CONSUMER SHOPPING PATTERNS AND PREFERENCES FOR PACKAGE SIZES

Consumer/Household Economics,

ANALYSIS OF CONSUMER PREFERENCES FOR PACKAGE SIZES FOR BEEF AND PORK PRODUCTS AS RELATED TO THEIR DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS

Delaware consumers were surveyed to obtain information about package size preferences for fresh beef and pork products. A chi-square and gamma analysis was made and age was found to be significant and positively correlated to the size of package chosen for various roasts and flank steak. Age and preferred package size was negatively correlated for ground beef, sirloin steak, spareribs, and pork chops. The larger the family the greater the tendency to buy larger packages of ground beef and roasts, as well as spareribs and pork chops. Those with higher incomes tended to purchase larger steaks. Females showed preferences for smaller packages while males preferred larger packages.Consumer/Household Economics,

A quick guide for student-driven community genome annotation

High quality gene models are necessary to expand the molecular and genetic tools available for a target organism, but these are available for only a handful of model organisms that have undergone extensive curation and experimental validation over the course of many years. The majority of gene models present in biological databases today have been identified in draft genome assemblies using automated annotation pipelines that are frequently based on orthologs from distantly related model organisms. Manual curation is time consuming and often requires substantial expertise, but is instrumental in improving gene model structure and identification. Manual annotation may seem to be a daunting and cost-prohibitive task for small research communities but involving undergraduates in community genome annotation consortiums can be mutually beneficial for both education and improved genomic resources. We outline a workflow for efficient manual annotation driven by a team of primarily undergraduate annotators. This model can be scaled to large teams and includes quality control processes through incremental evaluation. Moreover, it gives students an opportunity to increase their understanding of genome biology and to participate in scientific research in collaboration with peers and senior researchers at multiple institutions

Application of sedimentation model to uniform and segregated fluidized beds

Similarities between fluidization and sedimentation have been recognized for decades, and it is even common practice to estimate the solids holdup in the particulate regions of the fluidization beds using expressions developed for describing rates of particulate sedimentation. The most frequently used expression is that of Richardson and Zaki. This equation has a simple form and predicts for suspensions of uniform particles sedimentation rates that are proportional to the Stokes settling velocities at infinite dilution and proportional to the void fraction raised to an exponent between 2 and 5. The value of the exponent depends upon the Reynold\u27s number for the settling particles. However, recent measurements have shown that this relation does not always give an accurate description of the slip velocities or the solid holdup in particulate fluidized beds. The Richardson and Zaki equation predicts slip velocities between the fluid and the particles that are usually too high; this means that the predicted solids holdup is often lower than those measured experimentally. This paper incorporates concepts of unimodal and bimodal sedimentation to develop a model that accurately predicts bed expansion during particulate fluidization. During bed expansion a particle is considered to be fluidized not by the pure fluid, but by a slurry consisting of the pure fluid and other surrounding particles. The contributions of the other surrounding particles to the additional buoyant and drag forces are accounted for with the use of effective fluid or slurry properties, density and viscosity. As bed expansion proceeds, influences of the surrounding particles decrease; therefore, these effective properties are functions of the changing void fraction of the suspension. Furthermore, the expansion index, which empirically represents the degree to which viscous and inertial forces are present, is traditionally a function of a constant terminal Reynold\u27s number. Because the effective fluid properties are considered to be changing as fluidization proceeds, the degree to which viscous and inertial forces also changes; therefore, the expansion index is written as a function of a local or intermediate Reynold\u27s number. These concepts are further extended to bimodal fluidization in which small or light particles aid in the fluidization of the large or heavy particles. The results indicate that the proposed model more accurately predicts particulate bed expansion for a wider range of systems (gas - liquid, low Reynold’s number - high Reynold\u27s number) than other analytical or empirical models

An analysis of the latent semantic indexing retrieval system

In this thesis, a study and analysis of the effectiveness of the Latent Semantic Indexing Retrieval System (LSIRS) is presented. Using a Motif-based X-Windows application, LSIRS uses the truncated singular value decomposition (SVD) of the associated term-document matrices to perform document retrieval. The LSIRS user interface was initial prototype graphical user interface (GUI) of the recently developed XLSI application. The indexing and SVD software used to employ Latent Semantic Indexing (or LSI) was developed at Bellcore and the University of Tennessee. Based on data collected from the usage of the system by graduate students and University of Tennessee library patrons, LSIRS is shown to be an effective and useful document retrieval system for both the inexperienced and advanced user. However, as no software application is perfect, suggestions for future system improvements are described