Jeff Bray, Heather Hartwell, Sarah Price, Giampaolo Viglia, Grzegorz Kapuściński, Katherine Appleton, Laure Saulais, Federico J.A. Perez-Cueto and Ioannis Mavridis
Advances have been made in the provision of nutritional and ingredient information on packaged food, however, there is a need to translate this to eating out reflecting consumer…
Abstract
Purpose
Advances have been made in the provision of nutritional and ingredient information on packaged food, however, there is a need to translate this to eating out reflecting consumer desire for greater transparency and knowledge of menu content. The purpose of this paper is to assess consumer’s preferences for food information presentation in four European countries (UK, Greece, Denmark and France) in a workplace dining setting.
Design/methodology/approach
This study focusses on workplace canteens since the regularity in which they are used provides an important context and potential for behaviour change. An exploratory phase designed iteratively in collaboration with experts, end-users and researchers (qualitative) informed a survey (quantitative) conducted in four European countries. The survey was used to examine workplace diners’ preferences towards food information presentation.
Findings
Differences were found and clustered (n=5) to “heuristic processors” (33 per cent) “brand orientated” (25 per cent) “systematic processors” (17.3 per cent) “independent processors” (16.1 per cent) and “tech-savvy” (8.6 per cent). Dual-process theories were used to analyse the findings and produce new insight into how menu information can be most effectively delivered.
Originality/value
When eating-out consumers struggle to make choices or make the wrong choice from a health perspective, partly caused by a lack of nutrient profile information as well as other criteria of concern. Giving catering managers the understanding of preferred communication channels can enable a more competitive operator. Traffic light labelling was the optimal presentation with the opportunity for consumers to discover more detailed information if desired. For the first time this research has given operational clarity whilst allowing food providers to be considered as part of corporate health.
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Christos K. Georgiadis, Panayotis E. Fouliras, Ioannis Mavridis and Athanasios Manitsaris
Web services refer to a specific set of technologies used to implement a Service Oriented Architecture. Thanks to maturing Web‐services standards, and to new mobile devices and…
Abstract
Web services refer to a specific set of technologies used to implement a Service Oriented Architecture. Thanks to maturing Web‐services standards, and to new mobile devices and application solutions, progress is being made in presenting similar Web‐services offerings in both mobile and fixed networks. To bring that architecture and the solutions it will support to the world of mobility is indeed a significant issue in m‐business applications, because mobile Web services present various advantages: Reduction of the overall cost of development (by reusing existing system components), faster time to market introduction of products (provided by applications’ rapid development and deployment) and remarkable possibilities to emerge new applications with increased functionalities. In addition, the new and forthcoming mobile networks, with native IP connection and high speed transmission capability, allow the development of a variety of modern multimedia services. Multimedia Messaging Services (capable to mix the media types in order to enable more intuitive messaging operation), and Instant Messaging and Presence Services (dedicated for presence, instant messaging, and distribution and sharing of multimedia content in groups of users), provide suitable underlying capabilities to support location‐based and context‐sensitive multimedia services. In this paper we will present the current approaches regarding architectural, functional and security features that allow enterprises to enjoy the benefits of traditional Web services in the mobile multimedia domain.
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Dimitrios Michalopoulos and Ioannis Mavridis
The purpose of this paper is to investigate hazards for minor users while they are exposed to social networks. In particular, it provides the statistical relationship of these…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate hazards for minor users while they are exposed to social networks. In particular, it provides the statistical relationship of these hazards with the exposure time as well as the amount of published personal information.
Design/methodology/approach
An experiment was conducted that has revealed a huge number of personal information exposed by users of social network applications. Moreover, a significant amount of suspicious activity against minors has been recorded. Experimental data led to the hypothesis that online hazards can be modeled with known statistical distributions. In order to examine this hypothesis, survival analysis techniques, which involve the estimation of certain functions that reflect the relation of a disastrous event with time, were applied.
Findings
The results show that the incoming hazards for minor female profiles follow the Logistic distribution, while the corresponding hazards for minor male profiles follow the Normal distribution.
Originality/value
The findings of this work are crucial for developing an effective system for automated grooming recognition in real time by optimizing the detection threshold as a function of time. Thus, the threshold sensitivity can be appropriately adjusted such that lower frequencies of occurrence lead to lower threshold sensitivities, and higher frequencies of occurrence lead to higher threshold sensitivities.
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Janne P. Aikio, Timo Rahkonen and Ville Karanko
The purpose of this paper is to propose methods to improve the least square error polynomial fitting of multi-input nonlinear sources that suffer from strong correlating inputs…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to propose methods to improve the least square error polynomial fitting of multi-input nonlinear sources that suffer from strong correlating inputs.
Design/methodology/approach
The polynomial fitting is improved by amplitude normalization, reducing the order of the model, utilizing Chebychev polynomials and finally perturbing the correlating controlling voltage spectra. The fitting process is estimated by the reliability figure and the condition number.
Findings
It is shown in the paper that perturbing one of the controlling voltages reduces the correlation to a large extend especially in the cross-terms of the multi-input polynomials. Chebychev polynomials reduce the correlation between the higher-order spectra derived from the same input signal, but cannot break the correlation between correlating input and output voltages.
Research limitations/implications
Optimal perturbations are sought in a separate optimization loop, which slows down the fitting process. This is due to the fact that each nonlinear source that suffers from the correlation needs a different perturbation.
Originality/value
The perturbation, harmonic balance run and refitting of an individual nonlinear source inside a device model is new and original way to characterize and fit polynomial models.