SusOrganic - Development of quality standards and optimised processing methods for organic produce - Final report

The SusOrganic project aimed to develop improved drying and cooling/freezing processes for organic products in terms of sustainability and objective product quality criteria. Initially, the consortium focused on a predefined set products to investigate (fish, meat, fruits and vegetables). Contacting participants in the fruit and vegetable sector showed that there is only little perceived need for making changes for the improvement of the processes. At the same time, it became clear that hops and herb producers (drying) face several challenges in terms of product quality and cost of drying processes. Therefore, the range of products was extended to these products. The results of a consumer survey conducted as part the project showed clearly that consumers trust in the organic label, but also tend to mix up the term organic with regional or fair ­trade. Further, the primary production on farm and not the processing is explicitly included in the consumers’ evaluation of sustainability. Appearance of organic products was found to be one of the least important quality criteria or attributes regarding buying decisions. However, there are indications that an imperfect appearance could be a quality attribute for consumers, as the product then is perceived to be processed without artificial additives. Regarding drying operations, small scale producers in the organic sector often work with old and/or modified techniques and technologies, which often leads to an inefficient drying processes due to high energy consumptions and decreased product quality. Inappropriate air volume flow and distribution often cause inefficient removal of the moisture from the product and heterogeneous drying throughout the bulk. Guidelines for improvement of the physical setup of existing driers as well as designs for new drying operations, including novel drying strategies were developed. Besides chilling and freezing, the innovative idea of superchilling was included into the project.The superchilled cold chain is only a few degrees colder than the refrigeration chain but has a significant impact on the preservation characteristic due to shock frosting of the outer layer of the product and the further distribution of very small ice crystals throughout the product during storage. Super­chilling of organically grown salmon eliminated the demand of ice for transport, resulting in both, a reduction of energy costs and a better value chain performance in terms of carbon foot printing. This is mainly due to the significantly reduced transport volume and weight without the presence of ice. The product quality is not different but the shelf life is extended compared to chilled fish. This means that the high quality of organic salmon can be maintained over a longer time period, which can be helpful,e.g. to reach far distant markets. The same trend was found for superchilled organic meat products such as pork and chicken. The consortium also developed innovative noninvasive measurement and control systems and improved drying strategies and systems for fruits, vegetables, herbs, hops and meat. Those systems are based on changes occurring inside the product and therefore require observation strategies of the product during the drying process. Through auditing campaigns as well as pilot scale drying tests it has been possible to develop optimisation strategies for both herb and hops commodities, which can help reduce microbial spoilage and retain higher levels of volatile product components whilst reducing the energy demands. These results can be applied with modifications to the other commodities under investigation. The environmental and cost performance of superchilling of salmon and drying of meat, fruit and vegetables were also investigated and the findings indicated that both superchilling and drying could improve sustainability of organic food value chains especially in case of far distant markets. An additional outcome of the project, beyond the original scope was the development of a noninvasive, visual sensor based detection system for authenticity checks of meat products in terms of fresh and prefrozen meats

BEHAVIOR OF GREEDY SPARSE REPRESENTATION ALGORITHMS ON NESTED SUPPORTS

© 2013 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.This article was accepted for publication by IEEE in: Proc IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2013), Vancouver, Canada, 26-31 May 2013. pp. 5710-5714

On Theorem 10 in "On Polar Polytopes and the Recovery of Sparse Representations" (vol 50, pg 2231, 2004)

(c)2013 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works. Published version: IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 59 (8): 5206-5209, Aug 2013. doi:10.1109/TIT.2013.225929

Two-Loop Virtual Corrections to Drell-Yan Production at order alpha_s alpha^3

The Drell-Yan mechanism for the production of lepton pairs is one of the most basic processes for physics studies at hadron colliders. It is therefore important to have accurate theoretical predictions. In this work we compute the two-loop virtual mixed QCD x QED corrections to Drell-Yan production. We evaluate the Feynman diagrams by decomposing the amplitudes into a set of known master integrals and their coefficients, which allows us to derive an analytical result. We also perform a detailed study of the ultraviolet and infrared structure of the two-loop amplitude and the corresponding poles in epsilon.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figure

Constant-temperature molecular-dynamics algorithms for mixed hard-core/continuous potentials

We present a set of second-order, time-reversible algorithms for the isothermal (NVT) molecular-dynamics (MD) simulation of systems with mixed hard-core/continuous potentials. The methods are generated by combining real-time Nose' thermostats with our previously developed Collision Verlet algorithm [Mol. Phys. 98, 309 (1999)] for constant energy MD simulation of such systems. In all we present 5 methods, one based on the Nose'-Hoover [Phys. Rev. A 31, 1695 (1985)] equations of motion and four based on the Nose'-Poincare' [J.Comp.Phys., 151 114 (1999)] real-time formulation of Nose' dynamics. The methods are tested using a system of hard spheres with attractive tails and all correctly reproduce a canonical distribution of instantaneous temperature. The Nose'-Hoover based method and two of the Nose'-Poincare' methods are shown to have good energy conservation in long simulations.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

Subtropical Real Root Finding

We describe a new incomplete but terminating method for real root finding for large multivariate polynomials. We take an abstract view of the polynomial as the set of exponent vectors associated with sign information on the coefficients. Then we employ linear programming to heuristically find roots. There is a specialized variant for roots with exclusively positive coordinates, which is of considerable interest for applications in chemistry and systems biology. An implementation of our method combining the computer algebra system Reduce with the linear programming solver Gurobi has been successfully applied to input data originating from established mathematical models used in these areas. We have solved several hundred problems with up to more than 800000 monomials in up to 10 variables with degrees up to 12. Our method has failed due to its incompleteness in less than 8 percent of the cases

The scientific evaluation of music content analysis systems: Valid empirical foundations for future real-world impact

We discuss the problem of music content analysis within the formal framework of experimental design

The three flavour chiral phase transition with an improved quark and gluon action in lattice QCD

The finite-temperature chiral phase transition is investigated for three flavours of staggered quarks on a lattice of temporal extent N_t=4. In the simulation we use an improved fermion action which reduces rotational symmetry breaking of the quark propagator (p4-action), include fat-links to improve the flavour symmetry and use the tree level improved (1,2) gluon action. We study the nature of the phase transition for quark masses of ma=0.025, ma=0.05 and ma=0.1 on lattices with spatial sizes of 8^3 and 16^3.Comment: LATTICE98(hightemp), 3 pages, 7 figures, LaTeX2e-File, espcrc2.st