Background: Performance-based financing (PBF) is currently tested in many low- and middle-income countries as a health system strengthening strategy. One of the main mechanisms through which PBF is assumed to effect change is by motivating health workers to improve their service delivery performance. This article aims at a better understanding of such motivational effects of PBF. In particular, the study focused on organizational context factors and health workers’ perceptions thereof as moderators of the motivational effects of PBF, which to date has been little explored.Methods: We conducted a multiple case study in 2 district hospitals and 16 primary health facilities across three districts. Health facilities were purposely sampled according to pre-PBF performance levels. Within sampled facilities, 82 clinical skilled healthcare workers were in-depth interviewed one year after the start of the PBF intervention. Data were analyzed using a blended deductive and inductive process, using self-determination theory (SDT) as an analytical framework.Results: Results show that the extent to which PBF contributed to positive, sustainable forms of motivation depended on the "ground upon which PBF fell," beyond health workers’ individual personalities and disposition. In particular, health workers described three aspects of the organizational context in which PBF was implemented: the extent to which existing hierarchies fostered as opposed to hindered participation and transparency; managers’ handling of the increased performance feedback inherent in PBF; and facility’s pre-PBF levels in regards to infrastructure, equipment, and human resources.Conclusion: Our results underline the importance of leadership styles and pre-implementation performance levels in shaping health workers’ motivational reactions to PBF. Ancillary interventions aimed at fostering participatory as opposed to directional leadership or start-up support to low-performing health facilities will likely boost PBF effects in regards to the development of valuable motivational capacities. For instance, in Malawi, PBF motivated by increasing health workers’ perceived competence to do well in their job, by giving them goals to work towards, by increasing perceived recognition, and by changing team dynamics.11This study contributes to the growing body of literature on health worker motivation in PBF by providing evidence from Burkina Faso, focusing in particular on how health workers’ perceptions of pre-existing organizational factors and PBF-induced changes therein shape health workers’ motivational reactions, using self-determination theory (SDT) as an analytical framework.12 the initiative was expanded to 15 districts in six regions. The intervention is designed as a case-based payment model with a quality top-up14: Health facilities are paid subsidies according to the number of services provided from a pre-determined list of services primarily related to maternal and child health, and may receive a quality bonus if services satisfy quality norms and standards (“carrot-carrot approach”). To this end, regular verification of reported service volume and service quality is conducted in the health facilities. Health facilities are largely autonomous in deciding how to spend the additional revenue earned through PBF, with the idea being that part of it is invested in improving the facility’s infrastructure and resource situation, and part of it being disbursed to staff as bonus payments. In regards to the latter, a financial management tool is provided to ensure transparency and fairness. Individual bonuses are to be distributed across staff members based on specific criteria: qualification, seniority, responsibility, days of absence, and individual performance evaluation. Initial evidence using data from the routine health management information system indicates that the intervention had a significant positive impact on the number of postnatal consultations provided, but no impact on antenatal care consultations, completed vaccination cycles among children under the age of one, provision of modern family planning methods, and caesarian sections.15 A comprehensive impact evaluation based on primary data and including aspects of health worker motivation16 as well as aspects of quality of care is currently on-going.In Burkina Faso, PBF was initially introduced in 2011 as a pre-pilot project in 3 health districts. In December 2013, following positive evaluation,17 Financial aspects appeared relatively unimportant as motivators pre-PBF, with salaries largely accepted especially by lower-level cadres. However, a study on health worker preferences for performance-based payment pre-implementation indicated high receptiveness of health workers for financial incentives, with the majority of respondents expressing a high preference for financial incentives overall as well as over non-financial incentives.18Previous research on health worker motivation in Burkina Faso unrelated to the PBF program has shown high levels of intrinsic motivation and professionalism, a sense of being a health worker as a vocation, and strong feelings of duty to help the community, whereas working conditions often act as demotivators.21 In contrast to the previously dominant intrinsic-extrinsic motivation taxonomy, SDT postulates that the level of volition leading to a certain behavior is more important than what stimulates the behavior .22 Whereas in prior conceptualizations of motivation, externally stimulated behavior was categorized as “extrinsically motivated” and contrasted with the more desirable “intrinsic motivation,” SDT posits that not the origin of the behavior stimulus is important for the quality of motivation, but rather the “perceived locus of causality” of behavior. The latter refers to a congruence of behavior with individual values, convictions, and needs. External regulations such as PBF or other interventions are often put in place to encourage individuals to engage in certain behaviors. SDT posits that so long as such externally stimulated behavior is in congruence with such individual values, convictions, and needs, a person will easily “internalize” the behavior  and experience what in SDT is called “autonomous motivation.” If behavior does not correspond to individual values, convictions, and needs, however, behavior will likely not be internalized, but rather stay “controlled motivated.” Research has consistently demonstrated autonomous motivation to be superior to controlled motivation in regards to performance as well as to a variety of other work-related outcomes such as wellbeing, organizational commitment, and turnover.24SDT is increasingly used as a theoretical framework to understanding motivation in a PBF context.SDT further posits that the satisfaction of 3 basic psychological needs facilitates the internalization process: (1) a sense of autonomy, ie, feeling that one is in a position to do as one thinks best at work as a health professional, within professional boundaries; (2) a sense of competence, ie, feeling that one is able to act competently and effectively at work; and (3) a sense of relatedness, ie, feeling that one is recognized, valued, and respected by patients, colleagues, and superiors.25 and the wider organizational behavior literature,26 we postulate that pre-existing factors related to the organizational context moderate the extent to which PBF positively or negatively impacts basic needs satisfaction and thereby contribute to or rather hinder the internalization of behavior incentivized by PBF. Our study explores how PBF affects health worker motivation through its effect on the satisfaction of the basic needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. In particular, based on AN emerging understanding of the importance of context in population health intervention research14 The study took place in 3 of the 15 PBF districts, namely Diébougou, Ouahigouya, and Solenzo, which represent well the average healthcare situation in the country. At district level, cases were selected to represent the primary and secondary levels of care, as well as different pre-PBF performance levels at primary level. In total, 2 district hospitals  and 18 primary health facilities  were sampled.The study was embedded in a larger effort to evaluate the PBF implementation process, which employed a mixed methods multiple and contrasted case study design with multiple levels of analysis, described in detail as described in Ridde et al.In the context of the overall process evaluation, qualitative in-depth interviews with health workers at the sampled facilities were conducted in November 2014 and February 2015, approximately one year after the start of PBF implementation in early 2014. The in-depth interviews served to capture health workers’ experiences with, reactions to, and satisfaction with the implementation of PBF in their facility.At primary level, all skilled clinical personnel were interviewed. At the 2 CMA, research assistants purposely selected a number of “key informants” with particularly good knowledge of the PBF implementation process in their health facility. This resulted in a total of 82 interviews, distributed across levels of care, cadres, gender, and performance (at CSPS level) as displayed in 3Rather than assessing motivation directly, we elicited health workers’ experiences with various aspects of the intervention . In interpreting the coded material, we triangulated responses of health workers from the same facilities with the aim of disentangling individual motivational responses from those related to the broader organizational context. The initial results were presented for discussion to 2 researchers involved in the overall process evaluation to strengthen the credibility and rigor of the analysis.Approximately 1 year after the start of PBF, the majority of health workers expressed a sense of increased motivation and effort due to PBF and particularly the individual reward component. Most said that the anticipation of rewards made them work more or better so as to earn even more in the future. Perceived effected changes include improvements in service organization, in absenteeism, in the area of infection prevention, in documentation, and in patient reception. Many health workers further reported an increase in initiative taken by staff to correct previous substandard clinical practices. In many facilities, this included initiatives to develop clinical skills and competences in certain areas of need, which health workers appreciated not only in their current work, but also in regards to future professional development.“This PBF is a source of motivation, it encourages. It’s like a springboard that pushes people to give their best. […] It encourages them to make efforts even beyond their capacity. […] The more you work, the more you are recognized and the more you receive. So this encourages you to work much more in terms of quantity and also quality” .Interviews revealed large differences between individual respondents in regards to their focus on the individual financial reward component as opposed to other motivating factors. For respondents with a particularly strong focus on the individual financial reward, the significant payment delays experienced several times during the implementation period as well as diverse unfairness perceptions related to reward distribution tended to overshadow any other motivational effects and acted as demotivators. For most respondents, however, negative motivational effects of the payment delays appeared to be largely contained by health workers’ professionalism and a recognition of the positive effects of PBF on their work situation.