Does The Euro Have A Chance to Challenge The Dollar

The dollar has been the dominant currency since the World War II. Will the euro ever be able to challenge the dollar? In order to understand the chance of the euro against the dollar some comparisons are made between them. Starting with the main economic indicators to their roles in the international trade, their power and potential in many economical aspects are tried to be figured out and compared. Furthermore, their elasticities, their roles in the international financial markets, current account and trade balance of the the two parts are discussed. An empirical study on international bonds and notes is made by using the attraction model. All of the analyses made in this research show us the potential of the euro to become an international currency. Although the dollar has still some advantages over the euro, a bipolar currency regime dominated by Europe and the United States may replace the dollar-centered system that has continued for most of this century.

Weighted Mean Curvature

In image processing tasks, spatial priors are essential for robust computations, regularization, algorithmic design and Bayesian inference. In this paper, we introduce weighted mean curvature (WMC) as a novel image prior and present an efficient computation scheme for its discretization in practical image processing applications. We first demonstrate the favorable properties of WMC, such as sampling invariance, scale invariance, and contrast invariance with Gaussian noise model; and we show the relation of WMC to area regularization. We further propose an efficient computation scheme for discretized WMC, which is demonstrated herein to process over 33.2 giga-pixels/second on GPU. This scheme yields itself to a convolutional neural network representation. Finally, WMC is evaluated on synthetic and real images, showing its superiority quantitatively to total-variation and mean curvature.Comment: 12 page

Entrepreneurial Attitudes and Behaviours in Small-Scale Dairy Farms in Turkey

Dairy farms are quite important to transform Turkish livestock sector into being more productive and competitive in the process of EU integration. The purpose of this study is to determine the socio economic features of dairy farms in Turkey and to determine producers’ individual and management goals in the future. In addition, farmers’ level of participation related to the attitudes, behaviors and subjective norm components are determined and an entrepreneurship index is constructed to determine the factors that influence social economic characteristics of entrepreneurship. The material of the study consists of 167 surveys obtained from Cattle Breeders Association of Turkey in 17 cities through the postal mail in 2007. A five “Likert Scale” was used to determine behaviors and attitudes of farmers as well as descriptive statistics. In each category, factor weights were calculated based on factor analyses. Then, the social economic factors that determine entrepreneurship index were estimated using “Logistic Regression”. The results indicate that the primary goals of farmers are high income, enjoying the job, better life conditions, earning respect, utilizing the resources, better image, and producing high quality products. When entrepreneurial behaviors and attitudes are examined it was found that most of the farmers aim at earning high profit as a main goal and value dairy milk farming. The logistic regression shows that the factors that determine entrepreneur index are age, experience and area of feed crops.Small-Scale Dairy Farms, Entrepreneur Index, Theory of Planned Behavior, Turkey, Consumer/Household Economics, Livestock Production/Industries, Production Economics, Q12, Q16,

A Methodology to Repair or Deorbit LEO Satellite Constellations

In this thesis, mitigation of space debris is addressed by examining an approach for repair or de-orbit of a specific population of non-functional Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. Basic orbital mechanics propagation of the orbits was used as the process for computing a solution to the time and intercept position for the targeted satellites. Optimal orbital maneuvers to reach the target satellites from a pre-established orbit were also considered. In this way minimum ΔV budget, rendezvous time and mass budgets were managed. The Clohessy-Wiltshire Equations and two-impulsive rendezvous maneuvers were used to determine the orbital path of a chase satellite between two position vectors, along with the time of flight. A monopropellant propulsion system was assumed in order to estimate propellant mass requirements. This methodology can be applied to a variety of satellite constellations, as implemented using MatLab and Analytical Graphics, Inc. STK software. Several cases were investigated in the study. Simulations showed that the methodology can provide guidance for the rendezvous process, facilitating a minimum ΔV budget and minimum rendezvous time