articularse un doble movimiento: por un lado, una revisión y examen de la bibliografía y, por otro, una reflexión ordenada acerca de su contenido fundamental. Como conclusión habrá de decirse que la universidad no está propagando el hábito lector como se esperaría que lo hiciera por medio de la malla curricular y, en consecuencia, sigue siendo necesario repensar políticas trasversales al currículo que promocionen con acierto la lectura en la universidad.Este artigo trata do problema de investigação do facto de o hábito de leitura estar longe de se basear numa proporção absoluta de estudantes universitários. Ou seja, de acordo com muitos estudos, um grande sector do corpo estudantil ainda não o tem em seu crédito. Neste sentido, argumenta-se que as baixas taxas de leitura no ensino superior se devem a uma falta de empenho rigoroso na leitura nas diferentes disciplinas. Em particular, a forma especial como cada disciplina estabelece os seus próprios objectivos de aprendizagem, que não fazem necessariamente um uso radical da leitura, significa que o hábito da leitura não é tão estritamente encorajado como naquelas aulas em que a leitura é essencial. Do mesmo modo, a perspectiva metodológica assume uma abordagem analítico-comparativa que procura articular um duplo movimento: por um lado, uma revisão e exame da bibliografia e, por outro, uma reflexão ordenada sobre o seu conteúdo fundamental. Em conclusão, deve dizer-se que a universidade não está a propagar o hábito da leitura como seria de esperar através do currículo e, consequentemente, é ainda necessário repensar as políticas transversais ao currículo para promover a leitura na universidade