“We took an oath. The PBF is just a plus. For me, resources or not, it doesn’t matter much to me. The essential is that the work is done well. I’ve always told my colleagues that it’s a plus. But some people have thought from the start that PBF is a way to have a lot of money. It’s those who thought this way that [the payment delays] discourage” .Irrespective of which motivational aspects of PBF were of primary importance, virtually all health workers appeared to endorse the objectives of the intervention, which essentially reinforced adherence to pre-existing clinical protocols and guidelines, indicating a high degree of internalization.“Bottom line, in any case, PBF is a good thing. It allows to better take care of the patients which we receive at the CSPS. And this also allows good frequentation of the CSPS. And thirdly, it allows for us to have a small financial motivation to realize some things. There you go” .as PBF demands …”  or “… with PBF, I have no choice but to …” .Although most respondents seem to have had largely internalized the behavior incentivized by PBF, it appears that some health workers had not fully done so at the time of the interviews approximately one year after the introduction of the intervention, as indicated for instance by the use of phrases like “… Three groups of relevant organizational factors emerged during analysis, namely hierarchies, performance feedback, and resource availability.Many respondents spoke of the strong hierarchies in the Burkinabè health system in relation to PBF and their basic needs satisfaction, in positive as well as in negative ways. In some facilities, staff felt that the facility in-charge is the sole responsible and manager of PBF, implementing the program without involvement of or communication with other facility staff. Many health workers knew of the program, but could not provide any details on its design and implementation. This was particularly problematic in regards to the individual financial rewards  among staff members, which staff from some facilities felt was a completely untransparent process.“For [the subsidies], I really don’t know. Because, you see, our in-charges, it’s them who manage. And we are only waiting for the day when they come and tell us our subsidies. If all us health workers could be involved, it would make us happy. But we do not know. PBF, it is true that we have subsidies, but people here do not know the timing of payment of these subsidies: is it monthly, every 2 months, we do not know. It’s the in-charge who holds these secrets” .“anyway, we’ll never be listened to”  and “they are our employers, what can we do?” , negatively impacting the satisfaction of their basic need for autonomy and relatedness.For some respondents, this reinforced pre-existing feelings of powerlessness regarding their influence on facility matters and their valorization as valuable and knowledgeable facility members, as expressed by phrases like participative spirit of the PBF, we do service meetings, we explain, everyone knows how to dance now.” In the same facility, another nurse expressed his appreciation of this new participative spirit by speaking about how “as soon as the money is transferred, we sit in a meeting, we calculate together, we do the different parts, absences, holidays and everything, we subtract and according to the qualifications, each of us knows what to take. Really, here, we do everything together,” signaling positive effects on the satisfaction of his need for relatedness. The facility’s assistant midwife described how “there were things we did not do, at first it was difficult anyway [...] but it became water to drink. Like that, really, if you now see a woman, you manage to do that yourself, you’re proud of yourself, you know you took care of her,” signaling a positive contribution to the satisfaction of her need for competence.In other facilities, in contrast, good pre-existing team work and comparatively flat hierarchies supported a participatory and transparent introduction of PBF which in turn supported health workers’ basic needs satisfaction. In one high-performing CSPS, for instance, one nurse spoke with enthusiasm about the “At least in one case, PBF appeared to have provided an opportunity to break previous strong hierarchies by moving health workers’ focus away from hierarchies and “formal say” to facility performance. A lower-level cadre health worker reported that contrary to previous behavioral norms, with PBF, he felt comfortable advising his superior on facility management issues, contributing positively to his basic needs for autonomy and relatedness.When RBF came, I told the major: ‘You should diminish absenteeism, otherwise, the maternity will become worse rather than better’” .“Rigid hierarchies appeared to impact basic needs satisfaction not only in regards to within-facility relationships, but also in regards to the intervention more generally. Many health workers felt that PBF was introduced by directive and without adequate regard for their work realities in many ways, negatively contributing to their basic needs for relatedness and competence.“Now, there is a lot of documentation. If you do not, when the verifier comes, it’s as if you did not do anything, it’s 0. So you have to take time and when you take time, there are patients who complain, […] the more people are waiting outside. When I was in the East, there was no PBF. From 07:00 to 14:00, we took no less than 100 patients, but we cannot do it here. If you do, you will not be paid” .“PBF does not buy all services. For those whose services are not bought, it’s like their work is not valued […]. It’s a frustration” .A particular case was the AIS, who in principle are not supposed to provide curative care or perform deliveries and do not learn how to do so in their initial training, but who in practice often perform these tasks in light of the general staff shortage and who have often received respective in-service training.“When PBF came, they said that deliveries were done by an unqualified health worker: we are treated as unskilled health workers. And yet, an AIS can properly deliver, better than an assistant midwife with 2 years of service. I have 7 years of service in the maternity ward, a midwife who has just been out [of school] cannot do what I am doing. She is more than me, but what I know in maternity, she does not know!” .Although formal performance feedback processes had been in place even before the introduction of PBF, PBF acted to reinforce their regular implementation which had been an issue before. Some health workers described appreciating both positive and negative feedback, viewing it as recognition of their work and constructive advice on how to improve even further, strengthening the satisfaction of their need for competence and relatedness.“What I like in PBF is not the resources we receive. Anybody who does a job and then someone comes to tell you, “your work, it’s impeccable,” it’s an unmeasurable satisfaction. But if someone comes to tell you that what you’re doing there, it’s not good, it’s a total disappointment. So for me personally, PBF has led us to work in quantity and quality. [The feedback], it is a satisfaction for us, it is a source of motivation” .Some health workers, in contrast, expressed having felt incompetent and even ashamed in response to negative feedback. For instance, one health worker described how negative evaluations had affected his perceived competence.“On audit day, when we get zeros, we look at each other […] it’s shameful. We’re all there, we attend, we say that over here and over there, it’s not working, so zero, zero, and you’re traumatized. It’s really mortifying for you” .The extent to which feedback was constructively received and contributed to basic needs satisfaction appeared to depend much on the facility in-charges leadership and supervisory style. For example, in one facility, a health worker explained how the in-charge actively involved him, describing how this made him feel recognized and empowered, strengthening his need for competence and relatedness.“One wants to agree with one’s evaluation. That it is clear what you did well, what you did wrong, why you deserve the evaluation you received. There should be consensus. To me, it’s a responsibility” .Experiences in regards to material resources were mixed across facilities. Whereas it appears that some facilities used the PBF funds for improvements in the availability of medico-technical supplies, positively impacting health workers’ perceived ability to work well and thereby strengthening their basic need for competence, this seems to have not been the case in others.“Health workers now have good working conditions: clean work places, material available” .“The difficulties we encounter in the implementation of PBF, at least in my maternity, is that material is lacking. We did everything we could to have them, but there is always something missing. They say we should have at least 4 or 5 delivery beds, but this is complicated for us” .One problem common to all health facilities and persisting with PBF was a perceived shortage of human resources. In some health facilities, health workers explicitly spoke about how they could not achieve PBF objectives due to lack of staff. PBF had created this sense of increased workload by making certain technical resources available and enforcing close adherence to treatment guidelines, thereby increasing time spent on consultations including documentation . Many health workers were ambivalent in their reactions to this new situation, appreciating and endorsing the intervention aims as indicated above, but simultaneously perceiving the increased workload as overburdening and hindering adequate fulfillment of all tasks, weighing on their need for competence.