A Uniform Lying Helix (ULH) liquid crystal device (LCD) fabricated by utilizing the characteristics of shear flow alignment as well as dielectric anisotropy was demonstrated. Cholesteric liquid crystals with a short helical pitch can exhibit an electric field-induced tilt. These experimental results indicate that it is possible to realize a high-speed response flexible LCD using plastic substra...

This paper deals with process optimization, which establishes the optimal settings of process variables to achieve a better quality. To this end, the patient rule induction method (PRIM), widely used in various application areas, could be adopted. However, the PRIM may fail to provide successful solutions when some process variables are in discrete types. Thus, we propose a new PRIM-like method...

Discrete choice methods model a decision-maker's choice among a set of mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive alternatives. They are used in a variety of disciplines (transportation, economics, psychology, public policy, etc.) in order to inform policy and marketing decisions and to better understand and test hypotheses of behavior. This dissertation is concerned with the enhancement of...

Vehicular fuel composition and atmospheric emissions in South China: Hong Kong, Macau, Guangzhou, and Zhuhai W. Y. Tsai, L. Y. Chan, D. R. Blake, and K. W. Chu Department of Civil and Structural Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China Department of Chemistry, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA Received: 7 February 2006 – Accepted: 9 March 2006 – Publi...

The veri cation of timed systems is extremely important but also extremely di cult Several methods have been proposed to assist in this task including extensions to symbolic model checking One possible use of model checking to analyze timed systems is by modeling passage of time as the number of taken transitions and ap plying quantitative algorithms to determine the timing parameters of the sy...

This paper presents an overview of the economics literature on the effect of Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards on the new vehicle market. Since 1978, CAFE has imposed fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks sold in the U.S. market. This paper reviews the history of the standards, followed by a discussion of the major upcoming changes in implementation and stringency. It d...

BACKGROUND Although colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer in women, little is known about predictors of adherence to screening. METHODS A randomly selected sample of 202 predominantly low-income and African-American women were interviewed. Knowledge of, attitudes and beliefs about, and practices related to flexible sigmoidoscopy (FS) screening were assessed. RESULTS The majority...

This article calls for engaging the public and private sectors of developing and industrialized countries in a global clean cooking fuel initiative (GCCFI) to bring about a worldwide shift to clean fluid fuels for cooking and heating in 10-15 years’ time -with an emphasis on providing clean fuel to the poorest households. This initiative is crucial to implementation of the Millennium Developmen...

We study competition between two multi-product firms with distinct production technologies in a market where customers have heterogeneous preferences on a single taste attribute. The mass customizer (MC) has a perfectly flexible production technology, thus can offer any variety within a product space, represented by Hotelling’s (1929) linear city. The mass producer (MP) has a more focused produ...

The development of the Cyprus Stock Exchange together with the increasing trend of investors’ presence in financing activities has led to the importance of this market. In such circumstances, the first step towards a sustainable development of the Exchange is to support the investors. Risk of bankruptcy for the investee is a major challenge that an inexperienced stock investor encounters. In th...