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Apart from imparting increased fracture toughness, one of the useful purposes of reinforcing brittle matrices with fibers is to create enhanced composite strain capacity. This paper reviews the conditions underwhich such a composite will exhibit the pseudo strain-hardening phenomenon. The presentation is given in a unified manner for both continuous aligned and discontinuous random fiber composites. It is demonstrated that pseudo strain-hardening can be practically designed for both types of composites by proper tailoring of material structures.

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This paper investigates how to fuse grayscale and thermal video data for detecting foreground objects under challenging scenarios. To this end, we propose an intuitive yet effective method, called WEighted Low-rank Decomposition (WELD), which adaptively pursues the cross-modality low-rank representation. Specifically, we form two data matrices by accumulating sequential frames from the grayscale and the thermal videos, respectively. Within these two observing matrices, WELD detects moving foreground pixels as sparse outliers against the low-rank structure background, and incorporates the weight variables to make the models of two modalities complementary to each other. The smoothness constraints of object motion are also introduced in WELD for further improving the robustness to noises. For optimization, we propose an iterative algorithm to efficiently solve the low-rank models with three sub-problems. Moreover, we utilize an edge-preserving filtering based method to substantially speed up WELD while preserving its accuracy. To provide a comprehensive evaluation benchmark of grayscalethermal foreground detection, we create a new dataset including 25 aligned grayscale-thermal video pairs with high diversity. Our extensive experiments on both the newly created dataset and the public dataset OSU3 suggest that WELD achieves superior performance and comparable efficiency against other state-ofthe-art approaches.

This work uses a multivariate panel Granger causality test to examine the causal relationship between real international tourism receipts and economic growth in 11 Asian regions for the period from 1995 to 2015, accounting for both dependency and heterogeneity across regions. The results of this study support evidence for the growth hypothesis in the regions, such as Cambodia, China, and Malaysia. A reverse relationship supports evidence on the conservation hypothesis for the regions, such as Hong Kong, Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea. A reciprocal causal relationship was found in Macau and Singapore.

This article aims to examine the link between European economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and tourism activities in Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain using wavelet transform context structures. This innovative technique allows the decomposition of time-series at different time frequencies. In this work, we used continuous wavelets, wavelet coherency, and wavelet phase difference based on Granger causality analysis to investigate the relationship between European EPU and tourism using the annual data from 1995 to 2015. The results indicate that there is a unidirectional causal influence of European EPU on international tourism receipts (ITR) in the short run and a bidirectional causal influence of European EPU on ITR in European countries in the long run. Accordingly, it can be recommended that the government needs to increase and promote tourism demand and to further provide and nurture the expansion of tourism supply.