“We do not have the personnel required for [work of high quality]. If you are in the dispensary and you have to be there to consult from 8am to 5pm, and in the same time the midwife is alone with more than 60 children for growth monitoring. When there is not too much to do at the dispensary, we can help, because […] there really is a lot to do. […] Most CSPS are made up of a nurse, an AIS, and a midwife. It goes without saying that when the nurse is not there, the quality of consultation is not there. The staff is so small that very often, when they come for quality evaluation, it makes us lose a lot of points” .Using SDT and the concept of basic psychological needs, our study aimed to shed light onto how PBF as implemented into pre-existing work realities can promote or hinder the internalization of behavior incentivized by PBF, fostering or thwarting positive autonomous motivation.As hypothesized, results show that the extent to which PBF positively impacted motivation depended to quite some extent on the “ground upon which PBF fell,” ie, on health workers’ experiences of their context, beyond health workers’ individual personalities and disposition. Two aspects emerged as particularly relevant in health workers’ perception, namely the facility managers’ leadership behavior and the facility’s pre-implementation resource situation.30 For the case of Burkina Faso and similar contexts with a strong presence of hierarchical leadership styles, our results imply that leadership support and training in the context of PBF or similar health system interventions might be highly conducive to the development of positive and lasting forms of work motivation. By helping leaders in the transition from directive to participatory leadership styles, PBF program implementers can support building of feelings of valorization, trust and perceived competence, thereby ultimately propelling performance in the context of PBF and beyond.31 Simple strategies might include encouraging staff members to voice their opinions and ideas in a judgement- and consequences-free environment and making facility-related decision-making transparent, for instance in the context of regular staff or supervisor-subordinate meetings.Health workers’ perceptions of their facility managers’ leadership skills and style appeared to be of high importance for a constructive PBF implementation process and subsequent positive effects on health workers’ basic needs satisfaction, similarly to what has been found in relation to other prior interventions in Burkina Faso as well as in the broader literature on work motivation.32 In practice, it has long been recognized that a certain baseline performance level particularly in terms of infrastructure and large-scale resources might be required for PBF to trigger positive cycles or improvement.32 Renmans et al speak of “success to the successful” in a recent publication.33 Many PBF interventions have therefore entailed an initial start-up component to bring facilities up to a certain performance level from which they would then be able to further transform themselves.32 In Burkina Faso, such an initial start-up component had originally been planned,13 but was later not implemented due to budgetary constraints.One key assumption of PBF is that performance-contingent provision of resources will allow health facilities to gradually improve their performance in bottom-up fashion.Our results align with these experiences in that in tendency, facilities with sufficient pre-PBF capacity particularly in terms of human resources and leadership seemed relatively successful in developing their performance with PBF in the eyes of the respondents, with largely positive consequences for basic psychological needs satisfaction. Facilities with weak pre-PBF capacity, in contrast, appeared stuck and unable to “dig themselves out” of their low-performing situation. This was not only not conducive to positive forms of motivation, but rather thwarted health workers’ basic needs for competence, relatedness, and autonomy.3–, so that we had to resort to inferring from reported experiences and behavior, which poses certain risks of misinterpretation. Third, analysis was led by a researcher not directly involved in data collection and with an important time lag. Although other authors were involved in data collection and could provide field contextualization, this precluded using an iterative approach which might have allowed more depth in the exploration of motivational mechanisms and effects. Fourth, data was collected one year after the start of the intervention, when the intervention was likely still in the process of maturing and motivational effects were likely still to change over time. Finally, it is likely that in addition to other individual factors, motivational reactions of health workers differ much according to their pre-intervention motivation levels. Unfortunately, we did not have such information available for a respective additional analysis.Our study has several important limitations. First, it relies on a case-study approach, with facilities having been selected in the context of the broader process evaluation study and based on their pre-implementation performance, notably in terms of average numbers of patients per month. Many organizational factors, which are at the center of our analysis, could unfortunately not be taken into account, although we did observe sufficient variation in health workers’ description to be reasonably confident that various pre-PBF contexts are adequately represented in the sample. We did not measure organizational factors objectively in the context of the data collection. Rather, the study describes health workers’ perceptions of organizational factors and their role in shaping their motivational reactions to PBF. Although there was often a high degree of congruence in perceptions among staff from the same health facility, in interpreting the findings, it is important to recall that perceptions do not necessarily reflect the objective situation. Second, as motivation was only one of several subjects and objectives of the in-depth interviews, there was limited time to understand motivational impacts. None of the respondents spoke explicitly about impact on their basic needs satisfaction – which was expected from prior experiencesWhile the crucial importance of the implementation context is increasingly recognized in the PBF community, explicit research is yet scarce, especially on contextual factors as moderators of the motivational effects of PBF. Our study contributes to filling this gap in knowledge by providing evidence on the importance of perceived leadership styles and pre-implementation performance levels in shaping health workers’ motivational reactions to PBF. Ancillary interventions aimed at fostering participatory as opposed to directional leadership or start-up support to low-performing health facilities might therefore not only boost PBF effects in regards to quality of care, but also foster the development of positive, sustainable forms of autonomous motivation.The research project is part of the “Community research studies and interventions for health equity in Burkina Faso.” We thank the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) for funding the program (Grant number ROH-115213). VR holds a CIHR-funded Research Chair in Applied Public Health. AMTT obtained a bursary from the University of Montreal Hospital Research Center and the University of Montreal Public Health Research Institute. AMTT received a training bursary from the CIHR. This study would not have been successful without the contributions of Maurice Yaogo and Sylvie Zongo, who managed and supervised the data production, and Guillaume Kambire, Saliou Sanogo, Mariétou Ouedraogo, Souleymane Ouedraogo, Vincent Paul Sanon, Idriss Gali Gali, Vincent Koudougou, Assita Keita, Maimouna Sanou, Elodie Ilboudo, and Ahdramane Sow, who collected data in the health centers. We also wish to thank Donna Riley, who translated a previous version of the manuscript.Ethical approval was obtained by the health research ethics committees of Burkina Faso  and the University of Montreal Hospital Research Centre (CRCHUM) (13.158). The Ministry of Health approved and endorsed the study.JL is a researcher on the impact evaluation of PBF in Burkina Faso. Her salary as an employee at Heidelberg University is funded through a research grant of the PBF intervention funder (World Bank). VR is a co-researcher on the baseline impact evaluation but receives no salary from the World Bank. None of the authors received any payment from the World Bank for the presented analysis or writing of the manuscript. The World Bank did not interfere in study design, data analysis, or writing in any way.The overall process evaluation in which this study is embedded was conceived by VR, PAS, AMTT, and JL. PAS and AMTT supervised the data collection. AF and VR conceived the analytical strategy. The analysis was carried out by AF, with support from JL. All authors provided input into the final interpretation of results. AF and JL drafted the manuscript. All authors provided input into and approved the final manuscript.1School of Public Health, University of Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada. 2Heidelberg Institute of Global Health, Faculty of Medicine, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany. 3Association Action Gouvernance Intégration Renforcement (AGIR), Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. 4IRD (French Institute For Research on sustainable Development), CEPED (IRD-Université Paris Descartes), Universités Paris Sorbonne Cités, Paris, France. 5University of Montreal Public Health Research Institute (IRSPUM), Montreal, QC, Canada.Supplementary files 1. Interview topics in-depth interviews with health workers.Click here for additional data file.Organizational context factors moderate health workers’ motivational reactions to performance-based financing (PBF).Ancillary interventions aimed at fostering participatory leadership or start-up support to low-performing health facilities have the potential to positively boost health workers’ motivational reactions to PBF.Performance-based financing (PBF) aims at improving the quality of and access to healthcare services by motivating health workers to improve their performance. In practice, various factors often hinder intervention success. The study investigated how the organizational context into which PBF was implemented in Burkina Faso shaped health workers’ motivational reactions. Our findings suggest that additional elements such as leadership training might boost PBF’s potential to foster health worker motivation, and therefore positively contribute to patients’ healthcare.


Microbial communities are inherently complex systems. To address this complexity, microbial ecologists are developing new, more elaborate laboratory models at an ever-increasing pace. Microbial communities are inherently complex systems. To address this complexity, microbial ecologists are developing new, more elaborate laboratory models at an ever-increasing pace. These model microbial communities and habitats have opened up the exploration of new territories that lie between the simplicity and controllability of “synthetic” systems and the convolution and complexity of natural environments. Here, we discuss this classic methodological divide, we propose a conceptual perspective that integrates new research developments, and we sketch a 3-point possible roadmap to cross the divide between controllability and complexity in microbial ecology. Everything simple is false. Everything complex is unusable.Mauvaises pensées et autres, Gallimard, 1942)—Paul Valéry , increasing knowledge and computational power may in the long run tilt the scales in favor of reductive explanatory power. In principle, we should be able to conceive predictive equations containing variables such as strain abundance and distribution in space (genotypic complexity), and spatial scales and boundary conditions , in order to estimate the probability and extent of a set of processes . The challenge is to accurately measure those variables and to place them in a meaningful context. The rapid progress in doing so, which is under way in the field, is a good reason for optimism.


