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Abstract. During the 2006 Tropical Warm Pool InternationalCloud Experiment (TWP-ICE) in the tropics, the 2008 Indirect and Semi-Direct Aerosol Campaign (ISDAC) in the Arctic, and the 2010 Small PARTicles In CirrUS (SPAR-TICUS) campaign at mid-latitudes, high-resolution images of ice crystals were recorded by a Cloud Particle Imager at temperatures (T ) between −87 and 0 • C. The projected maximum dimension (D ), length (L ), and width (W ) of pristine columns, plates, and component bullets of bullet rosettes were measured using newly developed software, the Ice Crystal Ruler. The number of bullets in each bullet rosette was also measured. Column crystals were further distinguished as either horizontally oriented columns or columns with other orientations to eliminate any orientation effect on the measured dimensions. The dimensions and aspect ratios (AR, the dimension of the major axis divided by the dimension of the minor axis) of crystals were determined as functions of temperature, geophysical location, and type of cirrus.Dimensions of crystals generally increased with temperature. Columns and bullets had larger dimensions (i.e., W ) of the minor axis (i.e., a axis) for a given dimension (i.e., D or L ) of the major axis (i.e., c axis), and thus smaller AR, as T increased, whereas this trend did not occur for plate crystals. The average number of branches in bullet rosettes was 5.50 ± 1.35 during three campaigns and 6.32 ± 1.34 (5.46 ± 1.34; 4.95 ± 1.01) during TWP-ICE (SPARTICUS; ISDAC). The AR of bullets increased with the number of branches in bullet rosettes. Most dimensions of crystals and ARs of columnar crystals measured during SPARTICUS were larger than those measured during TWP-ICE and IS-DAC at −67 < T < −35 • C and at −40 < T < −15 • C, respectively. The relative occurrence of varying pristine habits depended strongly on cirrus type (i.e., anvil or non-anvil clouds), with plates especially occurring more frequently in anvils. The L-W relationships of columns derived using current data exhibited a strong dependence on temperature; similar relationships determined in previous studies were within the range of the current data.

This study examines the effect of a one percent local-option sales tax (LOST) on property tax level, millage rate, and total spending level in Georgia counties. The study covers a 13-year period for 136 Georgia counties. The findings suggest that the law, which requires rollback of property taxes when the LOST is used, led to actual property tax relief as well as millage rate reduction. Regression results show that counties collecting the LOST tend to have per capita property taxes that are an average of $12 or 1.8 mills lower than counties that do not collect the tax. Whereas an extra dollar of LOST revenue provides about 28 cents in property tax relief, it leads to an increase in total spending of about 48 cents. In sum, the LOST has achieved the objectives of property tax relief, but on balance it is more an augmentation of than an effective substitute for property taxes in Georgia counties.

This paper reviews the first challenge on efficient perceptual image enhancement with the focus on deploying deep learning models on smartphones. The challenge consisted of two tracks. In the first one, participants were solving the classical image super-resolution problem with a bicubic downscaling factor of 4. The second track was aimed at real-world photo enhancement, and the goal was to map low-quality photos from the iPhone 3GS device to the same photos captured with a DSLR camera. The target metric used in this challenge combined the runtime, PSNR scores and solutions' perceptual results measured in the user study. To ensure the efficiency of the submitted models, we additionally measured their runtime and memory requirements on Android smartphones. The proposed solutions significantly improved baseline results defining the state-of-the-art for image enhancement on smartphones. * A. Ignatov and R. Timofte ({andrey,radu.timofte}@vision.ee.ethz.ch, ETH Zurich) are the challenge organizers, while the other authors participated in the challenge. The Appendix contains the authors' teams and affiliations. PIRM 2018 Challenge webpage: http://ai-benchmark.org

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The main challenge of face super-resolution is to overcome facial distortions in an upscaling process. Recent works have utilized facial priors such as facial landmarks and component maps to generate a precise super-resolved image. However, the facial priors are estimated from the ground-truth and deep neural networks. Thus, recent works based on the facial priors are not only limited to specific datasets including the groundtruth, but also need sub-networks to extract facial priors. To solve these problems, we propose a progressive face superresolution network with non-parametric facial prior enhancement, called as NPFNet, which extracts and highlights facial components without any tricks, such as the ground-truth and deep neural networks. The self-enhancement module facilitates our network to fully utilize facial distinct features to enhance super-resolved images with a parameter-free operation. Extensive experiments on CelebA and VGGFace2 demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art face super-resolution methods in terms of visual quality and quantitative measurements.

This study analyses whether reformed cities (council-manager form) spend less than unreformed cities (mayor-council and commission forms) by examining per capita spending on common municipal functions of a panel of 504 American cities with populations over 50,000 during 1980-2000. Unlike most previous studies, the study employs a fixed effects model of the pooled cross-sectional time-series research design to better capture changing effects of municipal structure on spending level. Findings in the study indicate that per capita spending on common municipal functions in reformed cities is not statistically different from unreformed cities. However, when the two narrowest common municipal functions (police and fire) are examined, spending in council-manager cities is significantly less than in the non-council-manager cities for the police function, but not significant for the fire function. The findings suggest further detailed studies should be conducted considering population size, functional scope (responsibilities), forms of municipal government (e.g. newly emerging hybrid structure cities), region, metro status, and other variables for a better understanding of the effects of municipal structure on the level of spending. Furthermore, a more elaborated conceptual approach should be developed to better capture the factors affecting municipal spending level.