Master of Agribusiness / Department of Agricultural Economics / Vincent R. Amanor-Boadu / While understanding consumer decisions about food choices is complex, the nature of wines makes it even more difficult to decipher how consumers arrive at their choices. Given the perceived importance of "local", how willing are consumers to pay for locally-produced wine? And, what characteristics of the wine influence the premium that consumers pay for it? These are the two related questions that this research seeks to address. The research uses a case study approach to explore how five wine characteristics of local Kansas wine influence the premium consumers are willing to pay. The five characteristics are appearance, aroma, body, taste and finish. The study uses four pairs of wine in the following groups: sweet white, dry white, semi-sweet red and dry red. Each pair is made up of a Kansas wine and a non-Kansas wine. A very well-defined set of focus group participants were invited to taste these wine without knowing the identity of the wines and score them according to their characteristics and then provide an indication of how much they are willing to pay. The case results indicate that the focus group participants were willing to discount Kansas wines in all cases of the four pairs. The factors affecting the discount were finish for sweet white wines, appearance for sweet red wines, taste and aroma for dry white and dry red wines. The implication of this exploratory case study is that while most local residents proclaim their willingness to pay a premium for local wines, when tested against national or international competitors, consumers are unwilling to pay a premium for these local wines because the local wines lack the desired quality the international wines have. The information is important because it provides direction for an entrepreneur seeking to develop local wines to focus on understanding and addressing the characteristics which influence consumers' willingness to pay a premium even as she determines which particular wines current players in the local Kansas industry has the potential to be competitive if they address the characteristics upon which they are penalized by consumers. This, despite this being an exploratory case study, it provides important direction for entrepreneurial action.

The control of surface acoustic waves (SAWs) using arrays of annular holes was investigated both experimentally and through numerical modelling. Periodic elastic composites, phononic crystals (PnCs), were designed using these annular holes as constituent elements. Local resonances associated with the annular hole structure were found to induce phonon bandgaps of a highly frequency tailorable nature, at frequencies where radiation of acoustic energy into the bulk of the substrate medium is avoided. These bandgaps are numerically demonstrated to exhibit order-of-magnitude improved extinction ratios for finite numbers of PnC elements, relative to the commonly used cylindrical pillar architecture. Devices fabricated on commercially available lithium niobate SAW delay lines verify the predicted behaviour. Through laser knife-edge detector vibrometry, a bandgap attenuation of 24.5 dB at 97 MHz was measured, in excellent agreement with finite element method (FEM) simulations. The first reported experimental evidence of subwavelength confinement of propagating SAWs was realised using the same annular hole PnC concept. Defect holes of perturbed resonant frequencies are included within the PnC to define waveguides and cavities. Confinement within these defects was demonstrated to occur at subwavelength frequencies which was experimentally observed in fabricated cavities using standard SAW transducers, as measured by laser Doppler vibrometry. The success of this result was attributed to the impedance matching of hybridised modes to Rayleigh SAWs in un-patterned substrates at the defect resonance. The work here has the potential to transform the field by providing a method to enhance SAW interactions, which is a route towards the realisation of many lab-on-chip applications. Finally, the use of annular hole arrays as negative refraction metamaterials was investigated. The symmetry was broken of the unit cells by alternating either the locally resonant frequencies or the distance separating the constituent elements. Both methods, called the bi-dispersive and bi-periodic methods, were numerically demonstrated to exhibit negative group velocity bands within the first Brillouin zone. Preliminary experimental results show that the design has the potential to be used in superlensing, where a SAW spot was imaged over a subwavelength flat lens. Future research looks to demonstrate that this result can be attributed to negative refraction.

In this dissertation, we study self-adjusting algorithms for large-scale distributed systems. Self-adjusting algorithms enable distributed systems to adjust their properties dynamically as the input pattern changes. Self-adjustment is an attractive tool as it has the potential to significantly improve the performance of distributed systems, especially when the input patterns are skewed. We start with a distributed self-adjusting algorithm for skip graphs that minimizes the average routing costs between arbitrary communication pairs by performing topological adaptation to the communication pattern. Our algorithm is fully decentralized, conforms to the CONGEST model (i.e. uses O(log n) bit messages), and requires O(log n) bits of memory for each node, where n is the total number of nodes. Upon each communication request, our algorithm first establishes communication by using the standard skip graph routing, and then locally and partially reconstructs the skip graph topology to perform topological adaptation. We propose a computational model for such algorithms, as well as a yardstick (working set property) to evaluate them. Our working set property can also be used to evaluate self-adjusting algorithms for other graph classes where multiple tree-like subgraphs overlap (e.g. hypercube networks). We derive a lower bound of the amortized routing cost for any algorithm that follows our model and serves an unknown sequence of communication requests. We show that the routing cost of our algorithm is at most a constant factor more than the amortized routing cost of any algorithm conforming to our computational model. We also show that the expected transformation cost for our algorithm is at most a logarithmic factor more than the amortized routing cost of any algorithm conforming to our computational model. As a follow-up work, we present a distributed self-adjusting algorithm (referred to as DyHypes) for topological adaption in hypercubic networks. One of the major differences between hypercubic networks and skip graphs is that hypercubic networks are more rigid in structure than that of skip graphs. This property of hypercubic networks makes self-adjustment significantly different compared to skip graphs. Upon a communication between an arbitrary pair of nodes, DyHypes transforms the network to place frequently communicating nodes closer to each other to maximize communication efficiency, and uses randomization in the transformation process to speed up the transformation and reduce message complexity. We show that, as compared to DSG, DyHypes reduces the transformation cost by a factor of O(log n), where n is the number of nodes involved in the transformation. Moreover, despite achieving faster transformation with lower message complexity, the combined cost (routing and transformation) of DyHypes is at most a log log n factor more than that of any algorithm that conforms to the computational model adopted for this work. Similar to DSG, DyHypes is fully decentralized, conforms to the CONGEST model, and requires O(log n) bits of memory for each node, where N is the total number of nodes. Finally, we present a novel distributed load balancing algorithm called Meezan to address the load imbalance among large-scale networked cache servers. Modern web services rely on a network of distributed cache servers to efficiently deliver content to users. Load imbalance among cache servers can substantially degrade content delivery performance. Due to the skewed and dynamic nature of real-world workloads, cache servers that serve viral content experience higher load as compared to other cache servers. Our algorithm Meezan replicates popular objects to mitigate skewness and adjusts hash space boundaries in response to load dynamics in a novel way. Our theoretical analysis shows that Meezan achieves near perfect load balancing for a wide range of operating parameters. Our trace driven simulations shows that Meezan reduces load imbalance by up to 52% as compared to prior solutions.