This study was carried out to examine the validity of previous studies on the intercompatibility of olive and to compare the approach and techniques used for proposing the diallelic self‐incompatibility system and the sporophytic self‐incompatibility system. Analysis of the literature indicates that the mating system of the olive tree is a controversial issue and requires further studies to clearly and fully comprehend it. All possible approaches should be used to maximize reliability of the final conclusions on the olive mating system. The statement “vast uncertainty around the genetic identity of vernacular varieties” seems exaggerated because there could be uncertainty in some specific situations, but not as a general case, especially for widely grown cultivars. In the case of olive, the morphological characteristics used to identify cultivars are those that have been widely used for descriptive purposes, and for distinguishing and classifying olive cultivars (Pandolfi et al., 3Obviously, some minor pollen contamination is likely to occur even when precautionary measures are taken. Referring to De La Rosa, James, and Tobutt , SaumitoObviously, in cross‐pollination treatments, contamination might occur during pollen transfer when the bags are opened. However, in order to quantify the incidence of unwanted pollen, it is interesting to examine data by Moutier, Terrien, Pécout, Hostalnou, and Margier , who useThe validity of the use of correct bags and times for bagging and, more in general, of the bagging method if properly applied, is also demonstrated by the statistically significant results regarding the influence of the pollinizer on seed characteristics of the olives obtained. If massive contamination had occurred, significant effects on seed characteristics would not have been found as a result of characters transmitted by the male pollen, as instead reported by Cuevas and Oller , Farinel4Stigma receptivity is essential to characterize the “self‐incompatibility system” of the olive tree (Rallo, Cuevas, & Rapoport, 5Saumitou‐Laprade, Vernet, Vekemans, Billiard et al.  SaumitouSome of the results obtained by (Saumitou‐Laprade, Vernet, Vekemans, Billiard et al. ; Saumito6We agree with Saumitou‐Laprade, Vernet, Vekemans, Castric et al.  that theWhen the bagging technique is used, most attention must be paid in order to minimize possible problems due to uncertainty around the genetic identity of varieties, risk of pollen contamination, and poor stigma receptivity. However, we have shown that errors due to these factors are sometimes present, but do not seem to be the rule. On the other hand, it is also important to note that with the techniques used by Saumitou‐Laprade, Vernet, Vekemans, Castric et al. , occurreAs far as the bagging method is concerned, it would also be important to standardize the methodology to evaluate fruit set. Indeed, Musho  and Ouks7Olea europaea have resulted in a complex system controlling self‐incompatibility, which is not easy to understand. Therefore, it could be helpful to use all the approaches in an integrated way in order to maximize the reliability of the information which can be drawn. As done by Saumitou‐Laprade, Vernet, Vekemans, Castric et al. (We can conclude that, considering the contrasting conclusions drawn by different research groups (Breton et al., c et al. , we alsoNone declared.


In his insightful review, Eugene V. Koonin discusses various aspects of CRISPR-Cas systems with a strong focus on their qualities as “adaptive (acquired) immune systems” Koonin , 3. The Koonin suggests that CRISPR-Cas based inheritance of acquired traits (IAC) might be an example for a genuine Lamarckian mechanism, because it operates by “(1) specific, heritable changes in the genome caused by an external factor, (2) specific phenotypic effect of those changes that constitutes adaptation to the causative factor” Koonin , 6f. YetI want to propose a way how one could fit CRISPR-Cas into a use/disuse paradigm. In so doing, we must shift our attention to one distinct feature of use/disuse, namely its focus on the quantitative aspects of the process. In a use/disuse scenario, we do not primarily deal with qualitative yes/no phenomena, but with gradual processes. Therefore, we shall consider pools of crRNA species instead of discrete spacers in CRISPR arrays. This should also help to understand the continuum between Darwinian and Lamarckian types of inheritance Koonin , 13, as With IDSA and the use/disuse paradigm at hand I shall now analyze the phase of interference. Here, we have to consider that Cas molecules as well as their targets (nucleic acids) are present in different concentrations. There is a pool of Cas proteins, and there is a pool of crRNAs. As a result of differences in sequence, each crRNA deriving from a spacer region has slightly different biochemical properties. Such differences might facilitate or impede binding. Ensuing expression, a pool of various crRNAs competes for binding to Cas molecules. What we shall define as “use” is a situation in which a specific crRNA (crRNA 1) binds a Cas protein and targets a parasite DNA sequence . Protospacers will be salvaged and inserted into the CRISPR array during elimination of the parasite nucleic acid. In the next round of expression, there will be a higher concentration of crRNA 1-associated crRNAs, and this subspecies is more likely to bind to a Cas protein again, as a result of its higher abundance. Thus, we have augmentation through use. Of course, use and disuse go hand in hand, as more use of one subspecies implies disuse of other species and their relative reduction in abundance. It has been shown that CRISPR-Cas complexes show a preference for more recently acquired spacers, cementing disuse and reduction on the RNA level for less used spacers. In addition, there are optimal numbers for spacers in CRISPR arrays Koonin  and thusThe case of IDSA shows that shifting our attention to other phases than the DNA phase of CRISPR will help us to find resonance with a modern interpretation of Lamarck’s “use/disuse paradigm.” DNA might be the genuine playground of Darwinian paradigms, yet this does not mean that other material sources are not present. It is often claimed that all forms of inheritance are in the end reducible to DNA-based mechanisms, as the relevant biomolecules, such as the crRNAs, derive from it. Yet one must not confuse DNA’s primacy in biochemistry with that in inheritance and evolution, as here, clearly, other levels can play a role, as shows use/disuse of crRNAs.I want to highlight one possible implication of CRISPR-Cas for philosophical problems, namely its potential for discussions centering around scientific pluralism. I define scientific pluralism here very broadly as the claim that to approach a certain phenomenon, several non-reducible theories, explanations or methods are, might be or should be required (see Kellert et al. Now, how shall we characterize this instance of pluralism? What kind of attack on orthodoxy does it pose if one shows that some core theoretical assumptions do not universally apply? Let me draw an analogy from a core theoretical assumption in physics: the first law of thermodynamics. Is claiming “sometimes Lamarckian inheritance is instantiated” the same as claiming “sometimes energy is not conserved”? What is now key here is that the answer might be “yes” and “no”. To some, such an analogy is valid Haig . I would


Purpose: Vitamin D deficiency is a complex topic in human health and ill-health and has been studied in a variety of contexts and populations. Few studies examine Vitamin D deficiency among non-western immigrant women and even fewer examine women’s perspective on daily life while living with low vitamin D levels after childbirth and undergoing vitamin D treatment. The aim was, therefore, to explore health and ill-health among non-western immigrant women living with low vitamin D levels after childbirth and reaching normalized levels after one year of vitamin D treatment.Method: An explorative qualitative study using qualitative content analysis. Six women aged 25 to 38 years, diagnosed with low 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels during pregnancy, were recruited after having undergone vitamin D treatment.Results: The women told about living a restrained life which gradually transformed into an experience of recaptured vitality. They also experienced a need for continuity in medication, as an interruption of treatment meant returning symptoms.Conclusion: In this study, non-western immigrant women described benefits in everyday life, increased strength, relieved pain and improved sleep quality. The findings can provide valuable knowledge for healthcare providers meeting women with physical weakness, musculoskeletal pain and/or poor sleep quality after childbirth. Further studies using a longitudinal design and larger samples are warranted. Vitamin D deficiency is a complex topic in human health, and ill-health and has been studied in a variety of contexts and populations. Vitamin D levels can be measured by analysing 25-hydroxyvitamin D, in short; 25(OH)D, via a blood sample. Institute of Medicine (IOM) concludes that there is a lack of evidence-based consensus about levels of 25(OH)D regarding vitamin D deficiency and excess . Five women were married, one was single. The women had one to three children, and their educational levels ranged from primary school to college. They originated from four different continents; Africa (n:2), South America (n:1), the Middle East (n:2), and Eastern Europe (n:1). All women were now living in suburban areas of Sweden.All women were provided with the opportunity to choose the interview location. The interviewer was one of the authors (NQ). Three women preferred the interviewer´s workplace, and three others preferred to be interviewed at home. All interviews were digitally audio recorded with the women´s permission, lasting between 25 and 45 min, with an average of 32 min. The interviewer used a semi-structured interview guide with open questions to enable the women to describe daily life after childbirth while undergoing vitamin D treatment in their own words . The information letter sent to all women participants described the purpose of the study that participation was voluntary, with the right to withdraw with no consequences for their continued care or contact with the healthcare system. Those