METHODOLOGY FOR TREND ANALYSIS AND PROJECTION OF PRODUCTION, MARKET SHARES, AND CONSUMPTION

Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

CONSUMER POTATO DEMAND

Changes in consumer demographics, socioeconomic conditions, lifestyles, food tastes, and health and nutrition concerns have been associated with shifting food purchase patterns. This article focuses on potato purchase decisions and consumption, using a sample of Washington households. The results suggest that potato purchases are affected by factors such as product quality and price but not availability of point-of-purchase information. Reported changes in fresh and processed potato consumption appeared to be related to concerns with health and nutrition and demand for convenience. These findings have implications for the potato industry in developing new products and marketing strategies.Demand and Price Analysis,

An atlas of emission line fluxes of planetary nebulae in the 1150-3200 A region

Emission line fluxes for 28 planetary nebulae are presented. The nebulae were chosen to cover a wide range of excitation classes, apparent diameters, location in the sky, and types of central stars. All objects were observed in the low dispersion mode of the IUE spectrographs, using the large entrance aperture

DEVELOPMENT OF A SCHEME TO EVALUATE CONSUMER APPLE VARIETY PREFERENCES

Consumer/Household Economics,

Ash dieback on the island of Ireland

Book sectionThis publication is based on the work of Action FP1103 FRAXBACK, supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology)On the island of Ireland it is estimated that there are over half a million kilometres of hedgerows (400,000+ km in the Republic of Ireland (Rep. Ireland) and 113,000+ in Northern Ireland (Northern Ireland). Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) is the second most important component, after hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna), in large proportions of this hedgerow network. In the Rep. Ireland over 20,000 ha of ash have been planted since 1990, primarily for sawlogs and to provide material for the manufacture of hurleys, which are used in an important national sport called hurling, and for camogie sticks used to play camogie. Ash dieback, caused by Hymenoscyphus fraxineus, was first identified on the island in October 2012 and since then has been detected at 306 sites (195 in Rep. Ireland and 111 in Northern Ireland). In the vast majority of cases the outbreaks have been on young, imported trees planted within the previous 5 – 6 years and it was evident that the pathogen had been introduced on trees for planting. On a small number of occasions there was evidence of the pathogen cycling within a plantation or moving from the plantation to infect neighbouring hedgerow trees. One possible mechanism by which the pathogen can build up sufficient inoculum is by the formation of apothecia on infected woody tissue high up on the plants. Rep. Ireland and Northern Ireland have strict policies of eradication and containment, as set out in the All-Ireland Chalara Control Strategy. To date over 2.1 million trees have been destroyed as part of an eradication strategy. It is considered that this prompt and far-reaching action has had a significant impact, significantly mitigating and preventing the rapid establishment of the pathogen and limiting its spread. The interventions since the disease was first confirmed have helped to protect the considerable investment in ash plantations of the last 20 years. The pathogen has not, however, been eradicated from the island of Ireland and it remains to be seen how widespread, and how quickly ash dieback will become established on the island of Ireland. The latest figures from the Republic of Ireland are that 733 hectares of ash plantation has been reconstituted with another species as a result of Chalara and this has cost our state €2.6 million so far; in addition, Chalara has been found and confirmed in all 26 counties of the Republic of Ireland to a greater or lesser extent. As a result the current policies and procedures regarding Chalara are under review.This publication is based on the work of Action FP1103 FRAXBACK, supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology

The VIRMOS deep imaging survey: I. overview and survey strategy

This paper presents the CFH12K-VIRMOS survey: a deep B, V, R and I imaging survey in four fields totalling more than 17 deg^2, conducted with the 30x40 arcmin^2 field CFH-12K camera. The survey is intended to be a multi-purpose survey used for a variety of science goals, including surveys of very high redshift galaxies and weak lensing studies. Four high galactic latitude fields, each 2x2 deg^2, have been selected along the celestial equator: 0226-04, 1003+01, 1400+05, and 2217+00. The 16 deg^2 of the "wide" survey are covered with exposure times of 2h, 1.5h, 1h, 1h, while the 1.3x1 deg^2 area of the "deep" survey at the center of the 0226-04 field is covered with exposure times of 7h, 4.5h, 3h, 3h, in B,V,R and I respectively. The data is pipeline processed at the Terapix facility at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris to produce large mosaic images. The catalogs produced contain the positions, shape, total and aperture magnitudes for the 2.175 million objects. The depth measured (3sigma in a 3 arc-second aperture) is I_{AB}=24.8 in the ``Wide'' areas, and I_{AB}=25.3 in the deep area. Careful quality control has been applied on the data as described in joint papers. These catalogs are used to select targets for the VIRMOS-VLT Deep Survey, a large spectroscopic survey of the distant universe (Le F\`evre et al., 2003). First results from the CFH12K-VIRMOS survey have been published on weak lensing (e.g. van Waerbeke & Mellier 2003). Catalogs and images are available through the VIRMOS database environment under Oracle ({\tt http://www.oamp.fr/virmos}). They will be open for general use on July 1st, 2003.Comment: 17 pages including 9 figures, submitted to A&

The spectrum of HM Sagittae: A planetary nebula excited by a Wolf-Rayet star

A total of image tube spectrograms of HM Sagittae were obtained. More than 70 emission lines, including several broad emission features, were identified. An analysis of the spectra indicates that HM Sagittae is a planetary nebula excited by a Wolf-Rayet star. The most conspicuous Wolf-Rayet feature is that attributed to a blend of C III at 4650 A and He II at 4686 A

Cost effective, experimentally robust differential-expression analysis for human/mammalian, pathogen and dual-species transcriptomics.

As sequencing read length has increased, researchers have quickly adopted longer reads for their experiments. Here, we examine 14 pathogen or host-pathogen differential gene expression data sets to assess whether using longer reads is warranted. A variety of data sets was used to assess what genomic attributes might affect the outcome of differential gene expression analysis including: gene density, operons, gene length, number of introns/exons and intron length. No genome attribute was found to influence the data in principal components analysis, hierarchical clustering with bootstrap support, or regression analyses of pairwise comparisons that were undertaken on the same reads, looking at all combinations of paired and unpaired reads trimmed to 36, 54, 72 and 101 bp. Read pairing had the greatest effect when there was little variation in the samples from different conditions or in their replicates (e.g. little differential gene expression). But overall, 54 and 72 bp reads were typically most similar. Given differences in costs and mapping percentages, we recommend 54 bp reads for organisms with no or few introns and 72 bp reads for all others. In a third of the data sets, read pairing had absolutely no effect, despite paired reads having twice as much data. Therefore, single-end reads seem robust for differential-expression analyses, but in eukaryotes paired-end reads are likely desired to analyse splice variants and should be preferred for data sets that are acquired with the intent to be community resources that might be used in secondary data analyses

Modeling atmospheric effects of the September 1859 Solar Flare

We have modeled atmospheric effects, especially ozone depletion, due to a solar proton event which probably accompanied the extreme magnetic storm of 1-2 September 1859. We use an inferred proton fluence for this event as estimated from nitrate levels in Greenland ice cores. We present results showing production of odd nitrogen compounds and their impact on ozone. We also compute rainout of nitrate in our model and compare to values from ice core data.Comment: Revised version including improved figures; Accepted for publication in Geophys. Res. Lett, chosen to be highlighted by AG