l outsourcing with a return policy is quite commonly adopted in the fashion supply chain. Under the return policy, the supplier as a brand owner may focus on production, and then outsource retailing to the retailer. In the meanwhile, the retailer may receive some support money from the supplier...

A series of essays authored by San Francisco Fed President and CEO John C. Williams, Senior Vice President and Associate Director of Research Mary C. Daly, Research Associate Yifan Cao, and Senior Economic Education Manager Jody Hoff, argue that the answer to the questions 'Does college matter?'...

The well-known Phillips curve suggests that future inflation depends on current and past inflation and a measure of economic slack or resource utilization. Using the unemployment gap to measure slack, a simple Phillips curve currently predicts that inflation will remain quite low through 2015....

Inflation as measured by the personal consumption expenditures price index is near historical low levels, below the Federal Reserve’s 2% longer-run goal. Another common inflation measure, the consumer price index, is also historically low, but remains closer to 2%. The recent gap between these...

We consider the problem of scheduling a given set of n jobs with equal processing times on m parallel machines so as to minimize the makespan. Each job has a given release date and is compatible to only a subset of the machines. The machines are ordered and indexed in such a way that a...

Based on the approach of flow distances, the international trade flow system is studied from the perspective of multi-layer flow network. A model of multi-layer flow network is proposed for modelling and analyzing multiple types of flows in flow systems. Then, flow distances are introduced, and...

Finite volume method (FVM) is adopted in the present investigation to simulate the temperature and reactant gas velocity distributions in hot filament chemical vapor deposition (HFCVD) diamond film growth inside holes, using a detailed 3D computational model well in accordance with the actual...

Si-doped diamond films with various Si concentrations are deposited on WC-Co substrates using HFCVD method, with the mixture of acetone, tetraethoxysilane (TEOS) and hydrogen as the reactant source. A variety of characterizations, including FE-SEM, AFM, Raman, XRD, surface profilometer and...

In the present study, a double-deck filament setup is proposed for the hot filament chemical vapor deposition (HFCVD) method and an optimization method is presented to determine its optimal geometry that is able to produce a highly uniform temperature field on the whole flute surface of...

In the present study, the fluid field in a process of fabricating diamond coated cutting tools using the hot filament chemical vapor deposition (HFCVD) method is investigated using the finite volume method (FVM), in which the effects of the inlet height, gas initial velocity, inlet radius and...