CONSUMER DECISION-MAKING STYLES AND YOUNG-ADULT CONSUMERS: AN INDIAN EXPLORATION

The economy of India is on a growth spree since the last two decades. This growth has increased the shopping options available to the consumers. The present study has tried to ascertain the decision-making styles of young-adult consumers so as to provide information to marketers interested in the decision-making profile of Indian consumers and thus enabling them to build their marketing efforts accordingly. The research has made use of Sproles and Kendall’s (1986) consumer styles inventory (CSI) on a sample of 425 young-adult Indian consumers and has attempted to examine the generalisability of the scale. Factor analysis has been employed to summarise the 38 variables identified into smaller sets of linear composites that preserved most of the information in the original data. The study has confirmed the applicability of the original US characteristics as well as two new traits specific to the Indian context. Furthermore, similarities and differences between different cultures have been discussed and implications have been proffered.Consumer decision-making, Consumer Style Inventory (CSI), Young-adult consumers, Factor analysis, India

Enhancing Energy Minimization Framework for Scene Text Recognition with Top-Down Cues

Recognizing scene text is a challenging problem, even more so than the recognition of scanned documents. This problem has gained significant attention from the computer vision community in recent years, and several methods based on energy minimization frameworks and deep learning approaches have been proposed. In this work, we focus on the energy minimization framework and propose a model that exploits both bottom-up and top-down cues for recognizing cropped words extracted from street images. The bottom-up cues are derived from individual character detections from an image. We build a conditional random field model on these detections to jointly model the strength of the detections and the interactions between them. These interactions are top-down cues obtained from a lexicon-based prior, i.e., language statistics. The optimal word represented by the text image is obtained by minimizing the energy function corresponding to the random field model. We evaluate our proposed algorithm extensively on a number of cropped scene text benchmark datasets, namely Street View Text, ICDAR 2003, 2011 and 2013 datasets, and IIIT 5K-word, and show better performance than comparable methods. We perform a rigorous analysis of all the steps in our approach and analyze the results. We also show that state-of-the-art convolutional neural network features can be integrated in our framework to further improve the recognition performance

Sophistication in Service Exports and Economic Growth

Services can now be stored and traded digitally, and they are not subject to many of the trade barriers that physical exports have to overcome. Services are no longer exclusively an input for trade in goods, but have become a “final export” for direct consumption. It is important to note that services not only have become more tradable, but also can be increasingly unbundled: a single service activity in the global supply chain can now be fragmented and done separately at different geographic locations. This has led to a new channel of growth—what we call service export sophistication.Exports, service exports, outsourcing, trade, growth, india, trade barriers, unbundled, supply chain, sophistication, developing countires

Perspective of buried oxide thickness variation on triple metal-gate (TMG) recessed-S/D FD-SOI MOSFET

Recently, Fully-Depleted Silicon on Insulator (FD-SOI) MOSFETs have been accepted as a favourable technology beyond nanometer nodes, and the technique of Recessed-Source/Drain (Re-S/D) has made it more immune in regards of various performance factors. However, the proper selection of Buried-Oxide (BOX) thickness is one of the major challenges in the design of FD-SOI based MOS devices in order to suppress the drain electric penetrations across the BOX interface efficiently. In this work, the effect of BOX thickness on the performance of TMG Re-S/D FD-SOI MOSFET has been presented at 60 nm gate length. The perspective of BOX thickness variation has been analysed on the basis of its surface potential profile and the extraction of the threshold voltage by performing two-dimensional numerical simulations. Moreover, to verify the short channel immunity, the impact of gate length scaling has also been discussed. It is found that the device attains two step-up potential profile with suppressed short channel effects. The outcomes reveal that the Drain Induced Barrier Lowering (DIBL) values are lower among conventional SOI MOSFETs. The device has been designed and simulated by using 2D numerical ATLAS Silvaco TCAD simulator

Service export sophistication and economic growth

Can increasing sophistication in service exports lead to economic growth? Although services were historically produced primarily for domestic consumption, they are gradually becoming more productive, tradable and unbundled. The authors construct an index of"service exports sophistication"to document this phenomenon. Panel data estimations indicate a positive association between growth in per capita income and higher sophistication of service exports. The results also suggest that this phenomenon is growing in importance over time. Considering the limits of traditional industrialization in igniting global growth, the results provide an alternative channel.Economic Theory&Research,Public Sector Corruption&Anticorruption Measures,Commodities,Housing&Human Habitats,Banks&Banking Reform

Image Retrieval using Textual Cues

International audienceWe present an approach for the text-to-image retrieval problem based on textual content present in images. Given the recent developments in understanding text in images, an appealing approach to address this problem is to localize and recognize the text, and then query the database, as in a text retrieval problem. We show that such an approach, despite being based on state-of-the-art methods, is insufficient, and propose a method, where we do not rely on an exact localization and recognition pipeline. We take a query-driven search approach, where we find approximate locations of characters in the text query, and then impose spatial constraints to generate a ranked list of images in the database. The retrieval performance is evaluated on public scene text datasets as well as three large datasets, namely IIIT scene text retrieval, Sports-10K and TV series-1M, we introduce

Effect of heavy metal, copper sulphate and potassium chromate on behaviour of “Tailless water flea” Simocephalus vetulus (Crustacea - Cladocera)

Water fleas constitute major zooplankton population of fresh water aquatic ecosystem. Their population density is an indicative of well-being of aquatic bodies. Simocephalus vetulus (Crustacea - Cladocera) is a tailless water flea and is well suited lab model for environmental monitoring. Copper a Gray listed heavy metals despite being an essential micronutrient, becomes highly toxic when present in excess quantity in aquatic ecosystem thereby causing deleterious effects on aquatic flora as well as fauna. The water-flea exposed to acute 0.37 mg/l (96hr LC50), sub-acute 0.0925 mg/l (25% of 96hr LC50) value and chronic 0.037 mg/l (10% of 96hr LC50) value of copper sulphate and acute 0.16 mg/l (96 hr LC50), sub-acute 0.04 mg/l (25% of 96 hr LC50) value and chronic 0.016 mg/l (10% of 96 hr LC50) value of potassium chromate showed behavioural alterations like initial hyperactivity, fast appendage movements and in phototaxis, geotaxis and avoidance indices. At later stage erratic swimming and spinning, reduced activity, loss of balance, reduced feeding and darkening of cuticular coloration, reduced phototactic, geotaxis and avoidance indices were the major effects on its behaviour. The behavioural alterations of S. vetulus showed the most susceptible and foremost indication of potential toxic effects. Various behavioural parameters, used in present study may serve as better biomarkers about metal toxicity and monitoring of drinking water qualit

Adenomatoid odontogenic tumor with impacted mandibular canine: a case report

The Adenomatoid Odontogenic Tumor (AOT) is a rare, slow growing, benign, odontogenic epithelial tumor with characteristic clinical and histological features; which usually arise in the second or third decade. It is a tumor composed of odontogenic epithelium in a variety of histoarchitectural patterns which are embedded in a mature connective tissue stroma. It is mostly encountered in young patients with a greater predilection for females. Maxilla is the predilection site of occurrence, most commonly associated with an unerupted maxillary canine. It presents as a symptom-free lesion and is frequently discovered during routine radiographic examination. This case report describes an unusual case of 20 year old male with only a one month history of tumor in the anterior mandible. The tumor was a well circumscribed intraosseous lesion with an embedded tooth. Histological evidence of calcification was present. The present case lends support to the categorization of AOT as a mixed odontogenic tumo

Data-driven augmentation of turbulence models for adverse pressure gradient flows

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143083/1/6.2017-3626.pd