Liberalization of China-US air transport market: assessing the impacts of the 2004 and 2007 protocols

This paper examines China's considerations in reaching the 2004 and 2007 Air Service Agreement Protocols with the United States (US) and the impacts of such policy on the China–US market from the perspective of China. Analysis shows that the 2004 and 2007 protocols have profound impacts on the China–US market. The two protocols have been associated with phenomenal traffic growth and intensified competition. Passengers also benefit from much more choice in terms of both airlines and routing. Over time, Chinese carriers' operating performance and financial performance have gradually improved after the liberalization expressed in the protocols. However, the industry's hub-building initiatives are still seriously challenged by competing hubs in Seoul and Tokyo which have diverted substantial number of passengers moving between the China and US markets. Such issues have to be addressed in order to create a win–win outcome for both countries

SC2GAN: Rethinking Entanglement by Self-correcting Correlated GAN Space

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can synthesize realistic images, with the learned latent space shown to encode rich semantic information with various interpretable directions. However, due to the unstructured nature of the learned latent space, it inherits the bias from the training data where specific groups of visual attributes that are not causally related tend to appear together, a phenomenon also known as spurious correlations, e.g., age and eyeglasses or women and lipsticks. Consequently, the learned distribution often lacks the proper modelling of the missing examples. The interpolation following editing directions for one attribute could result in entangled changes with other attributes. To address this problem, previous works typically adjust the learned directions to minimize the changes in other attributes, yet they still fail on strongly correlated features. In this work, we study the entanglement issue in both the training data and the learned latent space for the StyleGAN2-FFHQ model. We propose a novel framework SC$^2$GAN that achieves disentanglement by re-projecting low-density latent code samples in the original latent space and correcting the editing directions based on both the high-density and low-density regions. By leveraging the original meaningful directions and semantic region-specific layers, our framework interpolates the original latent codes to generate images with attribute combination that appears infrequently, then inverts these samples back to the original latent space. We apply our framework to pre-existing methods that learn meaningful latent directions and showcase its strong capability to disentangle the attributes with small amounts of low-density region samples added.Comment: Accepted to the Out Of Distribution Generalization in Computer Vision workshop at ICCV202

Denisovan DNA in Late Pleistocene sediments from Baishiya Karst Cave on the Tibetan Plateau

A late Middle Pleistocene mandible from Baishiya Karst Cave (BKC) on the Tibetan Plateau has been inferred to be from a Denisovan, an Asian hominin related to Neanderthals, on the basis of an amino acid substitution in its collagen. Here we describe the stratigraphy, chronology, and mitochondrial DNA extracted from the sediments in BKC. We recover Denisovan mitochondrial DNA from sediments deposited ~100 thousand and ~60 thousand years ago (ka) and possibly as recently as ~45 ka. The long-term occupation of BKC by Denisovans suggests that they may have adapted to life at high altitudes and may have contributed such adaptations to modern humans on the Tibetan Plateau

Airport Dominance and Airline Pricing Power: An Investigation of Hub Premiums in the Chinese Domestic Market

Concerns on market power conferred by airport dominance and the debates of hub premiums have attracted longstanding attention from governments and academics alike. Most previous studies mainly focus on the fully deregulated markets such as the United States and Europe, what remains unknown is how such effects change when a country evolves from a tightly controlled regime to a deregulated market. This research analyses the effects of airport dominance on airline pricing power with the empirical study based on the Chinese domestic market using fixed- effect panel data models. Results from the regression analysis indicate that airport dominance is the most important source of pricing power in the gradually deregulated Chinese domestic market. Hub carriers are able to charge higher prices to premium class passengers and non-hub carriers can benefit from the “umbrella effects” of hub premiums. However, hub carriers are not able to translate their airport dominance to pricing power in the economy class market, whereas non-hub carriers even have to reduce the prices as their market shares at major airports increase. This study contributes to the literature by explicitly segmenting the market into economy and premium classes. The results have important policy implications

Impact of Different Oak Chips’ Aging on the Volatile Compounds and Sensory Characteristics of <i>Vitis amurensis</i> Wines

In this work, different oak chips were used to age Vitis amurensis wine, and the effects on sensory properties were observed. Twenty-one different oak chips were added to a one-year-old wine made by a traditional technique. The wine was aged for 6 months before analysis by CIELab for color parameters, GC–MS for volatile compounds, and electronic tongue and a tasting panel for sensory properties. The results showed that the addition of any tested oak chip could significantly strengthen the wine’s red color. Among 61 volatile compounds, alcohols presented the highest concentrations (873 to 1401 mg/L), followed by esters (568 to 1039 mg/L) and organic acids (157 to 435 mg/L), while aldehydes and volatile phenols occurred at low concentrations. Different oak species with different toasting levels could affect, to varying degrees, the concentrations of esters, alcohols, and volatile phenols, but to a lesser extent those of aldehydes. Sensory analysis by a tasting panel indicated that non- and moderately roasted oak chips gave the wines higher scores than those with heavy toasting levels. The major mouthfeel descriptors determined by electronic tongue were in good agreement with those from the tasting panel