New Zealand food and beverage consumer preferences for product attributes and alternative retailers, and in-market use of digital media and smart technology

While much of New Zealand’s primary products are exported, it is still important to understand how domestic consumers value the attributes of food and beverage products, including willingness-to-pay (WTP) for particular product attributes, and use digital media and smart technologies to access information and purchasing food and beverage products. In response to this, firstly a literature review of New Zealand consumer preferences, WTP and technology use was carried out. Secondly, a survey of approximately 1,400 New Zealand consumers was undertaken examining preferences and WTP for credence attributes and their associated factors, attitudes to and use of alternative retailers, and digital media and smart technology use in relation to food and beverages. These results are compared with an overseas study to gain relative insight into the New Zealand market. A distinct difference between New Zealand and international consumers is observed across all factors examined. These results imply that a New Zealand-centric view of international consumers may lead to an underestimation of the potential value that could be captured in international markets

Spatial epidemiological patterns suggest mechanisms of land-sea transmission for Sarcocystis neurona in a coastal marine mammal.

Sarcocystis neurona was recognised as an important cause of mortality in southern sea otters (Enhydra lutris nereis) after an outbreak in April 2004 and has since been detected in many marine mammal species in the Northeast Pacific Ocean. Risk of S. neurona exposure in sea otters is associated with consumption of clams and soft-sediment prey and is temporally associated with runoff events. We examined the spatial distribution of S. neurona exposure risk based on serum antibody testing and assessed risk factors for exposure in animals from California, Washington, British Columbia and Alaska. Significant spatial clustering of seropositive animals was observed in California and Washington, compared with British Columbia and Alaska. Adult males were at greatest risk for exposure to S. neurona, and there were strong associations with terrestrial features (wetlands, cropland, high human housing-unit density). In California, habitats containing soft sediment exhibited greater risk than hard substrate or kelp beds. Consuming a diet rich in clams was also associated with increased exposure risk. These findings suggest a transmission pathway analogous to that described for Toxoplasma gondii, with infectious stages traveling in freshwater runoff and being concentrated in particular locations by marine habitat features, ocean physical processes, and invertebrate bioconcentration

Why Does My Model Fail? Contrastive Local Explanations for Retail Forecasting

In various business settings, there is an interest in using more complex machine learning techniques for sales forecasting. It is difficult to convince analysts, along with their superiors, to adopt these techniques since the models are considered to be "black boxes," even if they perform better than current models in use. We examine the impact of contrastive explanations about large errors on users' attitudes towards a "black-box'" model. We propose an algorithm, Monte Carlo Bounds for Reasonable Predictions. Given a large error, MC-BRP determines (1) feature values that would result in a reasonable prediction, and (2) general trends between each feature and the target, both based on Monte Carlo simulations. We evaluate on a real dataset with real users by conducting a user study with 75 participants to determine if explanations generated by MC-BRP help users understand why a prediction results in a large error, and if this promotes trust in an automatically-learned model. Our study shows that users are able to answer objective questions about the model's predictions with overall 81.1% accuracy when provided with these contrastive explanations. We show that users who saw MC-BRP explanations understand why the model makes large errors in predictions significantly more than users in the control group. We also conduct an in-depth analysis on the difference in attitudes between Practitioners and Researchers, and confirm that our results hold when conditioning on the users' background.Comment: To appear in ACM FAT* 202

Student Pharmacists and Street Children: A Mutually Beneficial Relationship

The Tumaini Children’s Drop-In Center is a daytime drop-in center for the street children of Eldoret, Kenya. It is part of a partnership between the Purdue University College of Pharmacy, the Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare program, Eldoret community members, and numerous individuals in both Kenya and the US. Through the efforts of local staff and Purdue student pharmacists, who work at the local hospital on an eight-week clinical rotation, the center has helped a population of nearly 400 local street children by providing a safe haven from life on the streets. Purdue student pharmacists aid the center by applying for grants to fund service-learning projects. These projects, run by the students, help provide the children with basic necessities in addition to screening and education sessions regarding local health issues. In turn, the street children aid the students by providing a break from the stress of the hospital and by providing a broader view of what health care should look like

