The influence of contact rates on the efficiency (the ability to exploit a profitable environment) and flexibility (the ability to track down a changing environment) of foraging in ants is studied theoretically in the case where foraging relies on a mixture of group and mass recruitment. It is shown that a combination of efficiency and flexibility can be reached across a range of group sizes if...

BACKGROUND The Institute of Medicine recommendation for a more educated nursing workforce has triggered significant activity in the area of academic profession, particularly in pre- and postlicensure baccalaureate nursing education. Many innovative academic progression models involving universities and community colleges have emerged. Among the most common barriers to this effort are inconsiste...

Predicting students’ academic performance has long been an important research topic in many academic disciplines. The prediction will help the tutors identify the weak students and help them score better marks; these steps were taken to improve the performance of the students. The present study uses free style comments written by students after each lesson. These comments reflect their learning...

This paper evaluates the scale of productivity change of the Bank of Serbia over the period 20072010. In this research the emphasis is put on measuring the productivity based on information from the financial statements using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method and Malmquist index to estimate the individual bank efficiency and productivity changes within this period. The Malmquist productivi...

A number of studies have considered the evaluation of efficiency in higher education institutions. In this paper we focus on the issue of revenue efficiency, in particular ascertaining the extent to which, given output prices, producers choose the revenue maximising vector of outputs. Following Johnson and Ruggiero (2011), we then relax the price taking assumption to consider the case in which ...

This report recounts one institution's experience in the fundamental reorganization of its institutional review board (IRB). With an appropriate approach, organizational structure, and ethos, the goals of research participant safety, regulatory compliance, and efficiency are not in conflict but, rather, mutually reinforcing. These important goals were realized because all aspects of the IRB reo...

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BACKGROUND Suboptimal operating room (OR) efficiency is a universal complaint among surgeons. Nonetheless, maximizing efficiency is critical to institutional success. Here, we report improvement achieved from low-cost, low-technology measures instituted within a tertiary-care academic medical center/Level I trauma center. STUDY DESIGN Improvements in preadmission testing and OR scheduling, in...

This article was republished on March 30, 2015, to correct the sizing and placement of thefigures; none of the article content was changed. The publisher apologizes for the originallayout errors. Please download this article again to view the corrected version. The originallypublished, uncorrected article and the republished, corrected article are provided herefor reference.

The relationship between gasoline prices and the demand for vehicle fuel efficiency is important for environmental policy but poorly understood in the academic literature. We provide empirical evidence that automobile manufacturers price as if consumers respond to gasoline prices. We derive a reduced-form regression equation from theoretical micro-foundations and estimate the equation with near...