A Case Study of Marketing Strategy and Logistics System of Changhong, a Chinese Home Appliances Enterprise

The growing process of Changhong, a representative Chinese home appliance enterprise, is described in this paper. Changhong succeeded in transforming from a former state-run military-radar factory into China’s leading consumer-electronics manufacturer. However it has been experiencing hardship since 1998 and reported significant losses in 2004.The success and failure of Changhong marketing strategy are expounded.This paper reports Changhong’s recent efforts in strategy shift. It shows Changhong is attempting to integrate upstream and downstream resources, and trying to use logistics and supply chain management as competitive business weapons, faced with new challenges in the high-end products market

Learning Diverse Image Colorization

Colorization is an ambiguous problem, with multiple viable colorizations for a single grey-level image. However, previous methods only produce the single most probable colorization. Our goal is to model the diversity intrinsic to the problem of colorization and produce multiple colorizations that display long-scale spatial co-ordination. We learn a low dimensional embedding of color fields using a variational autoencoder (VAE). We construct loss terms for the VAE decoder that avoid blurry outputs and take into account the uneven distribution of pixel colors. Finally, we build a conditional model for the multi-modal distribution between grey-level image and the color field embeddings. Samples from this conditional model result in diverse colorization. We demonstrate that our method obtains better diverse colorizations than a standard conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) model, as well as a recently proposed conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN).Comment: This revision to appear in CVPR1

Central Engine-Powered Bright X-ray Flares in Short Gamma-Ray Bursts: A Hint of Black Hole-Neutron Star Merger?

Short gamma-ray bursts may originate from the merger of double neutron stars (NS) or that of a black hole (BH) and an NS. We propose that the bright X-ray flare related to the central engine reactivity may hint a BH-NS merger, since such a merger can provide more fall-back materials and therefore a more massive accretion disk than the NS-NS merger. Based on the observed 49 short bursts with Swift/X-ray Telescope follow-up observations, we find that three bursts have bright X-ray flares, among which three flares from two bursts are probably related to the central engine reactivity. We argue that these two bursts may originate from the BH-NS merger rather than the NS-NS merger. Our suggested link between the central engine-powered bright X-ray flare and the BH-NS merger event can be checked by the future gravitational wave detections from advanced LIGO and Virgo.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in Ap