Incoherent transient radio emission from stellar-mass compact objects in the SKA era

The universal link between the processes of accretion and ejection leads to the formation of jets and outflows around accreting compact objects. Incoherent synchrotron emission from these outflows can be observed from a wide range of accreting binaries, including black holes, neutron stars, and white dwarfs. Monitoring the evolution of the radio emission during their sporadic outbursts provides important insights into the launching of jets, and, when coupled with the behaviour of the source at shorter wavelengths, probes the underlying connection with the accretion process. Radio observations can also probe the impact of jets/outflows (including other explosive events such as magnetar giant flares) on the ambient medium, quantifying their kinetic feedback. The high sensitivity of the SKA will open up new parameter space, enabling the monitoring of accreting stellar-mass compact objects from their bright, Eddington-limited outburst states down to the lowest-luminosity quiescent levels, whose intrinsic faintness has to date precluded detailed studies. A census of quiescently accreting black holes will also constrain binary evolution processes. By enabling us to extend our existing investigations of black hole jets to the fainter jets from neutron star and white dwarf systems, the SKA will permit comparative studies to determine the role of the compact object in jet formation. The high sensitivity, wide field of view and multi-beaming capability of the SKA will enable the detection and monitoring of all bright flaring transients in the observable local Universe, including the ULXs, ... [Abridged] This chapter reviews the science goals outlined above, demonstrating the progress that will be made by the SKA. We also discuss the potential of the astrometric and imaging observations that would be possible should a significant VLBI component be included in the SKA.Comment: To be published in: "Advancing Astrophysics with the Square Kilometre Array", Proceedings of Science, PoS(AASKA14

NMFS / Interagency Working Group Evaluation of CITES Criteria and Guidelines.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: At present, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) criteria used to assess whether a population qualifies for inclusion in the CITES Appendices relate to (A) size of the population, (B) area of distribution of the population, and (C) declines in the size of the population. Numeric guidelines are provided as indicators of a small population (less than 5,000 individuals), a small subpopulation (less than 500 individuals), a restricted area of distribution for a population (less than 10,000 km2), a restricted area of distribution for a subpopula-tion (less than 500 km2), a high rate of decline (a decrease of 50% or more in total within 5 years or two generations whichever is longer or, for a small wild population, a decline of 20% or more in total within ten years or three generations whichever is longer), large fluctuations (population size or area of distribution varies widely, rapidly and frequently, with a variation greater than one order of magnitude), and a short-term fluctuation (one of two years or less). The Working Group discussed several broad issues of relevance to the CITES criteria and guidelines. These included the importance of the historical extent of decline versus the recent rate of decline; the utility and validity of incorporating relative population productivity into decline criteria; the utility of absolute numbers for defining small populations or small areas; the appropriateness of generation times as time frames for examining declines; the importance of the magnitude and frequency of fluctuations as factors affecting risk of extinction; and the overall utility of numeric thresh-olds or guidelines

Consumption caught in the cash nexus.

During the last thirty years, ‘consumption’ has become a major topic in the study of contemporary culture within anthropology, psychology and sociology. For many authors it has become central to understanding the nature of material culture in the modern world but this paper argues that the concept is, in British writing at least, too concerned with its economic origins in the selling and buying of consumer goods or commodities. It is argued that to understand material culture as determined through the monetary exchange for things - the cash nexus - leads to an inadequate sociological understanding of the social relations with objects. The work of Jean Baudrillard is used both to critique the concept of consumption as it leads to a focus on advertising, choice, money and shopping and to point to a more sociologically adequate approach to material culture that explores objects in a system of models and series, ‘atmosphere’, functionality, biography, interaction and mediation