A Focus Group Study Of Agrlcultural Marketing Programs

Five focus group sessions were held involving over 50 agricultural producers and professionals who work with farmers

Towards Digital Transformation in Fashion Retailing: A Design-Oriented IS Research Study of Automated Checkout Systems

Automated checkout systems promise greater sales due to an improved customer experience and cost savings because less store personnel is needed. The present design-oriented IS research study is concerned with an automated checkout solution in fashion retail stores. The implementation of such a cyberphysical system in established retail environments is challenging as architectural constraints, well-established customer processes, and customer expectations regarding privacy and convenience impose limits on system design. To overcome these challenges, the authors design an IT artifact that leverages an RFID sensor infrastructure and software components (data processing and prediction routines) to jointly address the central problems of detecting purchases in a reliable and timely fashion and assigning these purchases to individual shopping baskets. The system is implemented and evaluated in a research laboratory under real-world conditions. The evaluation indicates that shopping baskets can indeed be detected reliably (precision and recall rates greater than 99%) and in an expeditious manner (median detection time of 1.03 s). Moreover, purchase assignment reliability is 100% for most standard scenarios but falls to 42% in the most challenging scenario

Economic Implications of Additive Manufacturing and the Contribution of MIS

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12599-015-0374-4

Radioassay facilities at the STFC Boulby Underground Laboratory

For future low-background particle physics experiments, it will be essential to assay candidate detector materials using an array of assay techniques. To minimise the risk of sample contamination whilst moving between assay techniques, it is also sensible to minimise the distance between assay stations, particularly for non-destructive techniques where the sample may end up being installed into an experiment. The Boulby UnderGround Screening (BUGS) Facility comprises an array of germanium detectors, two XIA UltraLo-1800 surface-alpha counters, two radon emanation detectors and an Agilent ICP-MS system. This article describes each of these systems

Ultra-low background germanium assay at the Boulby Underground Laboratory

As we move to an era where next generation ultra-low background particle physics experiments begin to be designed and constructed, the ability to assay materials with high sensitivity and at speed with a variety of techniques will be key. This paper describes the Mirion Technologies (Canberra) specialty ultra-low background detectors installed and commissioned at the Boulby Underground Laboratory between 2017 and 2021. The low background levels of the detectors combine with low background shielding and a radon-reduced dry nitrogen purge system to give sensitivity approaching the best in the world without the need for intricate shielding solutions. For an optimised sample geometry, run for 100 d, it would be possible to reach close to 10 μBq kg-1(10-12 g/g) for background radionuclides of interest in neutrinoless double-beta decay

Search for astronomical neutrinos from blazar TXS 0506+056 in super-kamiokande

We report a search for astronomical neutrinos in the energy region from several GeV to TeV in the direction of the blazar TXS 0506+056 using the Super-Kamiokande detector following the detection of a 100 TeV neutrinos from the same location by the IceCube collaboration. Using Super-Kamiokande neutrino data across several data samples observed from 1996 April to 2018 February we have searched for both a total excess above known backgrounds across the entire period as well as localized excesses on smaller timescales in that interval. No significant excess nor significant variation in the observed event rate are found in the blazar direction. Upper limits are placed on the electron- and muon-neutrino fluxes at the 90% confidence level as 6.0 × 10−7 and 4.5 × 10−7–9.3 × 10−10 [erg cm−2 s−1], respectively

A Proposal for a Three Detector Short-Baseline Neutrino Oscillation Program in the Fermilab Booster Neutrino Beam

A Short-Baseline Neutrino (SBN) physics program of three LAr-TPC detectors located along the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) at Fermilab is presented. This new SBN Program will deliver a rich and compelling physics opportunity, including the ability to resolve a class of experimental anomalies in neutrino physics and to perform the most sensitive search to date for sterile neutrinos at the eV mass-scale through both appearance and disappearance oscillation channels. Using data sets of 6.6e20 protons on target (P.O.T.) in the LAr1-ND and ICARUS T600 detectors plus 13.2e20 P.O.T. in the MicroBooNE detector, we estimate that a search for muon neutrino to electron neutrino appearance can be performed with ~5 sigma sensitivity for the LSND allowed (99% C.L.) parameter region. In this proposal for the SBN Program, we describe the physics analysis, the conceptual design of the LAr1-ND detector, the design and refurbishment of the T600 detector, the necessary infrastructure required to execute the program, and a possible reconfiguration of the BNB target and horn system to improve its performance for oscillation searches.Comment: 209 pages, 129 figure

'The Germans are Hydrophobes': Germany and the Germans in the Shaping of French Identity

This article addresses issues of national identity and nationalism in the age of the French Revolution by looking at French attitudes towards the Germans. It engages with theories of nationalism while presenting empirical evidence gleaned from archival research. This material, sometimes grimly, sometimes rather amusingly, reveals much about French ideas and prejudices about the Germans and how it reflected back on the revolutionary and Napoleonic sense of what it meant to be French