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BackgroundExcess calorie consumption and poor diet are major contributors to the obesity epidemic. Food retailers, in particular at supermarkets, are key shapers of the food environment which influences consumers’ diets. This study seeks to understand the decision-making processes of supermarket retailers—including motivators for and barriers to promoting more healthy products—and to catalogue elements of the complex relationships between customers, suppliers, and, supermarket retailers.MethodsWe recruited 20 supermarket retailers from a convenience sample of full service supermarkets and national supermarket chain headquarters serving low- and high-income consumers in urban and non-urban areas of New York. Individuals responsible for making in-store decisions about retail practices engaged in online surveys and semi-structured interviews. We employed thematic analysis to analyze the transcripts.ResultsSupermarket retailers, mostly representing independent stores, perceived customer demand and suppliers’ product availability and deals as key factors influencing their in-store practices around product selection, placement, pricing, and promotion. Unexpectedly, retailers expressed a high level of autonomy when making decisions about food retail strategies. Overall, retailers described a willingness to engage in healthy food retail and a desire for greater support from healthy food retail initiatives.ConclusionsUnderstanding retailers’ in-store decision making will allow development of targeted healthy food retail policy approaches and interventions, and provide important insights into how to improve the food environment.

Despite the continuous research to facilitate WSNs development, most safety analysis and mitigation efforts in concurrency are still left to developers, who must manage synchronization and shared memory explicitly. In this paper, we present a system language that ensures safe concurrency by handling threats at compile time, rather than at runtime. Based on the synchronous programming model, our design allows for a simple reasoning about concurrency that enables compile-time analysis resulting in deterministic and memory-safe programs. As a trade-off, our design imposes limitations on the language expressiveness, such as doing computationally-intensive operations and meeting hard realtime responsiveness. To show that the achieved expressiveness and responsiveness is sufficient for a wide range of WSN applications, we implement widespread network protocols and the CC2420 radio driver. The implementations show a reduction in source code size, with a penalty of memory increase below 10% in comparison to nesC. Overall, we ensure safety properties for programs relying on high-level control abstractions that also lead to concise and readable code.

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C éU is a synchronous language targeting soft real-time systems. It is inspired by Esterel and has a simple semantics with fine-grain control over program execution. C éU uses an event-triggered notion of time that enables compile-time checks to detect conflicting concurrent statements, resulting in deterministic and concurrency-safe programs. We present the particularities of our design in comparison to Esterel, such as stack-based internal events, concurrency checks, safe integration with C, and first-class timers. We also present two implementation back ends: one aiming for resource efficiency and interoperability with C, and another as a virtual machine that allows remote reprogramming.

The zebrafish model can play a role in education because of its suitability for manipulation and attractiveness to students compared to traditional lecture-based instruction. Furthermore, zebrafish offer advantages over other model species. Seeing as fewer and fewer students are entering science degree programs, this project has been developed to encourage scientific vocations among secondary school students. To do so, an aquarium was given to 114 schools so that they could look after adult zebrafish, mate them, and visualize embryo development. For training on more sophisticated techniques, a virtual tool was developed to simulate a real genetics laboratory on a personal computer. Results based on teachers' feedback indicate that the students were fully dedicated to the project and achieved better understanding of genetic concepts and techniques. These results demonstrate the potential of alternative teaching methods for engaging students in science learning.

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