willing to participate were asked to sign and return the pre-paid letter while keeping a personal copy. Thereafter, the first author contacted the participants and asked whether they had questions or preferences for the interview locations. The interviewer asked the women after the interview for any sensitive information they wished to be carefully dealt with during transcription. All interviews were de-identified during transcription, e.g., by omitting personal names, country of origin, and workplace.A process of living a restrained life prior to the discovery and treatment of their low levels of vitamin D (LLVD hereafter) were described. During the treatment, an increased physical strength and a recaptured vitality were present, while an instant backlash occurred when interrupting the medication.Simply MOVING tired me out … I couldn´t do anything, I just didn’t have the strength … two things on the same day were too much for me (Olivia)Descriptions of a paralyzing and inhibitory physical weakness during the period of LLVD were common among the women. Physical weakness affected everyday life, both at home and away, in a variety of ways. The weakness could limit the number of daily activities and decreased the physical strength to overcome daily chores at home. One woman described how weakness and tiredness meant that she had to prioritize what to do during the day: The weak body inhibited ordinary activities in daily life, as it was unpossible to ’speed up’ when, for example, being in a hurry to catch the bus or being unable to come for a doctor’s appointment knowing that an invoice would come due to the missing visit.So if I sat, and tried to stand … it felt as if I had/ … /soreness, even though I hadn´t been exercising so much … I had severe pain throughout my body./ … /I don´t know what it´s like for other women/ … /but I think it was a bit strange. After six months you should recover somewhat after the delivery, but it took so long.All women described experiences of pain restricting and inhibiting their daily lives. For example, walking with the baby carriage became extremely slow due to pain in the legs and back. The pain could be constant, intense and felt in both muscles, bones, back, rib cage, legs, back of the knees, the knee joint and wrist. All this meant difficulties in stretching out, swimming, relaxing at bedtime, and doing pleasant things like dancing and exercising. Rosa described the pain in her whole body a long period after childbirth:Sometimes I slept during the day, and in the evening as well … but was also very tired afterwards. It´s not normal. You should be alert during the day, and sleep at night. The necessity of sleeping during the day sometimes made the women feel incapable of caring for their children, and not being good mothers. One woman described how she was unable to take care of her children, or provide them with food due an overwhelming need to sleep:Sometimes I feel I don´t want to see them [the children], since I´m so tired when they come and wake me, I say ”go away” I want to lie down, I want to sleep … you shouldn´t do that to your own children. (Hanna)Restraining also came in the form of poor quality of sleep. This could either be due to difficulties to relax and fall asleep, or sleep being interrupted, because of pain. As all the women in this study were mothers of small children during the vitamin D treatment this meant that in addition to being disturbed by pain and immobility, sleep was also sometimes affected and interrupted by the child/children. In a combination, this could lead to a negative spiral of impaired sleep. It could end up being a compelling and “unnatural” need for sleep during the day while suffering from LLVD, as Hanna said: This meant that she was unable to cook for her children, and that she had to ask her husband for help.The need of also sleeping during the day and needing to use every opportunity to take a nap, for example, by following the sleeping rhythm of their children, had the result that daily life revolved around the need to sleep, and finding ways to sleep during the day. It took all energy and restricted the possibility of being active and getting out; it was the antithesis of life itself.The physical and emotional capacity increased after vitamin D treatment, an increased physical strength, capacity and alertness that enabled most of them to be more active.I couldn´t train, but can now. I want to train. I began at first with five minutes, then ten, then 15 minutes, 20 minutes; I spend more time/ … /I feel I´m getting better and better … day by day. (Emma)This ability to set goals for the everyday life and being outdoors more often were valued highly. The enjoyment of physical activity and the ability to exercise became better and better for most of the women during vitamin D treatment. One woman described this:Even if I take vitamin D tablets daily I feel, unfortunately, that I´ve gotten worse/ … /I just want to lie down. When I´ve eaten breakfast I just want to go lie down. (Stella)For some, increased level of activity could though have a back side as it could involve a feeling of stress related to less time to relax. One woman even experienced that her feeling of tiredness became worse despite continuous treatment with vitamin D, since she increasingly had to sleep during the day. She described a cycle of continuous tiredness:I went to a naprapath at work, because I had pain here [points to her rib cage]/ … /it didn´t help/ … /I had a lot of pain before, even if I went to the physiotherapist, and ah, I took a sauna. Perhaps it´s muscle pain or something that hurts. But now, no! Nothing! (Hanna)The pain that was felt during LLVD could be related to different times during the day, as bedtime, or presenting itself at special body parts like ribcage, arms, elbows, wrists or legs. After receiving vitamin D treatment, the pain generally diminished although the experienced effect varied. For some the effect was significant. A large variety of over-the-counter medicines (paracetamol and COX inhibitors) to relieve pain and non-pharmacological treatment as sitting in the sauna, and contact with a variety of healthcare providers did not help. Vitamin D was what finally helped:When I went to bed I didn´t fall asleep right away. I had to wait maybe an hour/ … /my back ached. Now I fall asleep in ten minutes. I sleep maybe an hour longer now. Before I slept six hours at the most, but now maybe seven hours. (Emma)The women told of how they slept better after receiving vitamin D treatment, for example, in terms of falling asleep earlier related to no longer being disturbed by backache:Some of the women also told how they now needed less sleep because they felt more alert and awake. They had time for activities because they now could stay awake and do things while the children slept.The effect of vitamin D treatment was not immediate. The women found it took at least a month to notice any difference.When I haven´t taken them [the vitamin D tablets] for a while, perhaps a week or two, my pills were finished … and the prescription wasn´t renewed. I began to notice the pain returning, that is, the pain I had before treatment came back … (Rosa)The women described occasional breaks in their vitamin D treatment. Reasons varied. Either they simply forgot or lacked a renewed prescription when needed. The women pausing medication experienced symptom recurrence, in term of tiredness or pain:I don´t always take the vitamin D pills … I don´t like them … they make me fat … I`m hungry all the time … (Emma)Some were sceptical of and having an aversion towards taking the medication in general or due to side effects they believed was caused by vitamin D:Results showed that the women experienced crippling ill-health with pain, weakness, tiredness, and sleep deprivation, during a period of low levels of vitamin D. They told of how they had not previously received vitamin D for vitamin D deficiency, but as first or second-generation non-western immigrant women, they may have had LLVD for several years before treatment . It was thus difficult for them to express their ill-health in terms of particular “symptoms”. The women had diverse multicultural backgrounds and multi-cultural variations in experience of and verbalising symptoms are well known and have been found among patients with other diseases Kwok, .This is important knowledge for healthcare professionals to bear in mind when meeting women who are mothers of small children with diffuse physical tiredness and pain and calls for a broadened and cultural sensitive and safe care in a world with increasing migration . They were also informed that they could withdraw from the study at any moment without consequences for their clinical care. All women were given the possibility to choose interview location and time point; some women preferred to be interviewed at home, others preferred the interviewer’s workplace. Confidentiality was secured throughout the research process by excluding all information that could lead to identification during transcription, sample description and in the presentation of results.The varied expertise and disciplinary background among the members of the research group provided openness to the nuances in the women’s descriptions, which enhanced credibility (Graneheim & Lundman, The study provides knowledge about the difficulties for women to distinguish precise symptoms that could be unequivocally connected to low levels of vitamin D. The women’s experiences of ill-health during the period of LLVD were described as entangled with daily life as mothers of small children. Lack of sleep is common and a part of life after childbirth, and pain can be associated with the postpartum period (McGovern et al.,


