Shopper Marketing Nutrition Interventions

Grocery stores represent a context in which a majority of people’s food purchases occur. Considering food intake quality has dramatically decreased, understanding how to improve food choice in the grocery store is important. In this presentation, we detail financial resource types from which shoppers can draw (i.e., personal income, WIC, SNAP) and explain how these resources are allocated (i.e., planned, unplanned, error). Subsequently, we identify a framework for shopper marketing nutrition interventions that targets unplanned fruit and vegetable purchases (i.e., slack, or willingness to pay minus list items). Targeting slack for fresh fruit and vegetable purchases allows retailers to benefit economically (i.e., fruit and vegetables are higher margin) and allows shoppers to improve nutrition without increasing budgets. We also provide preliminary evidence of what in-store marketing of fresh fruits and vegetables could entail by modifying grocery carts and floors to provide information of what is common, normal, or appropriate fruit and vegetable purchases. In each example, fresh fruit and vegetable purchases increased while not increasing shoppers’ budgets. To provide context for these results, we detail measurement tools to understand shopper behaviors, purchases, and consumption patterns. Finally, we address theoretical, practical, and policy implications of shopper marketing nutrition interventions

The Great Uncertainty: Thinking through questions of time

The global financial crisis, the shift in the global balance of economic power and the environmental threat have unfolded over very different time horizons, but they still come to a head at the same moment

Highly automatic quantification of myocardial oedema in patients with acute myocardial infarction using bright blood T2-weighted CMR

<p>Background: T2-weighted cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) is clinically-useful for imaging the ischemic area-at-risk and amount of salvageable myocardium in patients with acute myocardial infarction (MI). However, to date, quantification of oedema is user-defined and potentially subjective.</p> <p>Methods: We describe a highly automatic framework for quantifying myocardial oedema from bright blood T2-weighted CMR in patients with acute MI. Our approach retains user input (i.e. clinical judgment) to confirm the presence of oedema on an image which is then subjected to an automatic analysis. The new method was tested on 25 consecutive acute MI patients who had a CMR within 48 hours of hospital admission. Left ventricular wall boundaries were delineated automatically by variational level set methods followed by automatic detection of myocardial oedema by fitting a Rayleigh-Gaussian mixture statistical model. These data were compared with results from manual segmentation of the left ventricular wall and oedema, the current standard approach.</p> <p>Results: The mean perpendicular distances between automatically detected left ventricular boundaries and corresponding manual delineated boundaries were in the range of 1-2 mm. Dice similarity coefficients for agreement (0=no agreement, 1=perfect agreement) between manual delineation and automatic segmentation of the left ventricular wall boundaries and oedema regions were 0.86 and 0.74, respectively.</p&gt

ALS engine propellant effector system

This report summarizes analysis, design, and experimental testing done on the propellant effector (valve plus electromechanical actuator) for the Advanced Launch System (ALS) main engine

A retrospective cohort study assessing patient characteristics and the incidence of cardiovascular disease using linked routine primary and secondary care data

This is the final version. Available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.Objectives: Data linkage combines information from several clinical data sets. The authors examined whether coding inconsistencies for cardiovascular disease between components of linked data sets result in differences in apparent population characteristics. Design: Retrospective cohort study. Setting: Routine primary care data from 40 Scottish general practitioner (GP) surgeries linked to national hospital records. Participants: 240 846 patients, aged 20 years or older, registered at a GP surgery. Outcomes: Cases of myocardial infarction, ischaemic heart disease and stroke (cerebrovascular disease) were identified from GP and hospital records. Patient characteristics and incidence rates were assessed for all three clinical outcomes, based on GP, hospital, paired GP/hospital (similar diagnoses recorded simultaneously in both data sets) or pooled GP/hospital records (diagnosis recorded in either or both data sets). Results: For all three outcomes, the authors found evidence (p<0.05) of different characteristics when using different methods of case identification. Prescribing of cardiovascular medicines for ischaemic heart disease was greatest for cases identified using paired records (p≤0.013). For all conditions, 30-day case fatality rates were higher for cases identified using hospital compared with GP or paired data, most noticeably for myocardial infarction (hospital 20%, GP 4%, p=0.001). Incidence rates were highest using pooled GP/hospital data and lowest using paired data. Conclusions: Differences exist in patient characteristics and disease incidence for cardiovascular conditions, depending on the data source. This has implications for studies using routine clinical data

Left ventricular outcomes following multivessel PCI vs. infarct artery-only PCI in patients with acute STEMI: the Glasgow PRAMI CMR sub-study

No abstract available

Timescales of variation in diversity and production of bacterioplankton assemblages in the Lower Mississippi River

Copyright: © 2020 Payne et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Rivers are characterized by rapid and continuous one-way directional fluxes of flowing, aqueous habitat, chemicals, suspended particles, and resident plankton. Therefore, at any particular location in such systems there is the potential for continuous, and possibly abrupt, changes in diversity and metabolic activities of suspended biota. As microorganisms are the principal catalysts of organic matter degradation and nutrient cycling in rivers, examination of their assemblage dynamics is fundamental to understanding system-level biogeochemical patterns and processes. However, there is little known of the dynamics of microbial assemblage composition or production of large rivers along a time interval gradient. We quantified variation in alpha and beta diversity and production of particle-associated and free-living bacterioplankton assemblages collected at a single site on the Lower Mississippi River (LMR), the final segment of the largest river system in North America. Samples were collected at timescales ranging from days to weeks to months up to a year. For both alpha and beta diversity, there were similar patterns of temporal variation in particle-associated and free-living assemblages. Alpha diversity, while always higher on particles, varied as much at a daily as at a monthly timescale. Beta diversity, in contrast, gradually increased with time interval of sampling, peaking between samples collected 180 days apart, before gradually declining between samples collected up to one year apart. The primary environmental driver of the temporal pattern in beta diversity was temperature, followed by dissolved nitrogen and chlorophyll a concentrations. Particle-associated bacterial production corresponded strongly to temperature, while free-living production was much lower and constant over time. We conclude that particle-associated and free-living bacterioplankton assemblages of the LMR vary in richness, composition, and production at distinct timescales in response to differing sets of environmental factors. This is the first temporal longitudinal study of microbial assemblage structure and dynamics in the LMR

Compact North Finding System

The knowledge of orientation of an object with respect to earth-fixed reference coordinate system is crucial in many applications. For instance, in oil mining it is very crucial to accurately know the orientation of the drilling equipment under the earth surface to drill through desired path. In this context we propose a compact inertial sensor system that estimates the instantaneous orientation of the system using accelerometer and gyroscope-derived tilt and azimuth angles. To keep the system size small, we use two-axis accelerometer and one-axis gyroscope. In addition, to avoid high sensor cost, the sensor biases are removed using indexing method. The proposed system estimates the orientation of the compact system in almost all of the orientations and additionally it also provides the measurement accuracy and integrity values that help in ascertaining the validity of the orientation estimate.acceptedVersionPeer reviewe