PRODUCT QUALITY IN THE CANADIAN DAIRY INDUSTRY

Supply management has been shown to increase the price of milk. Technological change has induced (and allowed) processors to substitute alternative inputs, many of which can be imported tariff-free, for the traditional ingredients to lower costs and maximize profit. Meanwhile, there has been a great deal of consolidation in the dairy processing industry. We analyse the effect of these trends on cheese quality by measuring the increase in casein imports. Results suggest that supply management is negatively affecting cheese quality, by increasing casein imports due to the higher milk price. Furthermore, we were able to calculate that approximately 9.8% of specialty cheese is produced used casein. A 22% ad valorem tariff is needed to drive casein imports down to zero.Industrial Organization,

Product Quality in the Canadian Dairy Industry

Supply management has been shown to increase the price of milk. Technological change has induced (and allowed) processors to substitute alternative inputs, many of which can be imported tariff-free, for the traditional ingredients to lower costs and maximize profit. Meanwhile, there has been a great deal of consolidation in the dairy processing industry. We analyse the effect of these trends on cheese quality by measuring the increase in casein imports. Results suggest that supply management is negatively affecting cheese quality, by increasing casein imports due to the higher milk price. Furthermore, we were able to calculate that approximately 9.8% of specialty cheese is produced used casein. A 22% ad valorem tariff is needed to drive casein imports down to zero.Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Industrial Organization,

Growth kinetics of environmental Legionella pneumophila isolated from industrial wastewater

Wastewater treatment plants are environmental niches for Legionella pneumophila, the most commonly identified causative agent of severe pneumonia known as Legionnaire's disease. In the present study, Legionella pneumophila's concentrations were monitored in an industrial wastewater treatment plant and environmental isolates were characterized concerning their growth kinetics with respect to temperature and their inhibition by organic acids and ammonium. The results of the monitoring study showed that Legionella pneumophila occurs in activated sludge tanks operated with very different sludge retention times, 2.5 days in a complete-mix reactor, and 10 days in a membrane bioreactor, indicating that this bacterium can grow at different rates, despite the same wastewater temperature of 35 degrees C. The morphology of Legionella cells is different in both reactors; in the membrane bioreactor, the bacteria grow in clusters, while in the complete-mix reactor, filaments predominate demonstrating a faster growth rate. Legionella pneumophila concentrations in the complete-mix reactor and in the membrane bioreactor were within the range 3 x 10(1) to 4.8 x 10(3) GU/mL and 3 x 10(2) to 4.7 x 10(3) GU/mL, respectively. Environmental Legionella pneumophila SG2-14 isolates showed distinct temperature preferences. The lowest growth rate was observed at 28 degrees C, and the highest 0.34 d(-1) was obtained at 42 degrees C. The presence of high concentrations of organic acids and ammonium found in anaerobically pre-treated wastewater caused growth inhibition. Despite the increasing research efforts, the mechanisms governing the growth of Legionella pneumophila in wastewater treatment plants are still unclear. New innovative strategies to prevent the proliferation of this bacterium in wastewater are in demand

Multifractal Properties of Aperiodic Ising Model: role of geometric fluctuations

The role of the geometric fluctuations on the multifractal properties of the local magnetization of aperiodic ferromagnetic Ising models on hierachical lattices is investigated. The geometric fluctuations are introduced by generalized Fibonacci sequences. The local magnetization is evaluated via an exact recurrent procedure encompassing a real space renormalization group decimation. The symmetries of the local magnetization patterns induced by the aperiodic couplings is found to be strongly (weakly) different, with respect to the ones of the corresponding homogeneous systems, when the geometric fluctuations are relevant (irrelevant) to change the critical properties of the system. At the criticality, the measure defined by the local magnetization is found to exhibit a non-trivial F(alpha) spectra being shifted to higher values of alpha when relevant geometric fluctuations are considered. The critical exponents are found to be related with some special points of the F(alpha) function and agree with previous results obtained by the quite distinct transfer matrix approach.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, 3 Tables, 17 reference

AN ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF PRODUCT QUALITY WITHIN THE CANADIAN CHEESE INDUSTRY

Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

The State, Agencies and Health

Objectives: To describe and discuss the scope of institutional, legal and technical attributions of regulatory health agencies in Brazil

Distribuicao radicular de caupi em solo arenoso sob diferentes laminas de agua e dose de adubacao fosfatada.

bitstream/item/97437/1/PAND620001.pd

Using Self-Adaptive Evolutionary Algorithms to Evolve Dynamism-Oriented Maps for a Real Time Strategy Game

9th International Conference on Large Scale Scientific Computations. The final publication is available at link.springer.comThis work presents a procedural content generation system that uses an evolutionary algorithm in order to generate interesting maps for a real-time strategy game, called Planet Wars. Interestingness is here captured by the dynamism of games (i.e., the extent to which they are action-packed). We consider two different approaches to measure the dynamism of the games resulting from these generated maps, one based on fluctuations in the resources controlled by either player and another one based on their confrontations. Both approaches rely on conducting several games on the map under scrutiny using top artificial intelligence (AI) bots for the game. Statistic gathered during these games are then transferred to a fuzzy system that determines the map's level of dynamism. We use an evolutionary algorithm featuring self-adaptation of mutation parameters and variable-length chromosomes (which means maps of different sizes) to produce increasingly dynamic maps.TIN2011-28627-C04-01, P10-TIC-608