The wine hedonic price models in the "Old and New World": : state of the art

The basic hedonic hypothesis is that goods are valued for their utility-bearing characteristics and not for the good itself. Each attribute can be evaluated by consumers when making a purchasing decision and an implicit price can be identified for each of them. Thus, the observed price of a certain good can be analyzed as the sum of the implicit prices paid for each quality attribute. Literature has reported hedonic models estimates in the case of wines, which are excellent examples of differentiated goods worldwide.The impact of different wine attributes (intrinsic or extrinsic) on consumers’ willingness to pay has been analyzed with dissimilar results. Wines coming from "New World" producers seem to be appreciated for different attributes than wines produced in the "Old World". Moreover, "Old and New World" consumers seem to value differently the wine’s characteristics. To our knowledge, no cross country analysis has been done dealing with "New World" wines in "Old World" countries, leaving an important gap in understanding underlying attributes influencing buying decisions.

SMA-Based Muscle-Like Actuation in Biologically Inspired Robots: A State of the Art Review

New actuation technology in functional or "smart" materials has opened new horizons in robotics actuation systems. Materials such as piezo-electric fiber composites, electro-active polymers and shape memory alloys (SMA) are being investigated as promising alternatives to standard servomotor technology [52]. This paper focuses on the use of SMAs for building muscle-like actuators. SMAs are extremely cheap, easily available commercially and have the advantage of working at low voltages. The use of SMA provides a very interesting alternative to the mechanisms used by conventional actuators. SMAs allow to drastically reduce the size, weight and complexity of robotic systems. In fact, their large force-weight ratio, large life cycles, negligible volume, sensing capability and noise-free operation make possible the use of this technology for building a new class of actuation devices. Nonetheless, high power consumption and low bandwidth limit this technology for certain kind of applications. This presents a challenge that must be addressed from both materials and control perspectives in order to overcome these drawbacks. Here, the latter is tackled. It has been demonstrated that suitable control strategies and proper mechanical arrangements can dramatically improve on SMA performance, mostly in terms of actuation speed and limit cycles.

A new dominance intensity method to deal with ordinal information about a DM's preferences within MAVT

Dominance measuring methods are a new approach to deal with complex decision-making problems with imprecise information. These methods are based on the computation of pairwise dominance values and exploit the information in the dominance matrix in dirent ways to derive measures of dominance intensity and rank the alternatives under consideration. In this paper we propose a new dominance measuring method to deal with ordinal information about decision-maker preferences in both weights and component utilities. It takes advantage of the centroid of the polytope delimited by ordinal information and builds triangular fuzzy numbers whose distances to the crisp value 0 constitute the basis for the de?nition of a dominance intensity measure. Monte Carlo simulation techniques have been used to compare the performance of this method with other existing approaches.

Mia Magazzino of Italian Art, Garrison (New York), 2011

MIA MAGAZZINO OF ITALIAN ART, GARRISON (NEW YORK), 2011 [Proyecto]

Perceptions Surrounding the Implementation of Colorado Senate Bill 10-191's New Teacher Evaluations

In 2013, many public education reform efforts in the United States of America center on testing and accountability. Recent data revealed that teachers have the single greatest in-school impact on student learning; however, the methods to assess teacher effectiveness are widely criticized for not holding teachers accountable and, consequently, are experiencing significant legislative attention. In 2010, Colorado passed Senate Bill 10-191: The Great Teachers and Leaders Act to improve student learning by revising teacher and principal evaluations, including linking them to student learning data, and eradicating tenure. Teachers, administrators, and policymakers hold critical roles in the implementation of this bill, yet little is known about how members of each group perceive their respective roles in the implementation. This explanatory sequential mixed methods study was designed to gather perception data from these three groups, through surveys and interviews. Data revealed that teachers and administrators do not have similar perceptions of many matters related to teacher evaluations, education reform, and the implementation of Senate Bill 10-191 (SB 191). The data also revealed that teachers and administrators expected they would agree on these matters. These collective findings led to multiple recommendations, such as the need for increased dialogue between teachers and administrators about their own perceptions of education reforms.

The Museum/School Partnership: A New Role for Art Museums in K-5 Art Education

For nearly thirty years, the arts have been poorly represented in public school classrooms due to tight budgets, state mandates, and a belief that the arts are not essential to education. In this paper, I will investigate the absence of focused art education curriculum in K-5 classrooms across the United States’ public school system, explain the advantages of reinstating art as a basic subject in the classroom curriculum, and advocate for a more active art museum role in public school elementary art education. The art museum may be in the ideal position to help develop and facilitate programming in K-5 classrooms. By placing teams of art museum professionals in public school classrooms, art museums can establish a prominent role in the museum/school relationship and can help ensure that children have adequate access to art education. The outcome would be children who have greater academic and personal successes throughout their lives.

New crocodilians from the Upper Paleocene of western Colorado / by Karl P. Schmidt --

v.6:no.21(1938)

New Pantodonta and Dinocerata from the Upper Paleocene of western Colorado / by Bryan Patterson --

v.6:no.24(1939)