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Consumers’ perceptions of animal husbandry practices and their heterogeneous needs for information – insights from a cross-country cluster analysis
No full textThe growing complexity of value chains leads to an increasing distance between consumers and producers. In anonymized markets, product labels are used to decrease the information asymmetry between producers
and consumers, as they replace any form of direct communication. In the context of animal husbandry, we reveal how the distance between consumers and producers is related to consumers’ perceptions of animal
welfare and elaborate on the role of knowledge, information, and product labels. A quantitative online survey on consumers’ perceptions of and attitudes towards animal welfare (AW) was carried out in Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Sweden. Data was analyzed using principal component and cluster analysis, yielding four consumer segments, namely the pragmatists, the AW unconcerned, the indifferent, and the AW concerned. The results indicate that the more contact consumers have with producers/farmers, the higher is consumers’subjective knowledge of animal husbandry systems and the lower is the need for additional information on animal welfare through a label. Further research is needed to investigate the relation between subjective and objective knowledge, animal welfare concern, and consumers’ alienation from food production places and practices
Business Case Projekt PLA4MAP
Get PDFDer Business Case für die PLA4MAP Mehrschichtverbundfolie bewertet deren Marktfähigkeit und die Schritte zur industriellen Herstellung. Die nahezu vollständig biobasierte Folie ist theoretisch recyclingfähig (81,8 %) und für Lebensmittelverpackungen unter Schutzgas geeignet. Allerdings schneidet sie in der Nachhaltigkeitsbewertung derzeit schlechter ab als petrochemische Alternativen. Wirtschaftlich ist sie aufgrund hoher Rohstoffpreise mindestens 250 % teurer als Benchmark-Verpackungen. Dennoch bietet sie langfristig Potenzial zur Reduzierung fossiler Rohstoffe und zur Erhöhung der Recyclingrate. Der Markteintritt hängt von technologischem Fortschritt, politischen Rahmenbedingungen und der PLA-Produktionskapazität ab
Production of Hydrogel-Based Curcumin-Loaded O/W Suspoemulsions
Get PDFCurcumin is a biopharmaceutical classification system (BCS) class IV substance with many potential therapeutic effects. However, like many other BCS IV active pharmaceutical ingredients, complex formulations are needed to guarantee a sufficiently high bioavailability. A not-so-well-known delivery system is a suspoemulsion (SE). SEs are emulsions with a crystalline API in continuous or dispersed phases. This study aimed to produce curcumin-loaded o/w suspoemulsions with the particle in the oil phase for, e.g., encapsulation or triggered release effects. The particles need to be smaller than the emulsion droplet size to attain high encapsulation efficiencies (EE) in the oil phase. Sonofragmentation and bead milling were tested for their ability to produce these nanocrystals in different dispersion media. It was discovered that production in miglyol was the best fit for the needed application of the crystals in SEs. Around 85% (by volume) of the particles produced with bead milling were smaller than the droplet size of about 5 µm. In contrast, only 23% of the sonofragmentated particles were below the diameter of those droplets. This oily suspension was then used to successfully produce hydrogel-based o/w suspoemulsions. In the second part of this study, we investigated different methods for determining encapsulation efficiency, but none of the methods accurately and satisfactorily resolved the encapsulation efficiency. Finally, the suspoemulsions could not be macroscopically distinguished from one another and were physically stable. In summary, we showed that stable hydrogel-based curcumin-loaded o/w suspoemulsions could be produced
An expandable voice user interface as lab assistant based on an improved version of Google’s speech recognition
Get PDFAbstractVoice assistants are potentially helpful when working in a scientific laboratory. A big challenge is the extremely specific use of language in every laboratory. As with any voice assistant, another concern is data security. Here, we present Rainbow—an open source voice user interface (VUI) for scientific laboratories, that is adaptable to any Windows PC with Internet access. We used Google Translate Site (GTS) as a voice input and output system to ensure communication to the user. The scripting language AutoIt controls GTS, executes all actions and builds the VUI. Rainbow performs tasks from three different areas—general Microsoft Windows tasks, lab-specific tasks, and device-specific tasks. We achieved significantly higher speech recognition accuracy with our VUI than with GTS alone (91.3% versus 85.1%). Because of Rainbow's architecture, it is possible to improve the voice assistant in terms of functionality and accuracy, allowing each laboratory to optimize its own Rainbow system in a user-friendly way. In a test setup, this led to a speech recognition accuracy of 98.6%. Taken together, Rainbow provides an opportunity for every scientist to implement highly specific scientific terms and tasks to this open source voice assistant system in a very user-friendly way
Bitte anstupsen!
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der sogenannten Nudging-Methode – lässt sich
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