Consumers Valuations and Choice Processes of Food Safety Enhancement Attributes: An International Study of Beef Consumers

Food safety concerns have had dramatic impacts on food and livestock markets in recent years. Here we examine consumer preferences for various beef food safety assurances. In particular, we evaluate the extent to which such preferences are heterogeneous within and across country-of-residence defined groups and examine the distributional nature of these preferences with respect to marginal improvements in food safety. We collected data from over 4,000 U.S., Canada, Japan, and Mexican consumers. Using mixed logit models we find that Japanese and Mexican consumers have WTP preferences that are nonlinear in the level of food safety risk reduction. Conversely, U.S .and Canadian consumers appear to possess linear preferences. These results suggest that optimal food safety investment strategies hinge critically upon consumer perception of actual food safety improvements, the distributional relationship describing the targeted consumer segment's tradeoff function between WTP premiums and risk reduction levels, and the cost structure of these investments.consumer beef preference, food safety, investment decision, mixed logit, willingness-to-pay, Demand and Price Analysis, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

The Role of Consumer Risk Perceptions and Attitudes in Cross Cultural Beef Consumption Changes

Beef food safety events have contributed to considerable market volatility, produced varied consumer reactions, created policy debates, sparked heated trade disputes, and generally contributed to beef industry frustrations. Better understanding of the forces causing observed consumer reactions in light of beef food safety events is critical for policy makers and industry participants. We examine whether consumers altered their beef consumption behavior because of their risk aversion and risk perceptions stemming from information about beef food safety in recent years. We use data from a total of 4,000 consumers in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and Japan to estimate a two-stage Probit/double-bounded Tobit modeling framework. Results reveal there are stark differences in risk perceptions and risk aversion regarding beef food safety across consumers in the four countries and that these differences are revealed through different beef consumption behavior. An improved understanding of food safety perceptions and attitudes will enable policy makers and agricultural industries to better anticipate consumers changing consumption behavior, if a food safety event occurs. Consumers from the four countries examined exhibited heterogeneous food safety perceptions and attitudes. Results suggest that food safety management strategies should vary across countries because of identified differences in food safety risk attitudes and risk perceptions.Cross-culture, risk attitude, risk perception, food safety, beef, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Livestock Production/Industries,

Water Diffusion and Fracture Behavior in Nano-Porous Low-K Dielectric Film Stacks

Among various low-dielectric constant (‘low-k’) materials under development, organosilicate glasses (OSG) containing nanometer-size pores are leading candidates for use as intra-metal dielectrics in future microelectronics technologies. In this paper, we investigate the direct impact of water diffusion on the fracture behavior of film stacks that contain porous OSG coatings. We demonstrate that exposure of the film stacks to water causes significant degradation of the interfacial adhesion energy, but that it has negligible effect on the cohesive fracture energy of the nanoporous OSG layer. Isotope tracer diffusion experiments combined with dynamic secondary ion mass spectroscopy (SIMS) show that water diffuses predominantly along the interfaces, and not through the porous films. This unexpected result is attributed to the hydrophilic character of the interfaces.Engineering and Applied Science

Adaptive Grid Refinement for Discrete Tomography

Discrete tomography has proven itself as a powerful approach to image reconstruction from limited data. In recent years, algebraic reconstruction methods have been applied successfully to a range of experimental data sets. However, the computational cost of such reconstruction techniques currently prevents routine application to large data-sets. In this paper we investigate the use of adaptive refinement on QuadTree grids to reduce the number of pixels (or voxels) needed to represent an image. Such locally refined grids match well with the domain of discrete tomography as they are optimally suited for representing images containing large homogeneous regions. Reducing the number of pixels ultimately promises a reduct

Lesion evidence for a critical role of left posterior but not frontal areas in alpha-beta power decreases during context-driven word production

Acknowledgements The authors are grateful for the patients and their families, as well as for the other volunteer participants for taking part in this study. We would like to thank Donatella Scabini and Brian Curran for patient delineation, Brian Curran, Clay Clayworth and Callum Dewar for lesion reconstruction, Amber Moncrief and Selvi Paulraj for helping design the materials, Paige Mumford and Laura Agee for help with audio recordings, Kristoffer Dahlslätt for invaluable discussions, and the members of the Center for Aphasia and Related Disorders at the VAHCS in Martinez, CA, for neuropsychological testing. Funding This work is supported by grants from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (446‐13‐009 to V.P., 275‐89‐032 to J.R.), the National Institutes of Health (NINDS R37 NS21135 to R.T.K), and by the Nielsen Corporation. Data accessibility This article's supporting data and materials can be obtained upon request.Peer reviewedPostprin