Complexity is generally perceived to be a desirable attribute as far as the design/delivery of food and beverage experiences is concerned. However, that said, there are many different kinds of complexity, or at least people use the term when talking about quite different things, and not all of them are relevant to the design of food and drink experiences nor are they all necessarily perceptible within the tasting experience (either in the moment or over time). Consequently, the consumer often needs to infer the complexity of a tasting experience that is unlikely to be perceptible (in its entirety) in the moment. This paper outlines a number of different routes by which the chef, mixologist, and/or blender can both design and signal the complexity in the tasting experience. The more times you can return to a glass of wine and find something different in it—in the bouquet, in the taste—the more complex the wine. The very greatest wines are not so much overpowering as they are seemingly limitless.” [Complexity is commonly talked about as a desirable attribute of the consumer’s experience of food and drink . It is,oducts.” ). Compleoducts.” ,7) Just itless.” ,6,7).Furthermore, complexity is often not perceptible subjectively. That is, it is often not perceptible sensorially to the diner/drinker in their tasting experience, rather it is inferred  ). What, Evolving Human Nutrition: “Without a large neocortex, humans could not have elaborated cuisines, not only because cooking can be a complex process” [Prior to the diner/drinker tasting the food or beverage product, there are a number of ways in which those preparing/creating it can signal the complexity of the process that leads to its creation  , accordiprocess” . Below, The presence of complexity on the menu can, of course, be signaled simply by listing out the multitude of ingredients/elements that went into making a dish. That said, oftentimes, it feels more like the aim is to highlight some of the more/most expensive/luxury elements in the dish rather than to overwhelm the diner with a long list of ingredients. Research from Dan Jurafsky (2014) has shown that the more letters on the restaurant menu, the more a meal is likely to cost . In partFilet Mignon, Stuffed Breast of Chicken, and Pasta. The items had either simple or complex descriptions  conducted an intriguing study to assess the impact of menu complexity on people’s perception of quality, price, and purchase intention in a relatively large sample of 160 college students . Responsions see . The resThe Times newspaper) Giles Coren: “Lobster Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, sauce Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, sur son lit de pommes de terre façon, merde, je ne me rappelled plus le nom, tu sais, le mec qui etait le chef de Tallyrand, je voulais dire Antonin Worrall-Thompson, mais ce n’est pas lui”  [Brevity and the low vernacular: ‘beef in crust,’ ‘burnt cream,’ ‘cock in wine.’ It’s a weird, strangulated form of pretentious unpretentiousness. And it feels to me like the most pretentious sort of naming there could be.” [That said, one has to be careful since an overly descriptive label can all too easily come across as pretentious  . For ins p. 176) ,15. Iron“Among the recipes it contains is one for a wonderful dish served at Dinner: “Meat fruit”, a life-like tangerine with an aromatic orange zest, topped by a stem with a couple of leaves.” The journalist continues “The instructions for making it run to more than 1000 words, take a few days  and require a sous-vide sealing machine that removes the air from plastic bags, a temperature-controlled water bath, and a Thermomix that blends and heats simultaneously. Plus heat probes, silicon moulds–oh, and scales can weigh out as little as 2 g. The book itself is beautifully designed, bound, slip-cased, and illustrated. As must be evident, you can’t really use it to cook from at home. Not only is the domestic batterie de cuisine not up to the job; who has the time for such labor-intensive preparations?” [The rise of the open kitchen has undoubtedly facilitated the diner’s ability to see the culinary artistry (and complexity therein). That said, the cooking process normally takes place at too slow a pace for the diner to really get a proper sense of all the steps that may be involved in the preparation of a dish. Hence, the emergence of the open kitchen is perhaps better framed as a means of signaling that the food that eventually appears on the dining table has been freshly prepared (and playing to the growing interest in food theatre) than anything else  . Note hehttp://john-salt.com, Masters, 2012, O’Loughlin, 2012) [At this point, one might consider chef Ben Spalding’s dish at the short-lasting John Salt restaurant in Islington, North London  ,19. In thttp://www.bras.fr) are worth mentioning here. He uses what he calls ‘negative space’ (playing with the contrasting background elements) in order to accentuate the many colorful ingredients that he works with. In addition, although these elements may seem to have been placed spontaneously on the plate, they actually require around 100 individual actions. What may look random/accidental is, in other words, actually a very complex and highly-orchestrated procedure. Alternatively, here, we also have chef Andoni’s 100-element salad served at his restaurant Mugaritz in San Sebastian, Spain  . The plaThe plating and visual presentation of restaurant dishes has become increasingly complex in recent years  ,23. A coà la Russe  to service à la Française  court banquets might consist of many tens of courses too  [As chefs have increasingly gone from the traditional three, five, or seven course meal up to tasting menus with 20 or more dishes, one is reminded here of El Bulli’s closing menu with 49 courses  ,27. It sr, 2009) , which aSwitching for a moment from dining to drinking, there is relevant discussion here around the world of mixing and blending. For instance, Johnnie Walker (Blue label) whisky is made of a blend of 35 different single malt whiskies. One might compare this to the many botanicals that may be advertised in a premium gin and wonder which spirit is more complex  . In the “If a natural (flavor) character is desired, then the optimum level of complexity is often the minimum number of components required to prevent the taster from perceiving the individual characters. This level of complexity can vary from perhaps as few as 15 components in a simple fruit flavor to up to 100 in the most complex flavor of cooked food.” [“A further implication is that a flavor that may be undesirable when recognizably strong may be a contributor to complexity and, therefore, not undesirable if below the recognition threshold in the blend.” [The notion that the art of blending involves the obscuring of some of the individual elements links to what is often said about a good Indian curry. While the latter may well contain 20–30 or more herbs and spices and so is likely more chemically complex than many other dishes, it is commonly held that the chef has failed if it is possible to taste the individual elements  ,38. One d food.” . NeverthComplexity in the meal itself (as seen from the diner’s perspective) can occur at various levels from the granular to the high-level.2O. If it were, it would taste bitter/sour  [The chemists have various formulae by which to assess the complexity of a molecule  . What isa, 2017) ,46,47. Ia, 2017) ,49. HencMost food and drink products actually contain many tens if not hundreds of different molecules  ,51. A qu“I had to draw a deep breath in anticipation of what would rise from my glass of Leroy 2005 Musigny and, in that moment, Madame Leroy trenchantly observed that ‘it’s another world’ down in there. Tea, ginger, tangerine rind, myriad sweet flowers, cherry distillate, truffles, and fraise des bois preserves are among the scents that pour forth. Bloody fresh meat and implacable chalk join the medley of fruit, floral, and spice concentrates on a palate whose texture “polish,” “refinement,” or “velvet” are pitifully inadequate to describe. For all of its amazing richness, this displays more of a confident inner sweetness than a superficial sucrosity and there is no lack of sheer energetic brightness of fruit and drive. Indeed, seatbelts would be advised before attempting to swallow this elixir such is the phenomenal thrust of its finish.” [Reading the wine press, one could all too easily be convinced that there is a world of complexity in a quality glass of wine. For example, Smith (2008) highlights the following beautiful example from Robert Parker’s website (eRobertParker.com): finish.” . Howeverfinish.” ,63,64,65“In wines, flavor complexity is considered very important to high quality and is believed to be one of the primary effects produced by proper aging.” [This discrepancy might be explained in a number of ways. It might, for instance, simply be that real foods vary in many other sensory attributes such as, for instance, their oral-somatosensory texture/mouth feel  ,67 not t aging.” .One might also think of literature suggesting that two palates  ,75,76,77The notion of chunking from the field of cognitive psychology may also be relevant here too  . Additio“In other words, the integration of aromas in a multi-component mixture such as a wine … may be considered a higher level of abstraction that can give rise to a single perception described by the word “complex.” This higher level of abstraction is argued as involving configural perception or perceptual fusion where the multiple components of a stimulus are recognized as a whole pattern with the individual components not necessarily accessible to consciousness. That is, as distinct from elemental perception where the components of a mixture such as a wine are perceived within the mixture, configural perception involves blending of the components or properties of the mixture with the resulting percept or Gestalt being different from the components.” [Another way in which to think about subjectively-perceived flavor complexity is in terms of configural processing  ,63. Studonents.” . There ionents.” .However, while people may want to ascribe complexity to a flavor experience with only a single dominant note, it is certainly not clear that the configural approach is necessarily the best way to think about what may be going on. This is because, in vision, the configural account is much more highly developed  while the elements may be grouped as a configural whole. The individual elements retain their identity in a way that is not so obviously the case in flavor perception  ,88. One “You know, I went to cooking school decades ago and there they taught me how to make delicious food. It’s not my goal to make delicious food anymore. I want to make interesting food.”  [Complex experiences are unlikely to be processed fluently while simple dishes/flavors by contrast are processed fluently  . One of a, 2012) .Thon au chocolat blanc et piment Thaï dish at his namesake restaurant in Vevey, Switzerland  [Chef Denis Martin’s serves a n, 2007) . The disn, 2007) . It has n, 2007) ,6,96.While consumers undoubtedly do value complexity as far as their experience of food and drink are concerned  , see alsWe value subjective complexity but that is something that is often not perceptible in the mix. No wonder then that stress is placed on complexity on the making, be it in terms of the number of ingredients on the menu, the number of steps in the recipes in the cookbooks that perhaps no one ever cooks from, the number of courses, or the skill of the maker to have their work imperceptible. While complexity has primarily been framed as positive here, one might, in closing, want to question whether it should always be thought of as such. Here, it is just worth noting the striving for simplicity that is undoubtedly a key feature that many chefs are striving toward these days. Early work on complexity in the visual arts suggested an inverted U-shaped graph linking liking with complexity  ,100,101.“The summit of the chef’s art is to conceive and realize a multicourse meal that progresses through a series of flavors without repetition .”  [Lastly, it can be argued that, while many western writers tend to want to put the complexity in the flavor, those from the East far more often situate the complexity in the art of making/preparing, which is cognizant that there is only a very limited amount of complexity that can be perceived in the moment. It may also reflect the differing role of food production more generally constraining thinking style  . In the e, 1999) . We haveUltimately, then, as this review has hopefully made clear, ‘complexity’ is a term that is used in multiple ways by those working in the world of food and drink. The challenge for the culinary creative given that complexity is so often deemed a desirable attribute of our multisensory tasting experiences, is to communicate that to the consumer in the most effective way since it is not always something that is discernible on the palate itself. This is achieved in a number of ways on both the menu and in the meal itself.Looking to the future, it will be interesting to determine the extent to which the positive associations that many people have with complexity in food and drink is culture-specific. It will also be interesting to see how in the coming years the desire for complexity interfaces with the growing desire for purity, simplicity, and natural/unadulterated foods  . Given t


The authors wish to make the following corrections to this paper :In the abstract, the sentence “This study describes for the first time the detection of free BLV RNA in blood from BLV-infected asymptomatic cows” should be “This study describes the detection of free BLV RNA in blood from BLV-infected asymptomatic cows”.In the discussion section, we eliminated the sentence “Therefore, our results suggest that BLV viral expression, reactivation, and/or replication could be present during the asymptomatic period in the naturally BLV-infected animals”, and added the sentence “This is in line with recently reported data , and reinforces the evidence suggesting that BLV viral expression, reactivation and/or replication could be present during the asymptomatic period in naturally BLV-infected animals”.Also, a new reference was added : JaworskThe authors would like to apologize for any inconvenience caused to the readers by these changes.


The human daily activity category represents individual lifestyle and pattern, such as sports and shopping, which reflect personal habits, lifestyle, and preferences and are of great value for human health and many other application fields. Currently, compared to questionnaires, social media as a sensor provides low-cost and easy-to-access data sources, providing new opportunities for obtaining human daily activity category data. However, there are still some challenges to accurately recognizing posts because existing studies ignore contextual information or word order in posts and remain unsatisfactory for capturing the activity semantics of words. To address this problem, we propose a general model for recognizing the human activity category based on deep learning. This model not only describes how to extract a sequence of higher-level word phrase representations in posts based on the deep learning sequence model but also how to integrate temporal information and external knowledge to capture the activity semantics in posts. Considering that no benchmark dataset is available in such studies, we built a dataset that was used for training and evaluating the model. The experimental results show that the proposed model significantly improves the accuracy of recognizing the human activity category compared with traditional classification methods. The knowledge about which activities and why people perform them at a certain time can be very valuable for identifying healthy lifestyles  and can In this paper, we aim to automatically extract high-level logical activity  We propose a general model for human activity classification based on a deep learning sequence model and a series of solutions to capture the activity semantic by embedding, encoding and fusing text semantics, external knowledge and temporal information for machine learning. The model provides methods on how to extract a sequence of higher-level word phrase representations in posts, as well as how to integrate temporal information and external knowledge in posts.(2)We build an activity-text dataset that contains activity labels, post texts, and release time called Yelp-20k. The dataset contains 14 categories of activities and 28,150 labeled posts; the dataset utilized in this paper can be downloaded via GitHub. The dataset can be taken as a benchmark dataset to facilitate works on human activity recognition.(3)We present the proposed model and its variants to classify human activity with accuracies of 81.29, 81.99, 82.93 and 82.42%. While all four models perform similarly well for human activity recognition, combining text semantics and temporal information is more robust.Considering this problem, we propose a general model for recognizing the human activity category based on a deep learning sequence model. To the best of our knowledge, our proposal is the first to recognize activity from social media based on deep learning  theory aThe rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Referring to human activity recognition, many works aim to identify low-level physical activities . Human physical activity recognition is a promising research field due to its applications in healthcare, athletics, lifestyle monitoring, and computer-human interaction. Usually, it can be implemented from three categories of data, such as video, wearable motion sensor data, and multi-sensors data ,12,13. RIn contrast to physical activity, human activity recognition in this paper aims to classify high-level logical activities . For high-level logical activities recognition, there are different works in the literature using different types of data. These related studies can be summarized in 3 categories.The first category of works focuses on activity category prediction. Weerkamp proposed an approach to predict the popular activities that will occur in a future time window, such as tonight, tomorrow, and next week, by using a future time window and keywords related to activities . Their iThe second category is human activity recognition using location information in both continuing and noncontinuous types of trajectories. (1) For continuous trajectories, these studies usually use constrained random fields, support vector machines, or Bayesian to identify travel modes with spatiotemporal features of trajectory data ,19,20,21The third category of related works infers the user activity category from crowdsourced texts. Human activities can be expressed not only by images and videos but also by texts. Zhu, Blanke  built a A post could be a text document, blog post, tweet, etc. For example, from the post “the pizza is very delicious”, we have a high probability of determining that the person who made this post is eating. Through social media platforms that record such data, we can obtain rich information for activity recognition without any additional instrumentation. Therefore, as long as we establish the connection between posts and activities and then classify these posts, we know what kinds of activities people are performing. Thus, by mapping activities to posts, activity classification is similar to a text classification task. In this paper, our objective is to design a model to improve the accuracy of extracting human activity for posts on social media.Inspired by a deep learning sequence model that has had considerable success in many natural language tasks, including text classification and voice recognition, we will use deep learning to automatically deduce the classification of an activity and recognize an activity from social media texts and time together.The proposed model is derived from a long short-term memory network (LSTM) , and we In the following subsections, we explain how to recognize human activities from social media with a deep learning sequence model and how to integrate external knowledge and temporal information to improve precogitation accuracy.We denote a post of Both the word meaning and its context should help us to capture a more precise word characteristic related to human activity. In our model, we use the word embedding model to capture the word meaning of the word and its context in the word sequence.Word embedding is a model that represents words in sparse spaces as low-dimensional and high-density distributed representations. Compared to traditional representations, such as one-hot representation, which leads to the curse of dimensionality, word embedding is suitable for the neural network input because it embeds rich syntactic and semantic information of the words ,29. TherTo generate a word embedding vector for each word in posts, the skip-gram model is selected. The skip-gram model is a popular model for building word embedding and is considered state-of-the-art in many NLP tasks . It traiGenerally, posts may contain different keywords that should contribute more than ordinary words for recognizing human activities in social media posts because those keywords have richer activity semantics. The keyword collection is labeled manually into a different category and is called a dictionary. The dictionary