Sorting It out: Food Waste Separation in Large New Zealand Hotels: Barriers and Incentives

<p>Food waste presents a resource management challenge for New Zealand communities, businesses and governance institutions. The energy, labour, soil, water and myriad other inputs used to grow, manufacture, distribute and prepare food are lost with each kilogram that is thrown away. Numerous technologies enable the energy and nutrient potential within food waste to be recovered. Systems of this type are most efficacious when food is separated from other waste streams at source. This research demonstrates that New Zealand‟s existing waste related legislation has the potential to foster market conditions favourable to food waste recovery initiatives and technologies. However, the suite of policy instruments currently actuated provides weak stimulus for the adoption, innovation or expansion of food waste diversion ventures amongst stakeholders. Current legislation does little to incentivise food waste separation within hotels. Many hotel operators are reliant upon third party provision of waste collection, recovery and or disposal services. Exceptions include operators for whom onsite food waste processing systems or arrangements with individual farmers (who collect waste at low cost) are viable. Within this thesis, food waste, the New Zealand tourism product and the environment‟s capacity to assimilate waste are conceptualised as common pool resources requiring interconnected management regimes.</p>

Sorting It out: Food Waste Separation in Large New Zealand Hotels: Barriers and Incentives

<p>Food waste presents a resource management challenge for New Zealand communities, businesses and governance institutions. The energy, labour, soil, water and myriad other inputs used to grow, manufacture, distribute and prepare food are lost with each kilogram that is thrown away. Numerous technologies enable the energy and nutrient potential within food waste to be recovered. Systems of this type are most efficacious when food is separated from other waste streams at source. This research demonstrates that New Zealand‟s existing waste related legislation has the potential to foster market conditions favourable to food waste recovery initiatives and technologies. However, the suite of policy instruments currently actuated provides weak stimulus for the adoption, innovation or expansion of food waste diversion ventures amongst stakeholders. Current legislation does little to incentivise food waste separation within hotels. Many hotel operators are reliant upon third party provision of waste collection, recovery and or disposal services. Exceptions include operators for whom onsite food waste processing systems or arrangements with individual farmers (who collect waste at low cost) are viable. Within this thesis, food waste, the New Zealand tourism product and the environment‟s capacity to assimilate waste are conceptualised as common pool resources requiring interconnected management regimes.</p>

Application of Chaos Theory in the Assessment of Emotional Vulnerability and Emotion Dysregulation in Adults

In this work, we propose an interdisciplinary chaos analysis of emotion dysregulation (ED) and emotional vulnerability in adults. One of the main goals was the assessment of incongruences that occur in the evaluation of one’s own emotional dysregulation mechanisms in the presence of an extremely weak stimulus (Butterfly Effect). Thus, we considered a “flavor” of the Lyapunov Function method based on the assumption that the effort of answering to the test is itself a small perturbation. In this context, we calculated the “instability coefficient” Δ defined as the Euclidean distance between the pairs of vectors that include similar and reverted items of a test. The relationship between Δ, ED, and emotional characteristics as quality (positive/negative) and type (trait/state) was highlighted. We hypothesized that a higher level of Δ should be significantly related with a higher ED and with the type and the quality of emotions. The results suggest that Δ is significantly correlated with trait emotions (positively with negative emotions, and negatively with positive ones) and with ED. Moreover, Δ significantly predicts ED in adults. Thus, we consider that this approach is promising with respect to the evolution of emotional mechanisms across time. The presence of an initial instability to a weak perturbation might predict future abnormal emotional functioning, which could put at risk the mental or psychosomatic systems.

The internal temporal dynamic of unconscious inhibition related to weak stimulus–response associations

Unconscious inhibition has generally been perceived to be dependent on stimulus–response (S-R) associations. Some research has shown that the inhibition related to strong associations increases with response latency to the target. Although this finding suggests that the inhibitory process may need time to unfold, its exact internal temporal dynamic remains to be elucidated. This study examined the role of spontaneous reaction time (RT) fluctuations on sensorimotor processes using letters (Experiments 1 and 2) and faces (Experiment 3), which are more ubiquitous in our environment and do not contain strong associations as stimuli in fixed and free-choice tasks. The results averaged across trials showed that there was no negative compatibility effect in either fixed or free-choice tasks. However, when trials were classified by their response latency, the results indicated that compatibility effects decreased and became negative with longer RTs in the fixed task. These results suggest that the internal temporal dynamic of unconscious inhibitory mechanisms related to fixed responses remains effective for stimuli that do not contain strong S-R associations.

