Preliminary explorative research about ethical values and organic food consumption in Apulia region, South of Italy

In the recent years there has been a growing concern and debate about ethical values linked to organic foods production and consumption. The growing interest in organic and ethical production and trade has been both consumer driven and trade driven (Browne et al., 2000). Although the debates around the ethics of organic food have typically been framed around a divide between production and consumption (Clarke et al., 2008). Therefore, the present research focus on perceptions and motives of ethical consumer. It’s aimed initially at exploring the knowledge and awareness of apulian consumers about the link between ethical values and organic production and consumption

The Spectrum of Strong Behavioral Equivalences for Nondeterministic and Probabilistic Processes

We present a spectrum of trace-based, testing, and bisimulation equivalences for nondeterministic and probabilistic processes whose activities are all observable. For every equivalence under study, we examine the discriminating power of three variants stemming from three approaches that differ for the way probabilities of events are compared when nondeterministic choices are resolved via deterministic schedulers. We show that the first approach - which compares two resolutions relatively to the probability distributions of all considered events - results in a fragment of the spectrum compatible with the spectrum of behavioral equivalences for fully probabilistic processes. In contrast, the second approach - which compares the probabilities of the events of a resolution with the probabilities of the same events in possibly different resolutions - gives rise to another fragment composed of coarser equivalences that exhibits several analogies with the spectrum of behavioral equivalences for fully nondeterministic processes. Finally, the third approach - which only compares the extremal probabilities of each event stemming from the different resolutions - yields even coarser equivalences that, however, give rise to a hierarchy similar to that stemming from the second approach.Comment: In Proceedings QAPL 2013, arXiv:1306.241

Food Security, Food Chains and Bioenergy Challenges for a Sustainable Development Environment

Food system dynamics worldwide are under a new paradigm. Energy supply based on renewable natural resources is now a necessary solution, where agri-business can play an important role, and food systems will have to interact worldwide with new competitors for land and agriculture activity. The argument in this paper is based on the evidence that innovation and technology changes in food production (agricultural production) can offer a sustainable supply of grain and biomass, when demand behaviour is consistent and very flexible (demand elasticity above 1). The main argument is based on the hypothesis that demand behaviour is the main driver in food systems, which can be observed looking at technical and technological changes in production systems in Europe and elsewhere, such as Latin America, and more specifically Brazil. Economic surplus distribution across the food chain is another key factor for the induced innovation process to occur dynamically in food and agricultural production, based on well functioning markets such as the international markets (elastic demand for most countries). Science will face a new industry demand for solutions on the production side that are able to provide sustainability and supply increases that have to support empowerment of the primary sector to help producers capture surplus created by new technology possibilities, and “new demands”. Technological changes will occur quickly enough to avoid strong changes in prices if, and only if, producers are able to look at new opportunities with conditions (and sufficient time) to improve their business (and share on economic surplus). Institutional innovation is another key factor in the food system, and should also provide capability to create value to a set of intangible goods provided by the primary sector, giving space for a multi-functionality perspective on the primary sector activity, such as environment and sustainability considerations. The first factor to be considered is certainly the market functioning, because food production traditionally suffers from market problems, which began with the characteristics of the products, space diversity, conservation problems, and production seasonality (to mention only the most obvious). Other considerations related with the environment, and non tangible goods, such as the landscape dimension (and other dimensions on man’s relationship with nature), will continue to deserve new initiatives to improve the Quality of Life.Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Farm Management, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Industrial Organization,

Uniform Labeled Transition Systems for Nondeterministic, Probabilistic, and Stochastic Process Calculi

Labeled transition systems are typically used to represent the behavior of nondeterministic processes, with labeled transitions defining a one-step state to-state reachability relation. This model has been recently made more general by modifying the transition relation in such a way that it associates with any source state and transition label a reachability distribution, i.e., a function mapping each possible target state to a value of some domain that expresses the degree of one-step reachability of that target state. In this extended abstract, we show how the resulting model, called ULTraS from Uniform Labeled Transition System, can be naturally used to give semantics to a fully nondeterministic, a fully probabilistic, and a fully stochastic variant of a CSP-like process language.Comment: In Proceedings PACO 2011, arXiv:1108.145

The Mayer series of the Lennard-Jones gas: improved bounds for the convergence radius

We provide a lower bound for the convergence radius of the Mayer series of the Lennard-Jones gas which strongly improves on the classical bound obtained by Penrose and Ruelle 1963. To obtain this result we use an alternative estimate recently proposed by Morais et al. (J. Stat. Phys. 2014) for a restricted class of stable and tempered pair potentials (namely those which can be written as the sum of a non-negative potential plus an absolutely integrable and stable potential) combined with a method developed by Locatelli and Schoen (J. Glob. Optim. 2002) for establishing a lower bound for the minimal interatomic distance between particles interacting via a Morse potential in a cluster of minimum-energy configurations