Abstract: The invention relates to a hair-trimming guide that includes a cutting guard that comprises an arcuate sheet of material that defines the region of hair to be cut when it is positioned on the head of a person in need of a haircut. The hair-trimming guide is easy-to-use, durable, and customizable. The invention also provides a method for trimming hair using this hair-trimming guide.

Abstract: The system for the automatic determination of customized prices and promotions automatically constructs product offers tailored to individual shoppers, or types of shopper, in a way that attempts to maximize the vendor's profits. These offers are represented digitally. They are communicated either to the vendor, who may act on them as desired, or to an on-line computer shopping system that directly makes such offers to shoppers. Largely by tracking the behavior of shoppers, the system accumulates extensive profiles of the shoppers and the offers that they consider. The system can then select, present, price, and promote goods and services in ways that are tailored to an individual consumer. Likely shoppers can be identified, then enticed with the most effective visual and textual advertisements; deals can be offered to them, either on-line or off-line; detailed product information screens can be subtly rearranged from one type of shopper to the next.

Abstract: An adaptive compression technique which is an improvement to Lempel-Ziv (LZ) compression techniques, both as applied for purposes of reducing required storage space and for reducing the transmission time associated with transferring data from point to point. Pre-filled compression dictionaries are utilized to address the problem with prior Lempel-Ziv techniques in which the compression software starts with an empty compression dictionary, whereby little compression is achieved until the dictionary has been filled with sequences common in the data being compressed. In accordance with the invention, the compression dictionary is pre-filled, prior to the beginning of the data compression, with letter sequences, words and/or phrases frequent in the domain from which the data being compressed is drawn. The letter sequences, words, and/or phrases used in the pre-filled compression dictionary may be determined by statistically sampling text data from the same genre of text.

Abstract: An adaptive compression technique which is an improvement to Lempel-Ziv (LZ) compression techniques, both as applied for purposes of reducing required storage space and for reducing the transmission time associated with transferring data from point to point. Pre-filled compression dictionaries are utilized to address the problem with prior Lempel-Ziv techniques in which the compression software starts with an empty compression dictionary, whereby little compression is achieved until the dictionary has been filled with sequences common in the data being compressed. In accordance with the invention, the compression dictionary is pre-filled, prior to the beginning of the data compression, with letter sequences, words and/or phrases frequent in the domain from which the data being compressed is drawn. The letter sequences, words, and/or phrases used in the pre-filled compression dictionary may be determined by statistically sampling text data from the same genre of text.