Search

Food choices are an integral part of wellbeing and longevity, yet poor nutrition is responsible for millions of deaths every year. Among the complex mosaic of determinants of food choices are demographic, socioeconomic, physiological, and also cultural. In this work, we explore the connection between educational attainment, as a proxy for cultural capital, and food purchases, as a proxy for food consumption. Unlike existing studies, which use diaries and surveys, we use a large-scale dataset of food-related products purchased from a major retailer in London over the course of one year. By using this high-resolution dataset, we are able to explore the spatial dependence of the various factors impacting food choices, and estimate their direct and indirect spatial effects. We characterize food consumption across two complementary dimensions of (1) diet composition, and (2) diet variety. By building spatial auto-regressive models on these variables, we obtain an improved fit compared to traditional regression, and illustrate the importance of spillover effects. Our results consistently confirm the association between a higher educational attainment and a healthier diet, even when controlling for spatial correlation. First, a low educational level is connected to diets high in carbohydrates and low in fibers. Second, it is also associated with higher consumption of sweets and red meats, while high educational level is linked to a greater consumption of fruits, vegetables, and fish. Third, highly-educated areas show an increased nutritional diversity, together with a lower caloric intake. Finally, we show the presence of spillover effects within the neighboring communities, which would need to be taken in consideration when designing public health policies and interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Search engines are increasingly going beyond the pure relevance of search results to entertain users with information items that are interesting and even surprising, albeit sometimes not fully related to their search intent. In this paper, we study this serendipitous search space in the context of entity search, which has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for building semantically rich answers. Specifically, our work proposes to enhance an explorative search system that represents a large sample of Yahoo Answers as an entity network, with a result structuring that goes beyond ranked lists, using composite entity retrieval, which requires a bundling of the results. We propose and compare six bundling methods, which exploit topical categories, entity specializations, and sentiment, and go beyond simple entity clustering. Two large-scale crowd-sourced studies show that users find a bundled organization-especially based on the topical categories of the query entity-to be better at revealing the most useful results, as well as at organizing the results, helping to discover novel and interesting information, and promoting exploration. Finally, a third study of 30 simulated search tasks reveals the bundled search experience to be less frustrating and more rewarding, with more users willing to recommend it to others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]