can be introduced as external knowledge.In this paper, we use the TF-IDF model  to extraThe TF-IDF model includes two parts, term frequency and inverse document frequency. The term frequency refers to the number of times that a given word appears in the post. Its mathematical expression can be defined as follows:However, the large TF value of a word cannot represent a post directly because some common words that appear in many posts will have a large TF value. The main idea of inverse document frequency is that if fewer posts that contain word The reason that the denominator adds 1 is to avoid the denominator being 0. A word that has a high word frequency in a particular post and a low post frequency in the entire corpus can produce a high weight TF-IDF value. Thus, the TF-IDF model can filter out common words and keep important words. The reserved words can express the feature of posts very well. It can be defined as follows:We then use the TF-IDF model to calculate the TF-IDF weight value for each word in the posts and select some high-ranking words in different categories as keywords to construct a dictionary. The number of keywords is determined by the user.The next step is to transform posts into a weight vector based on the dictionary. The transformation process can be defined as follows:Temporal information such as date and week has abundant activity semantics for activity recognition because human activity has a very close relationship to its occurrence time. With the help of temporal information, we can better determine and infer what activities a user produced at a given time.Therefore, we consider time to be another important feature of a post for classifying the activity category. Some activities only occur during a specific time. We treat temporal information as additional knowledge and integrate it with the post text by embedding temporal information.We define the date when the post was published as Long short-term memory  neural nIn this paper, the posts on social media can be treated as sequence data, and we use the LSTM model to process and classify human activities. The probabilities of the human activity categories are calculated in the model and are considered as the weights when predicting the activity category by each post from social media. The post contains multi-dimensional rich information that need to be reduced to a single attribute item, here it is human activity category.f function can be defined as:When we process information at the current moment, the LSTM architecture can preserve and utilize useful information in previous posts but discard useless information. As shown in At step Here, Here, To understand the mechanism behind the architecture, we can view For recognizing the human activity category in a post, we regard the output of the hidden state at the last time step of the LSTM cell as the document representation. We connect this target vector to a fully connected layer to classify the activities. We use the Softmax  functionAfter the activation function, the model takes categorical cross-entropy  as a losIn this section, we first describe the built dataset and the experimental parameter settings and evaluate our ALSTM model with traditional classification methods, such as SVM and TF-IDF.www.Yelp.com). Yelp is an online community whose members spontaneously publish posts containing specific public and commercial locations. As of August 2009, “Yelpers” authored over 7 million posts about their personal experiences with restaurants, shopping, beauty, arts, entertainment, and events [To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, we first built a benchmark dataset from Yelp (d events . Yelp poTo build a dataset for training and testing, posts from collected Yelp data were labeled into 14 categories by considering the post text, post time and referenced businesses information. Random sampling was performed according to the rule of about 2000 posts per category, finally a dataset with 28,150 posts was built. It should be noted that only 863 posts of “listening” are selected because there are no enough posts in this category.The 14 activity categories, including eating food, beauty and spa, entertainment, and travel, are listed in As shown in We should also note that the number of samples in the dataset did not differ significantly during the days of the week, which means that it is impossible to conduct user activity categories based only on the day of the week of the posts.To construct a dictionary, we then use the TF-IDF model to calculate the TF-IDF weight value for all words in the posts and manually select the top 2735 words as keywords. The number distribution of the selected keywords over the categories is listed in We use a random sampling method to extract 70% of the records from Yelp-2k built in the last section for training and the remaining 30% of the records for the test.To transform a discrete word input into a continuous vector, we use the word2vec model to build the word embedding matrix. The dimension size of the word embedding vector is set to 100.We also set the dimension size of the LSTM hidden layer to 128, 256, 512 and training 500 epochs. The Adam method is adopted as the optimizer. The dropout parameter is set to 0.5 in the network, and the learning rate is set to 0.001.Finally, we implemented the network model with TFLearn  neural nBy combining the components in We evaluate the four ALSTM variants and compare them to traditional classification methods, such as SVM and TF-IDF. The accuracy for each activity category on Yelp-20k is calculated and listed in As shown in Among the four ALSTM models, the ALSTM-TE model achieved the highest accuracy in the whole dataset. It should be noted that the number of samples in each category did not differ significantly during the days of the week, as mentioned in Compared to ALSTM, the ALSTM-DE model achieved an improvement because the model considers both word embedding and dictionary encoding.However, the ALSTM-DE-TE model, which combines word embedding vectors, dictionary encoding vectors, and temporal information encoding vectors together as input, achieved a slightly lower average accuracy compared with the ALSTM-TE model. Its accuracy was still higher than that of the ALSTM-DE model. We argue that there is a certain conflict between the information from the dictionary and time. It should be noted that the ALSTM-DE accuracy is more balanced in all categories in which there is higher accuracy in the worse category than ALSTM-TE.Finally, a nonnegligible result is that the TF-IDF model performed well in certain categories and achieved the best accuracy in the car-related activities category, which is not surprising because here the TF-IDF model is a classification based on manually labeled keywords, and there are some highly differentiated keywords with car-related activity semantics. This result illustrates the importance of artificial knowledge for recognizing human activity from natural language. Of course, we must also realize that the scope of adaptation of this method is still limited.In a word, the proposed models achieved a great performance for recognizing human daily activity, because that they can successfully capture both words meaning and the contextual information or word order in posts. As well, both external knowledge and temporal information can contribute to the improvement of accuracy and robustness of our task.We calculated the accuracy rate and loss when the models were trained. The accuracy rate and loss curve of the four ALSTM variants are shown in In the field of machine learning and the specification of statistical classification, a confusion matrix is a specific table layout that allows visualization of the performance of an algorithm or model, typically in supervised learning . Each coWe conduct 4 confusion matrixes of the ALSTM series of models in In addition, the sum of each heat map row represents the actual number of samples in that category. The abbreviations in 4 figures are “EF”, “BS”, “EA”, “Tr”, “Sh”, “Se”, “Sp”, “TH”, “CA”, “Ni”, “KP”, “EE”, “RA” and “L”, which represent the categories “eating food”, “beauty & spa”, “entertainment activity”, “travel”, “shopping”, “services”, “sports”, “treating & health”, “car-related activities”, “nightlife”, “keep pets”, “engaged in education”, “religious activities” and “listening”.The above 4 heat maps clearly illustrate the accuracy of each category and the distribution of correct and incorrect samples in each category. We also found that the categories of “eating food” and “nightlife” have the maximum confusion in Considering that most of the people who made posts on comment websites are closely related to daily activities, some statement of posts was not clear enough. We filtered uncommon activities such as “entertainment activity”, “services”, “car-related activities”, “nightlife”, and “listening” and reserved the remaining 9 activities. Then, we calculated the accuracy for each activity category again. We also conducted comparative experiments with our methods and list the results in Compared with For accurately recognizing human daily activity in social media posts, we proposed a model based on a deep learning sequence model. The proposed model includes a word embedding component, a dictionary knowledge encoding component, a temporal information encoding component, and an LSTM component. Considering that no datasets are available in such studies, we built a social media benchmark dataset with 14 activity categories and 28,150 labeled posts for training and testing. The proposed models achieved state-of-the-art performance with high accuracies for the recognition of human activity since they successfully extracted user activity information in posts from sequences of higher-level representations while preserving the sequence order of words. In the model, both external knowledge and temporal information can contribute to the improvement of accuracy and robustness of the task.For future work, user attributes can be fused to infer latent semantics of posts to further improve the classification performance. Additionally, we will introduce more knowledge, such as Wikipedia and Freebase data, into models to improve the accuracy of our model. Due to the limitation of the data source, the time in the built dataset is represented as the date, which could be improved by including new data sources, such as Facebook.