Advertising Spillover Effects on Private Labels

Although brand advertising increases demand for the originating brand, manufacturer advertising spillover effects on the demand for private label brands are positive, increasing consumers’ demand on private label brands. Given a positive correlation among in-store products, this study shows that national advertising benefits store brands of retailers. While consumers infer product quality by observing the prices and advertising, a higher correlation among in-store products leads to a larger spillover effect of national advertising on private labels. Although retailers free ride on manufacturer’s efforts, a rational expectations model shows that coordinated marketing activities initiated by retailers can reduce consumers’ perceptive risk, thus benefit advertised brands

Detach and Adapt: Learning Cross-Domain Disentangled Deep Representation

While representation learning aims to derive interpretable features for describing visual data, representation disentanglement further results in such features so that particular image attributes can be identified and manipulated. However, one cannot easily address this task without observing ground truth annotation for the training data. To address this problem, we propose a novel deep learning model of Cross-Domain Representation Disentangler (CDRD). By observing fully annotated source-domain data and unlabeled target-domain data of interest, our model bridges the information across data domains and transfers the attribute information accordingly. Thus, cross-domain joint feature disentanglement and adaptation can be jointly performed. In the experiments, we provide qualitative results to verify our disentanglement capability. Moreover, we further confirm that our model can be applied for solving classification tasks of unsupervised domain adaptation, and performs favorably against state-of-the-art image disentanglement and translation methods.Comment: CVPR 2018 Spotligh

Sliding and pressure evaluation on conventional and V-shaped seats of reclining wheelchairs for stroke patients with flaccid hemiplegia: a crossover trial

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Reclining wheelchairs are commonly used to transport elderly stroke patients in Taiwan. However, there is concern that the patient's body in the wheelchair often slides forward when they return to a seated position, increasing the sitting pressure. Therefore, a novel reclining wheelchair with an ergonomic "V-Seat" was designed to prevent forward sliding and pressure sores. The use of these reclining chairs by stroke patients has not yet been studied. Thus, we investigated the effects of V-shaped and conventional seats in reclining wheelchairs on the extent of forward sliding and on the sitting pressure of stroke patients with flaccid hemiplegia and of able-bodied elders.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We recruited 13 able-bodied elders and 11 stroke patients with flaccid hemiplegia and performed 5 reclining cycles in both types of wheelchair. The amount of sliding along the backrest (BS) plane and the seat (SS) plane, the mean sitting pressure (MP), and the sacral peak pressure (SPP) of the subjects were recorded. We used the Wilcoxon signed-rank test to compare the BS, SS, MP, and SPP in wheelchairs with conventional and V-shaped seats, and we used the Wilcoxon rank sum test to compare the differences in BS and SS between stroke patients and able-bodied elders in both types of reclining wheelchair.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The BS, SS, and SPP of stroke patients were significantly lower in the wheelchairs with V-shaped seats than in conventional wheelchairs in most comparisons; however, the BS of able-bodied elders was higher in V-shaped seats than in conventional seats. The SS and SPP of stroke patients were significantly higher than those of able-bodied elders in both types of reclining wheelchair, and the BS of stroke patients was significantly higher than that of able-bodied elders only in conventional reclining wheelchairs.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The use of V-shaped seats in reclining wheelchairs can help reduce the forward sliding and sacral peak pressure of stroke patients with flaccid hemiplegia. The back displacement of able-bodied subjects when using both conventional and V-shape seats in reclining positions differs from the back displacement of stroke patients with flaccid hemiplegia when using such seats. These results are of paramount value and should be considered when prescribing the use of reclining wheelchairs to subjects with flaccid hemiplegia.</p

Results of one-stage urethroplasty for hypospadias in pediatrics – single surgeon’s experience

Introduction: Hypospadias repair is a challenging technique in pediatric urology with a long learning curve. This study presents the results of urethroplasty performed by a single surgeon to repair hypospadias in children and compares the surgical outcomes at different periods. Materials and Methods: From January 2009 to February 2016, patients who were less than 18 years old and were operated for hypospadias were retrospectively reviewed and divided into two groups: group I (from January 2009 to February 2012) and group II (from March 2012 to February 2016). All operations were performed by the same pediatric surgeon, andsurgical outcomes of the two periods were compared. Results: This study considered150 patients (69 in group I/81 in group II). The Mean operative age was 30.4±32.7 months in group I and 33.6±43.3 months in group II(p=0.309). The selected procedures mainly depended on the subjective anatomical analysis in the operating room and the surgeon’s preference. The mean follow-up duration was 21.7±28.31 months in group I and 13.6±16.6 months in group II (p=0.033).The overall complication rate was 44.9% in group Iand 35.8% in group II (p=0.316). The incidence of glanular disruption significantly decreased from 21.7% to 6.2% (p=0.007) because of the wide dissection of the glanular wings and the deep incision of the urethral plate, which led to tension-free sutures for glanular reconstruction. Conclusions: One-stage repair of hypospadias may achieve satisfactory outcomes in cosmetic appearance and voiding function. Surgical outcomes could be improved by increasing practice

SASMU: boost the performance of generalized recognition model using synthetic face dataset

Nowadays, deploying a robust face recognition product becomes easy with the development of face recognition techniques for decades. Not only profile image verification but also the state-of-the-art method can handle the in-the-wild image almost perfectly. However, the concern of privacy issues raise rapidly since mainstream research results are powered by tons of web-crawled data, which faces the privacy invasion issue. The community tries to escape this predicament completely by training the face recognition model with synthetic data but faces severe domain gap issues, which still need to access real images and identity labels to fine-tune the model. In this paper, we propose SASMU, a simple, novel, and effective method for face recognition using a synthetic dataset. Our proposed method consists of spatial data augmentation (SA) and spectrum mixup (SMU). We first analyze the existing synthetic datasets for developing a face recognition system. Then, we reveal that heavy data augmentation is helpful for boosting performance when using synthetic data. By analyzing the previous frequency mixup studies, we proposed a novel method for domain generalization. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of SASMU, achieving state-of-the-art performance on several common benchmarks, such as LFW, AgeDB-30, CA-LFW, CFP-FP, and CP-LFW.Comment: under revie