U.S Demand for Dairy Alternative Beverages: Hedonic Metric Approach

The consumption of dairy alternative beverages in the United States has increased rapidly in recent years. Conventional milk seems to be losing its market share to dairy alternative beverages, such as almond and soy milk, mainly because of the taste, health concerns and environmental concerns with these beverages. It is expected that the ongoing competition between conventional milk and dairy alternative beverages will continue to intensify over the next several years. This work is motivated by the need to take into consideration of intrinsic characteristics and difference of such characteristics when measuring the differentiation of products in demand estimation. Hedonic pricing model is extended by constructing a hedonic matrix for a variety of qualitative attributes of three dairy alternative beverages and four conventional milk categories to model consumer demand for these products in the United States. A two-stage estimation procedure is applied. The first stage is to create a multi-dimensional hedonic space based on the qualitative information available to consumers. The next stage is to allocate the different types of conventional milk and dairy alternative beverages considered in this study into the space and estimate the demand elasticities using attribute distances. Our methodology is advantageous in that it not only solves the price endogeneity problem typically questioned in demand systems estimation but also remarkably reduces the number of parameters estimated. Therefore, it enables a large number of differentiated products to be considered in a demand system. Nielsen Homescan consumer panel data 2004-2015 is used in this study. The final data set is aggregated to UPC level of products which captures not only enough variation in nutritional variables but also consumer purchase information. Results show that soy milk has the highest own-price elasticity which is -0.2506. Inelastic demand of all three types of dairy alternative beverages reflects that they are not sensitive to price changes. Soy milk is found to be a substitute for all four types of conventional milk products and vise-versa. Three dairy alternative beverages are complements between each other and four types of conventional milk are substitutes between each other

Suppression of Edge Recombination in InAs/InGaAs DWELL Solar Cells

The InAs/InGaAs DWELL solar cell grown by MBE is a standard pin diode structure with six layers of InAs QDs embedded in InGaAs quantum wells placed within a 200-nm intrinsic GaAs region. The GaAs control wafer consists of the same pin configuration but without the DWELL structure. The typical DWELL solar cell exhibits higher short current density while maintaining nearly the same open-circuit voltage for different scales, and the advantage of higher short current density is more obvious in the smaller cells. In contrast, the smaller size cells, which have a higher perimeter to area ratio, make edge recombination current dominant in the GaAs control cells, and thus their open circuit voltage and efficiency severely degrade. The open-circuit voltage and efficiency under AM1.5G of the GaAs control cell decrease from 0.914V and 8.85% to 0.834V and 7.41%, respectively, as the size shrinks from 5*5mm2 to 2*2mm2, compared to the increase from 0.665V and 7.04% to 0.675V and 8.17%, respectively, in the DWELL solar cells

Localization Accuracy of Ultrasound-Actuated Needle with Color Doppler Imaging

An ultrasonic needle-actuating device for tissue biopsy and regional anaesthesia offers enhanced needle visibility with color Doppler imaging. However, its specific performance is not yet fully determined. This work investigated the influence on needle visibility of the insertion angle and drive voltage, as well as determined the accuracy and agreement of needle tip localization by comparing color Doppler measurements with paired photographic and B-mode ultrasound measurements. Needle tip accuracy measurements in a gelatin phantom gave a regression trend, where the slope of trend is 0.8808; coefficient of determination (R2) is 0.8877; bias is −0.50 mm; and the 95% limits of agreement are from −1.31 to 0.31 mm when comparing color Doppler with photographic measurements. When comparing the color Doppler with B-mode ultrasound measurements, the slope of the regression trend is 1.0179; R2 is 0.9651; bias is −0.16 mm; and the 95% limits of agreement are from −1.935 to 1.605 mm. The results demonstrate the accuracy of this technique and its potential for application to biopsy and ultrasound guided regional anaesthesia

Deterministic integrated tuning of multi-cavity resonances and phase for slow-light in coupled photonic crystal cavities

We present the integrated chip-scale tuning of multiple photonic crystal cavities. The optimized implementation allows effective and precise tuning of multiple cavity resonances (up to ~1.60 nm/mW) and inter-cavity phase (~ 0.038 pi/mW) by direct local temperature tuning on silicon nanomembranes. Through designing the serpentine metal electrodes and careful electron-beam alignment to avoid cavity mode overlap, the coupled photonic crystal L3 cavities preserve their high quality factors. The deterministic resonance and phase control enables switching between the all-optical analogue of electromagnetically-induced-transparency (EIT) to flat-top filter lineshapes, with future applications of trapping photons/photonic transistors and optoelectronic modulators

Simulation and conservation of the end use water based on behaviour intervention modelling

There is now substantial literature describing the importance of end use water saving. From the management perspective, it is reasonable to investigate how consumers use water and their water use behaviours. The TPB behaviour intervention theory with extended parameters for water end use was computerized by applying the water flowing concept and SEM (Structural Equation Model). This TPB mathematical expression model (dynamic behaviour change model) integrated with ANNs (Artificial Neutral Networks) is also been proposed to investigate the behaviour intervention. The significance of findings about behaviour intervention modelling in water end use areas and its applications are discusse

Selective tuning of high-Q silicon photonic crystal nanocavities via laser-assisted local oxidation

We examine the cavity resonance tuning of high-Q silicon photonic crystal heterostructures by localized laser-assisted thermal oxidation using a 532 nm continuous wave laser focused to a 2.5 mm radius spot-size. The total shift is consistent with the parabolic rate law. A tuning range of up to 8.7 nm is achieved with ~ 30 mW laser powers. Over this tuning range, the cavity Q decreases from 3.2\times10^5 to 1.2\times10^5. Numerical simulations model the temperature distributions in the silicon photonic crystal membrane and the cavity resonance shift from oxidation.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure