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This is the third in a series of papers aimed at providing models effective in predicting the degree of pain and discomfort in canines. The first two papers provided benchmarking and examination of dogs suffering from osteoarthritis (OA). In this chapter, we extend the study to include dogs suffering from OA, sarcoma, and oral mucositis (a side effect of chemotherapy and radiation treatments). The R programming language and SAS JMP are used to clean data, generate ANOVA, LSR regression, decision tree, and nominal logistic regression models to predict changes in activity levels associated with the progression of arthritis. The predictive models provide a diagnostic basis for determining the degree of disease in a dog (based on demographics and activity levels) and provide forecasts that assist in establishing appropriate medication dosages for suffering dogs.

Although locally sourced and produced foods are a growing trend in food marketing, they are not yet clearly understood nor consistently defined. There is no lack of definitions currently offered, however, based on expanding, evolving, and sometimes conflicting, dimensions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate various emerging definitional elements of local foods to determine which elements may be as important to food shoppers today as the prevailing food miles definition.

A shopper survey is fielded and repeated measures ANOVA conducted to measure the relative importance of various definitional elements, assess where shoppers expect to acquire local foods, the price premium they are willing to pay, and differences that may exist across customer groups.

The study finds that consumers do consider other definitional elements as important as distance in their definition of local foods and they expect to find them in secondary outlets beyond farmers markets and the produce department. Consumers are willing to pay a price premium and there are differences across light, medium, and heavy users.

This study provides researchers with an expanded and clearer definition of local foods for future research and practitioners with guidance on what shoppers expect and value today and how to better source, merchandise, and promote local foods.

By combining definitional elements from across industry, government, and academia and analyzing them together, this study offers a more comprehensive definition of local foods and consumer expectations.

This paper aims to review policy innovations in China for addressing the graduate unemployment crisis that has been created by the expansion of higher education in the past decade.

The authors draw on government documents, research findings, and mass media reports to highlight the key measures of the Chinese government to alleviate the over‐education problem and to improve college graduates' employment prospects.

The review describes government efforts both at the institutional level to enhance student employability and at the national level to create alternative employment channels. The Chinese experiences show that the challenges posed by the graduate employment crisis may turn out to be a new opportunity to reform higher education in order to better address the needs unique to a country's own society.

The review of the Chinese case will inspire policy makers in other countries to seek alternative routes for the development of their own higher education.

This is the first study of its kind to address the recent policy innovations and their implications for potential reform.