A model for analysis of consumer behaviour towards food is developed. This model is intended to bridge the gap between the objective quality approach pursued in food sciences, the product characteristics approach, and the subjectively perceived quality approach, the product attribute approach as pursued in the consumer behaviour literature. The focus is on the information processing by the consumer. Information on the product quality is supplied to the consumer in the form of cues received while shopping or consuming. A distinction is made between extrinsic and intrinsic cues, and between search‐, experience‐, and credence‐quality attributes. Within the credence attributes, three categories are distinguished: food safety, health, and all other credence quality attributes. It is demonstrated that public policy should use minimum standards for regulating food safety, information and consumer education on health issues and definitional standards to regulate the other credence qualities. In the case of search quality, no public intervention is needed. In the case of experience quality, reputation is a means of reducing the quality erosion inherent for experience quality attributes. In the case of those foods which are not sold prepacked over the counter, these means are restricted. Here the public regulators could consider backing up the private quality policy efforts on labelling by implementing traceability schemes and defining the requirements for specific label claims.

In this article, the results of a consumer survey for Germany are presented. Extrinsic cues play an important role for quality selection in the shop. Here``country of origin'' and``place of purchase'' play a dominant role. To judge the eating quality of fresh meat, those experience quality attribute cues, which are hard to measure with characteristics, like flavour or smell, seem to be the most important. For assessing the safety of meat,``country of origin'' as an extrinsic credence quality attribute cue and``freshness'' as an intrinsic credence quality attribute cue are of most importance.``Country of origin'' is used by consumers not only to predict eating quality but also to indicate safety. This holds not only for beef, but also for pork and, to a lesser extent, chicken. The most trusted source of information on the safety of meat is the butcher.

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The subcellular localization of carbonic anhydrase (CA) IV and CA IX in mouse skeletal muscle fibers has been studied immunohistochemically by confocal laser scanning microscopy. CA IV has been found to be located on the plasma membrane as well as on the sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) membrane. CA IX is not localized in the plasma membrane but in the region of the t-tubular (TT)/terminal SR membrane. CA IV contributes 20% and CA IX 60% to the total CA activity of SR membrane vesicles isolated from mouse skeletal muscles. Our aim was to examine whether SR CA IV and TT/SR CA IX affect muscle contraction. Isolated fiber bundles of fast-twitch extensor digitorum longus and slow-twitch soleus muscle from mouse were investigated for isometric twitch and tetanic contractions and by a fatigue test. The muscle functions of CA IV knockout (KO) fibers and of CA IX KO fibers do not differ from the function of wild-type (WT) fibers. Muscle function of CA IV/XIV double KO mice unexpectedly shows a decrease in rise and relaxation time and in force of single twitches. In contrast, the CA inhibitor dorzolamide, whether applied to WT or to double KO muscle fibers, leads to a significant increase in rise time and force of twitches. It is concluded that the function of mouse skeletal muscle fibers expressing three membrane-associated CAs, IV, IX, and XIV, is not affected by the lack of one isoform but is possibly affected by the lack of all three CAs, as indicated by the inhibition studies.

In this work we describe a large-scale extrinsic evaluation of automatic speech summarization technologies for meeting speech. The particular task is a decision audit, wherein a user must satisfy a complex information need, navigating several meetings in order to gain an understanding of how and why a given decision was made. We compare the usefulness of extractive and abstractive technologies in satisfying this information need, and assess the impact of automatic speech recognition (ASR) errors on user performance. We employ several evaluation methods for participant performance, including post-questionnaire data, human subjective and objective judgments, and a detailed analysis of participant browsing behavior. We find that while ASR errors affect user satisfaction on an information retrieval task, users can adapt their browsing behavior to complete the task satisfactorily. Results also indicate that users consider extractive summaries to be intuitive and useful tools for browsing multi-modal meeting data. We discuss areas in which automatic summarization techniques can be improved in comparison with gold-standard meeting abstracts.

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We analyzed the determinants of acceptance of genetically modified food (GMF) by using the probit model. In this study, we found that around 41% of the students are willing to buy GMF, and acceptance of GMF is less in female respondents than male respondents. The findings indicate that in India, benefit perception of GMF outweighed the risk perception. We also found that respondents' trust in international organizations for truthful information has a positive and significant influence on acceptance of GMF.

The development of large-scale dialog systems requires a flexible architecture model and adequate software support to cope with the challenge of system integration. This contribution 1 presents a general framework for building integrated natural-language and multimodal dialog systems. Our approach relies on a distributed component model that enables flexible re-use and extension of existing software modules and is able to deal with a heterogeneous software environment. A practical result of our research is the development of a sophisticated integration platform, called MULTIPLATFORM, which is based on the proposed framework. This MULTIPLATFORM testbed has been used in various large and mid-size research projects to develop integrated system prototypes.