Digitization has expanded consumption opportunities by giving consumers access to the “long tail” of existing products, rather than simply the popular products that a retailer might stock with limited shelf space. While this is clearly beneficial to consumers, the benefits are somewhat limited: given the substitutability among differentiated products, the incremental benefit of obscure products...

The swimming backward for biomimetic carangiform robot fish is analyzed and implemented in this paper. The swimming law of the carangiform robot fish is modified according to the European Eel swimming mode based on the multiple-link structure to implement the backward motion. The motion mode difference between the eel and carangiform fish is discussed, and a qualitative kinematic analysis of th...

Electrofishing exploits the effects of electric fields on the target species to aid their capture. The challenge is to design the gear so that the electric field is strong enough to stimulate the target species and make it available for capture, while minimising any adverse effects on other species. Larger fish are more likely to be affected by an electric field than smaller fish, because for a...

The veil of ignorance has been used often as a tool for recommending what justice requires with respect to the distribution of wealth. We show that John Harsanyi’s and Ronald Dworkin’s conceptions of the veil, when modeled formally, recommend wealth allocations in conflict with the prominently espoused view that priority should be given to the worse off with respect to wealth allocation. It fol...

In this study, a novel single-image based dehazing framework is proposed to remove haze artifacts from images through local atmospheric light estimation. We use a novel strategy based on a physical model where the extreme intensity of each RGB pixel is used to define an initial atmospheric veil (local atmospheric light veil). Across bilateral filter is applied to each veil to achieve both local...

One of the large remaining challenges in the field of zebrafish neuroscience is the establishment of techniques and preparations that permit the recording and perturbation of neural activity in animals that can interact meaningfully with the environment. Since it is very difficult to do this in freely behaving zebrafish, I describe here two alternative approaches that meet this goal via tethere...

We have measured the growth kinetics of gold nanoparticles in real time. Gold nanoparticles were formed from the reduction of gold (III) in aqueous solution and monitored with a stopped-flow reactor equipped with a diode array. The overall reduction of gold (III) occurred in less than 20 [ms]. The growth kinetics was determined from measurements of the plasmon resonance time-dependent wavelengt...