Tank construction for space vehicles Patent

Liquid propellant tank design with semitoroidal bulkhea

Market power of German food and beverage industries on international markets

In this paper the existence and magnitude of market power for German beer, cocoa powder, chocolate, and sugar confectionary exporters are tested. Two theoretical approaches are employed, the 'pricing of market' (PTM) and the 'residual demand elasticity' (RDE) approach. Even though all markets show a significant violation of the 'law of one price' estimations for monthly data from 1991 to 1998 reveal that markets are in most cases perfectly competitive. However, while in some cases significant market power is indicated for the PTM approach, the RDE results do not support these findings. This leads to the conclusion that the underlying theoretical models fail to consistently match the observed price equilibria on the market under study. --

Instance-level Facial Attributes Transfer with Geometry-Aware Flow

We address the problem of instance-level facial attribute transfer without paired training data, e.g. faithfully transferring the exact mustache from a source face to a target face. This is a more challenging task than the conventional semantic-level attribute transfer, which only preserves the generic attribute style instead of instance-level traits. We propose the use of geometry-aware flow, which serves as a well-suited representation for modeling the transformation between instance-level facial attributes. Specifically, we leverage the facial landmarks as the geometric guidance to learn the differentiable flows automatically, despite of the large pose gap existed. Geometry-aware flow is able to warp the source face attribute into the target face context and generate a warp-and-blend result. To compensate for the potential appearance gap between source and target faces, we propose a hallucination sub-network that produces an appearance residual to further refine the warp-and-blend result. Finally, a cycle-consistency framework consisting of both attribute transfer module and attribute removal module is designed, so that abundant unpaired face images can be used as training data. Extensive evaluations validate the capability of our approach in transferring instance-level facial attributes faithfully across large pose and appearance gaps. Thanks to the flow representation, our approach can readily be applied to generate realistic details on high-resolution images.Comment: To appear in AAAI 2019. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/wdyin/GeoGA

RETAIL SALES: DO THEY MEAN REDUCED EXPENDITURES? GERMAN GROCERY EVIDENCE

Retail pricing strategies incorporate promotions, sales, and rigidities. A number of models have been proposed in particular to explain the occurrence of sales. Focussing on the market for fresh foods the model by Varian and the loss leader argument seem to be intuitively best fitting to the conditions in the fresh food market. From these models we derive several hypotheses that are tested for a unique data set of the German fresh food retail market. The data set consists of weekly prices for ten food items in 131 grocery shops over the period from 1995 to 2000. Following Varian sales should lead to reduced expenditures, while the loss leader argument assumes that consumers are lured into the shop by promotional sales which are covered by higher prices for other products. The results indicate that expenditures decrease with the number of sales in the short run but this effect is outweighed by a dynamic price adjustment thereafter.Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Marketing,

FOOD RETAIL SALES (PRICING): THEORY AND EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FOR GERMAN GROCERY STORES

Retail pricing indicates many phenomena, such as sales or rigidities. A number of models have been proposed in particular to explain the occurrence of sales. Focussing on the market for fresh foods the model by Varian and the loss leader argument seem to be intuitively best fitting to the conditions in the fresh food market. From these models we derive several hypotheses that are tested for a unique data set of the German fresh food retail market The data set consists of weekly prices for ten food items in 131 grocery shops over the period from 1995 to 2000. The results support to some extent the Varian model and also indicate some dynamic loss leader pricing. However, rejections of some hypothesis provide some hints for successive models adjustments. Promising extensions of the theory might be based on the consideration of menu and switching costs.Marketing,

Mirror Lake Management Plan

Management Plan and Comprehensive Lake Inventory of Mirror Lake in Wolfeboro and Tuftonboro, N

Multi-Lane Perception Using Feature Fusion Based on GraphSLAM

An extensive, precise and robust recognition and modeling of the environment is a key factor for next generations of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems and development of autonomous vehicles. In this paper, a real-time approach for the perception of multiple lanes on highways is proposed. Lane markings detected by camera systems and observations of other traffic participants provide the input data for the algorithm. The information is accumulated and fused using GraphSLAM and the result constitutes the basis for a multilane clothoid model. To allow incorporation of additional information sources, input data is processed in a generic format. Evaluation of the method is performed by comparing real data, collected with an experimental vehicle on highways, to a ground truth map. The results show that ego and adjacent lanes are robustly detected with high quality up to a distance of 120 m. In comparison to serial lane detection, an increase in the detection range of the ego lane and a continuous perception of neighboring lanes is achieved. The method can potentially be utilized for the longitudinal and lateral control of self-driving vehicles