Encoding Through Patterns: Regression Tree–Based Neuronal Population Models

Although the existence of correlated spiking between neurons in a population is well known, the role such correlations play in encoding stimuli is not. We address this question by constructing pattern-based encoding models that describe how time-varying stimulus drive modulates the expression probabilities of population-wide spike patterns. The challenge is that large populations may express an astronomical number of unique patterns, and so fitting a unique encoding model for each individual pattern is not feasible. We avoid this combinatorial problem using a dimensionality-reduction approach based on regression trees. Using the insight that some patterns may, from the perspective of encoding, be statistically indistinguishable, the tree divisively clusters the observed patterns into groups whose member patterns possess similar encoding properties. These groups, corresponding to the leaves of the tree, are much smaller in number than the original patterns, and the tree itself constitutes a tractable encoding model for each pattern. Our formalism can detect an extremely weak stimulus-driven pattern structure and is based on maximizing the data likelihood, not making a priori assumptions as to how patterns should be grouped. Most important, by comparing pattern encodings with independent neuron encodings, one can determine if neurons in the population are driven independently or collectively. We demonstrate this method using multiple unit recordings from area 17 of anesthetized cat in response to a sinusoidal grating and show that pattern-based encodings are superior to those of independent neuron models. The agnostic nature of our clustering approach allows us to investigate encoding by the collective statistics that are actually present rather than those (such as pairwise) that might be presumed.

Dynamics of Input Patterns Modulate the Behavior of a Model of Olfactory Bulb Function

Input patterns to the olfactory bulb are dynamic and change in an odor-specific manner as measured by selective calcium imaging of olfactory bulb input. To our knowledge, none of the published models of olfactory bulb function uses dynamic input patterns. Therefore we tested how dynamic input alters the behavior of a simple model consisting of two layers. The membrane potential of the first-layer neurons, integrate-and-fire neurons corresponding to mitral cells, was modulated with a subthreshold oscillation at respiration frequency. The membrane potential of the second-layer neurons was used to discriminate input patterns. We implemented oscillating input with amplitudes and latencies different for each mitral cell. Not only varying the input amplitudes but also de-synchronizing the input, and varying the relation between latency and input amplitude, individually changed the model's performance significantly. The discrimination time was affected more easily than the number of second-layer neurons that can differentiate an odor pair. Increasing the de-synchronization, i.e., the spread of latency values, reduced the differences in response time between strong and weak stimulus pairs without reducing the number of reacting cells. Input phase relative to the subthreshold oscillation altered the effect of de-synchronization. Thus dynamic input changes performance parameters of models of olfactory information processing that can be verified experimentally.

Signal Strength Determines the Nature of the Relationship Between Perception and Working Memory

Neurophysiological and behavioral studies have shown that perception and memory share neural substrates and functional properties. But are perception and the active working memory of a stimulus one and the same? To address this question in the spatial domain, we compared the percept and the working memory of the position of a target stimulus embedded within a surround of moving dots. Motion in a particular direction after the target's offset biased the memory of target location in the same direction. However, motion simultaneous with a high-contrast, perceptually strong target biased the percept of target location in the opposite direction. Thus, perception and working memory can be modified by motion in qualitatively different ways. Manipulations to strengthen the memory trace had no effect on the direction of the memory bias, indicating that memory signal strength can never equal that of the percept of a strong stimulus. However, the percept of a weak stimulus was biased in the direction of motion. Thus, although perception and working memory are not inherently different, they can differ behaviorally depending on the strength of the perceptual signal. Understanding how a changing surround biases neural representations in general, and postsensory processes in particular, can help one understand past reports of spatial mislocalization.