Exploring the influence of consumer characteristics on veal credence and experience guarantee purchasing motivators

In Europe, in the last decades, public administration has encouraged extensive livestock farming systems, usually related to high quality meat and the preservation of endangered local breeds. Nevertheless, its continuity in the near future should be based on adapting it to the market requirements. This paper investigates consumers’ preferences heterogeneity towards veal attributes, as well as the linkage between a wide range of consumer traits and attributes that motivate purchasing of veal with unique characteristics. Main method of analysis included a choice experiment method. Findings showed that regional origin and health information play a stronger role than tenderness degree guarantee at the moment of choice. Moreover, regional origin is more relevant when it is linked to a local breed. Nevertheless, heterogeneous preferences have been detected. In contrast to the general trend, one-person households attach greater importance to the presence of a high degree of tenderness guarantee. Furthermore, younger consumers value more this guarantee, while expert consumers do not

Analysis of a Pipelined Architecture for Sparse DNNs on Embedded Systems

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are increasing their presence in a wide range of applications, and their computationally intensive and memory-demanding nature poses challenges, especially for embedded systems. Pruning techniques turn DNN models into sparse by setting most weights to zero, offering optimization opportunities if specific support is included. We propose a novel pipelined architecture for DNNs that avoids all useless operations during the inference process. It has been implemented in a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), and the performance, energy efficiency, and area have been characterized. Exploiting sparsity yields remarkable speedups but also produces area overheads. We have evaluated this tradeoff in order to identify in which scenarios it is better to use that area to exploit sparsity, or to include more computational resources in a conventional DNN architecture. We have also explored different arithmetic bitwidths. Our sparse architecture is clearly superior on 32-bit arithmetic or highly sparse networks. However, on 8-bit arithmetic or networks with low sparsity it is more profitable to deploy a dense architecture with more arithmetic resources than including support for sparsity. We consider that FPGAs are the natural target for DNN sparse accelerators since they can be loaded at run-time with the best-fitting accelerator

La relevancia de las marcas de carne de vacuno para los consumidores. Un análisis interregional

Beef has been traditionally sold as an unbranded product. Nevertheless, the use of a brand would help to differentiate the product and achieve a higher degree of loyalty among consumers. The paper investigates the level of recognition and purchase of different types of branded beef, and relates that with quality perceptions and consumer traits. A better understanding of the role that the brand occupies in consumers’ awareness and purchase decisions and its relationship with quality perceptions and personal traits may be relevant to create successful brands targeted to specific segments. Thus, a survey was carried out in two Spanish regions (Aragón and Cataluña) and two French regions (Midi-Pyrénées and Languedoc-Roussillon), with different beef consumption habits, between September 2010 and April 2011, obtaining a total sample of 1222 consumers. Main methods of analysis included two-step clustering, bivariate association measures, and non-parametric tests. Cluster analysis revealed the presence of two market segments, tentatively named ‘Connoisseur and purchaser of branded beef’ and ‘Novice and non-purchaser of branded beef’. These segments were characterized by distinctive quality perceptions and a specific socio-demographic and consumption habits profile. Not a common cross-regional segment was found although some coincidences existed. This result can be especially useful for beef producers and distributors to ascertain if they should develop a different marketing policy depending on the region. A pesar de que la utilización de la marca permite ayudar a diferenciar el producto y a conseguir un mayor grado de lealtad entre los consumidores, la carne de vacuno se vende habitualmente sin marca. Este trabajo investiga el nivel de conocimiento y de compra de la carne de vacuno con distintos tipos de marca y su relación con la calidad percibida y las características de los consumidores. Conocer el papel que ocupa la marca en la mente del consumidor y en la decisión de compra puede ser especialmente relevante para crear marcas exitosas que estén dirigidas a segmentos específicos. El estudio se ha realizado en dos regiones españolas (Aragón y Cataluña) y en dos francesas (Midi-Pyrénées y Languedoc-Roussillon) con distintos hábitos de consumo entre Septiembre 2010 y Abril 2011. En total se obtuvieron 1,222 encuestas. Los principales métodos de análisis que se han aplicado son la segmentación en dos pasos, las medidas de asociación bivariantes y los contrastes no paramétricos. Se han identificado dos segmentos, el denominado "Conocedor y comprador de carne de vacuno con marca" y el "Menos conocedor y comprador de carne de vacuno con marca". Estos segmentos se caracterizan por presentar unas percepciones de calidad distintivas y un perfil específico. No se ha obtenido un único segmento para todas las regiones, a pesar de que existen algunas coincidencias entre ellas, lo que puede ser de especial interés para discernir si sería aconsejable que se desarrollase una política de marketing distinta en función de la región

