Third-party reviews play an important role in many contexts in which tangible attributes are insufficient to enable consumers to evaluate products or services. In this paper, we examine the impact of professional and amateur reviews on the box office performance of movies. Using a simple diffusion model, we establish an econometrics framework to control for the interaction between the unobserva...

Morphological openings and closings form the cornerstones of a rich set of nonlinear operators in signal processing. In this paper, we show how a new morphological operator can be constructed that serves as an approximation to openings and closings for images corrupted by low levels of noise. 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

The discovery and subsequent study of microquasars lead to major progress in our understanding of: 1) the nature of relativistic jets seen elsewhere in the universe, and 2) the connection between the accretion onto compact objects and the formation of collimated jets. A detailed account of the major progress accomplished until present was published in Annual Review of Astronomy & Astrophysics (...

Determination of stomatal densities of the banana peel (Musa acuminata L. var Hort. Valery) by microscopic observations showed 30 times fewer stomates on fruit epidermis than found on the banana leaf. Observations also showed that peel stomates were not laid down in a linear pattern as on the leaf.It was demonstrated that stomatal responses occurred in banana fruit. Specific conditions of high ...

the rapid melting of a semi- infinite body due to the absorption of a cw laser beam radiation has been studied. the enthalpy technique for the solution of phase change problems has been used in an explicit finite difference form to calculate the transient temperature distribution in the semi-infinite body and the growth rate of the melt pool. the technique has been modified so that it is not ne...

Subsuns, Bottlinger's rings, and elliptical halos are simulated by the use of a Monte Carlo model; reflection of sunlight from almost horizontal ice crystals is assumed. Subsuns are circular or elliptical spots seen at the specular reflection point when one flies over cirrus or cirrostratus clouds. Bottlinger's rings are rare, almost elliptical rings centered about the subsun. Elliptical halos ...

We have finalized the old (1979) results from [11] about enumeration of connected components of moduli or real polarized K3 surfaces. As an application, using recent results of [13] (see also math.AG/0312396), we completely classify real polarized K3 surfaces which are deformations of real hyper-elliptically polarized K3 surfaces. This could be important in some questions, because real hyper-el...