Example-based methods are effective for parameter estimation problems when the underlying system is simple or the dimensionality of the input is low. For complex and high-dimensional problems such as pose estimation, the number of required examples and the computational complexity rapidly becme prohibitively high. We introduce a new algorithm that learns a set of hashing functions that efficiently index examples relevant to a particular estimation task. Our algorithm extends a recently developed method for locality-sensitive hashing, which finds approximate neighbors in time sublinear in the number of examples. This method depends critically on the choice of hash functions; we show how to find the set of hash functions that are optimally relevant to a particular estimation problem. Experiments demonstrate that the resulting algorithm, which we call Parameter-Sensitive Hashing, can rapidly and accurately estimate the articulated pose of human figures from a large database of example images.

Food consumption trends change continuously. A noticeable trend in Sweden and the western world is consumers’ need for knowledge about the food they consume and where it originates from. Moreover, consumers appreciate food products produced close to home. The interest towards locally produced food has lately increased amongst today’s consumer, as has many researchers’ interest in the topic.  The purpose with this dissertation is to investigate how and if product-specific attributes attached to a locally produced food product, like Price, Quality, Brand and Organically produced can lead to that consumers’ are loyal towards a region. A deductive research approach is applied for this dissertation. Based on the theories of consumer loyalty, and by regarding current food trends, the theory of regional loyalty as a concept is developed. The product-specific attributes Brand, Price, Quality and Organic are examined and tested. A model and hypotheses are developed in order to understand the relationship better. By using a quantitative method and conducting a questionnaire, the consumer’s attitudes were examined. The research was conducted in themunicipalityofKristianstadand 130 questionnaires were handed out outside the biggest grocery stores in town. The findings indicate that there is a positive correlation between the variables attached to locally produced food products and regional loyalty. The results show that all these attributes are related to regional loyalty except of price, regardless of age, income or current occupation. According to the authors’ knowledge, since no study has been conducted on regional loyalty or product-specific attributes affecting this, the results of this dissertation will bring new knowledge to this area of research. The results may also be useful for executives when marketing locally produced food products.

A group G is called locally finite if every finitely generated subgroup of G is finite. In this thesis we study the centralizers of subgroups in simple locally finite groups. Hartley proved that in a linear simple locally finite group, the fixed point of every semisimple automorphism contains infinitely many elements of distinct prime orders. In the first part of this thesis, centralizers of finite abelian subgroups of linear simple locally finite groups are studied and the following result is proved: If G is a linear simple locally finite group and A is a finite d-abelian subgroup consisting of semisimple elements of G, then C_G(A) has an infinite abelian subgroup isomorphic to the direct product of cyclic groups of order p_i for infinitely many distinct primes pi. Hartley asked the following question: Let G be a non-linear simple locally finite group and F be any subgroup of G. Is CG(F) necessarily infinite? In the second part of this thesis, the following problem is studied: Determine the nonlinear simple locally finite groups G and their finite subgroups F such that C_G(F) contains an infinite abelian subgroup which is isomorphic to the direct product of cyclic groups of order pi for infinitely many distinct primes p_i. We prove the following: Let G be a non-linear simple locally finite group with a split Kegel cover K and F be any finite subgroup consisting of K-semisimple elements of G. Then the centralizer C_G(F) contains an infinite abelian subgroup isomorphic to the direct product of cyclic groups of order p_i for infinitely many distinct primes p_i.

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This qualitative study examines news values in local journalism. The study is based on the results of five personal interviews with journalists and editors at the newspaper Nerikes Allehanda. The purpose of this paper is to examine how news values is made in the editorial process. The essay also intends to compare possible differences and similarities between news for web and printed news, the focus will consistently be locally. This will be explored through qualitative interviews with local journalists and editors. All working for the newspaper Nerikes Allehanda in Örebro.

Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Adelaide, Dept of Pure Mathematics,1984. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-72).