Performance, carcass characteristics, economic margin and meat quality in young Tudanca bulls fed on two levels of grass silage and concentrate

This study investigates the effect on performance, carcass and meat characteristics of increasing the forage level in the diet of fattening Tudanca young bulls using silage as the forage source as compared with a conventional ad libitum straw plus concentrate diet. Twenty two Tudanca young bulls were assigned to three different finishing diets: ad libitum grass silage plus ad libitum concentrate (GS-AC), ad libitum grass silage plus concentrate limited to a half of the intake of the ad libitum group (GS-LC), ad libitum barley straw plus ad libitum concentrate (Str-AC) and then slaughtered at around 11 months of age. GS-LC diet resulted in relation to GS-AC and Str-AC diets in lower (p <= 0.05) average daily weight gain (750 vs 1, 059 and 991 g/animal/day, respectively), lower (p <= 0.05) carcass weight (133 vs 159 and 152 kg, respectively) and carcasses with slightly lower conformation scores. Although GS-LC diet allowed for a lower dependence on concentrate (372 vs 657 and 729 kg/animal, respectively), economic margin was similar for the two GS groups (-63.1 and -64.1 vs -91.8 (sic)/head). The polyunsaturated/saturated fatty acid ratio was the lowest (p <= 0.05) in GS-AC meat (the group showing the highest IMF levels) and the ratio n-6/n-3 was the highest (p <= 0.05) in Str-AC meat. GS-LC meat showed higher collagen content and Str-AC meat presented higher cohesiveness, springiness and chewiness values. Results suggested that the substitution of straw by grass silage and the restriction of the concentrate level could be recommended for finishing young Tudanca bulls in indoors systems

Glossary of methods and terms used in analytical spectroscopy (IUPAC Recommendations 2019)

Recommendations are given concerning the terminology of concepts and methods used in spectroscopy in analytical chemistry, covering nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, atomic spectroscopy, and vibrational spectroscopy. © 2021 IUPAC and De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. For more information, please visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 2021

Critical assessment of the elemental composition of Corning archeological reference glasses by LA-ICP-MS

Corning archeological reference glasses A, B, C, and D have been made to simulate different historic technologies of glass production and are used as standards in historic glass investigations. In this work, nanoseconds (193, 266 nm) and femtosecond (800 nm) laser ablation were used to study the elemental composition of Corning glasses using laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. The determined concentrations of 26 oxides (Li2O, B2O3, Na2O, MgO, Al2O3, SiO2, P2O5, K2O, CaO, TiO2, V2O5, Cr2O3, MnO, Fe2O3, CoO, NiO, CuO, ZnO, Rb2O, SrO, ZrO2, SnO2, Sb2O5, BaO, PbO, Bi2O3) are compared with values reported in the literature. Results show variable discrepancies between the data, with the largest differences found for Cr2O3 in Corning A; Li2O, B2O3, and Cr2O3 in Corning B; and MnO, Sb2O5, Cr2O3, and Bi2O3 in Corning C. The best agreement between the measured and literature values was found for Corning D. However, even for this reference, glass re-evaluation of the data was necessary and new values for PbO, BaO, and Bi2O3 are proposed